Reclaiming The Body, Reconstructing Womanhood: Toward A Womanist Corporeal Narrative In Alice Walker's Fiction

An important black female writer and activist, Alice Walker has committed herself to exploring and exposing the evils, inequalities and injustices of the world. The womanist philosophy she advocates and practices is essentially of a humanistic stance. With its redefinition of black femininity, its celebration of both sensuality and spirituality, as well as its emphasis on wholeness of survival, womanism provides a powerful framework for human existence.With Walker's womanist philosophy as the framework, this thesis endeavors to trace the development of black women's bodies and selves through a close reading of her three novels. Black female bodies in Walker's later works are not only the sites where power and trauma are immediately inscribed, but are the loci women return to and reclaim as well until awakening, resistance and healing are finally actuated. In The Color Purple (1982), Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) and By the Light of My Father's Smile (1998), Walker, with her writer's prerogative, consciously constructs maps for healing and resistance for her characters amid their physical and psychological trauma. Her exploration of the black female characters'corporeal experience along with their psychic journeys against the current of phallocentric bigotry, while charting a course for black women in refusing to be docile bodies, exerts itself to ignite a collective awareness for individual and communal love and care of the female bodies, which neatly fits into Walker's womanist agenda.The Color Purple documents the rise of an ideal womanist body and self. Whereas Celie's slave-like experience in the first half of her life situates her body and identity in a state of ambiguity, the repossession of her own body, actuated through her enlightened sexual awareness, her well-explored creativity and above all her writing about herself, reaffirms her subjectivity and womanhood. Possessing the Secret of Joy marks Walker's effort to examine the body in an extended and more complicated arena. Painfully laying bare a mutilated body and a traumatized spirit, Walker critiques not only patriarchal sexism that denigrates women and their bodies but also ethnocentrism and its internalization that blind women to hold on to the tradition at the expense of corporeal integrity. In By the Light of My Father's Smile, the black female body becomes a contested site of moral debate. The characters' distinct gestures of bodily protests against patriarchal convention underline Walker's further attempt to sanction the erotic as power.With its patched narrative in each of the selected novels, Walker's body writing pieces up the womanist prospect of survival whole, during which the black female bodies are effectively re-imagined and reconstituted. Therefore, Walker's black body writing can be projected as a womanist "textual healing," which, apart from its historical subversion of patriarchal and white supremacist representation, also works as a consciousness-raising campaign and a social alarm. With the characters and their experiences as the paragon, Walker expects to guide women toward a consciousness about their bodies, sexualities and selves, and meanwhile sounds the alarm for societal and familial care for the female bodies so that real wholeness of survival can be effected.