Modernity and Personal Experiments in Walker’s The Color Purple (1982)
Zhiar Sarkawt Abdulsamad
College of Education-Makhmour/ Salahaddin University- Erbil
Juan Abdullah Albanna
College of Languages/ Salahaddin University- Erbil
DOI: https://doi.org/10.25130/jls.5.1.5
Keywords: Womanism, Liberation, Oppression, African American, Self-Identity, Personal Experiment
Abstract
Women in the modern era have been defined as being revolutionary and opposed to the traditional representation of their lives. Alice Walker (February 1944-) a Pulitzer Prize-winning figure is an African-American novelist, critic and poet who has vigorously defended women's modernist innovations and African American civil rights in her works. Her novel The Color Purple (1982) explores the African American female experience through the life and struggles of the narrator of the novel. What distinguishes The Color Purple is the very feature of psychological state of the heroine whilst struggling for her minimal rights of being a woman and black. The heroine of the novel Celie is revolutionary and anti-traditional. Walker planted her own personal experience within The Color Purple through the sufferings and traumatic life of the female characters.Walker through “Womanism”, a term coined by herself representing Black feminism, combines critical elements in The Color Purple, namely the importance of black history and heritage and the centrality of female creativity and competence in that heritage, which are often symbolized by quilts, sisterhood, liberation, self-identity, double consciousness and other symbols. Further through exhibiting African American woman’s twice-oppressed state, as they were double-discriminated racially and sexually by Americans, on the one hand by white Americans, on the other, by their fellow black male counterparts. The epistolary style of The Color Purple is probably an essential feature of modern literary output. The letters are used to manifest Celie and other characters’ lives to readers. Furthermore, within The Color Purple, Walker employs the very modern African American literary feature which is “Neo-Slave Narrative”. Through Neo-Slave Narrative, she displays her black female characters’ still-enslaved status in the modern era to form a juxtaposition between narrations of her fellow oppressed black women and Slave-Narrations of enslaved African Americans like Harriet Jacobs and Sojourner truth.
