A Womanist Reading Of The Father Images In Alice Walker's Novels

As the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for the novel The Color Purple, Alice Walker is a prolific writer with brilliant achievements in her novels, essays and poetry. Walker, by addressing herslf a Womanist writer, has never failed to show her concern for the male life, especially the father images, which are important roles in her novels. In the white supremacist patriarchy, the father plays a decisive role in society and in the family. For a black father, however, in the white dominated society, he cannot fulfill his social role according to the patriarchal code. So he vents his anger and frustration on his family members, which leads to the destruction of the relationship between the husband and the wife and of the relationship between the father and the children. Consequently it would endanger the existence of the black people as a whole.In order to have a clear view of the images of father in Walker's novels, the thesis studies her three different texts representing different times respectively: The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), The Color Purple (1982) and By The Light of My Father's Smile (1998). In these novels, we find that the images of father change over the time, while their importance in the family remains the same.Walker is always concerned with the relationship between father and children. The thesis, from Walker's Womanist perspective, attempts to analyze the images of father in the three novels by studying the relationship between father and his white lord, the relationship between husband and wife, and the relationship between father and children so as to understand Walker's criticism of the patriarchal system and her pursuit of the ideal father image.