Claiming Black Womanhood, Claiming Souls: The Course Of Growth Of Black Women In Alice Walker's Major Novels

Alice Walker is one of the most important black women writers in the contemporary American literature. Black women's issues are always Walker's major subjects in her writings. The Third life of Grange Copeland, Meridian and The Color Purple are excellent novels reflecting the thought and life of Afro-American women, which probes into the problem about Afro-American women. This thesis tries to analyze five major female characters—Margaret, Mem, Ruth, Meridian and Celie in her three novels to show the course of growth of black women from the loss of black womanhood to the quest of black womanhood and the exploration for womanism. In The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Walker depicts the women's stories of three generations of the Copeland family during the first six decades of the twentieth century. Grange and Margaret are the first generation. Brownfield and Mem form the second generation. Their daughter Ruth is the third generation. Margaret and Mem both lose their black womanhood for they are the victims of racial discrimination and sexual oppression. Under the pressure of poverty and alienation from her husband—Grange, Margaret kills herself and her child. Mem is brutally murdered by her husband in one of his drunken rages. Raised in the sixties, Ruth becomes aware, by watching the civil rights activists—both women and men—that it is possible to struggle against the abuses of oppression. Though Walker does not specify Ruth's future, we can see her growth from Walker's later female characters. In Meridian, Walker tells us a vivid picture of a black woman's solitary struggle for the wholeness of her black womanhood in and after the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and 1970s. At first, the protagonist Meridian is burdened by the sense of guilt from the three failed roles as a daughter, a mother, and a revolutionary. To gain her black womanhood, she chooses to go back to the South, to live with her people, which is her source of strength. Still a civil rights worker, Meridian reaches her wholeness through the ways of broadening the definition of mother in the help of others'children, of discovering the black tradition from the black music and black church, and of inheriting her maternal heritage of creativity and ecstasy. Later Meridian could define her role as an artist in carrying on the black culture and she passes on her quest to others around her. The quest of black womanhood reaches its peak with the great success of the novel The Color Purple which embodies Walker's idea of "womanism". In the novel, Walker shapes a new womanist image—Celie. Celie explores for self-realization from three aspects: self-recognition as a whole woman, the familial and social independence and the womanist belief—the immanent God. The purpose of claiming black womanhood and souls is to explore black woman's potentiality and social value, arouse black women to seek powerful support in them so as to actualize freedom, equality and liberation in the American society full of problems of discrimination.