Survival Whole

As a poet, essayist, novelist and feminist, Alice Walker is not only one of the most prominent writers in contemporary American literary field, but also an outstanding representative of women literature and Afro-American literature. She is a versatile writer having published seven novels, three collections of short stories, six poetry volumes and several essays. Moreover, Walker has won numerous honors and awards, of which the novel The Purple written in 1983 let Walker won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award and the Academy Award.As a spokeswoman of all the female Afro-American, Alice Walker has become a unique writer in the United States by exposing the gender oppression within the black family mercilessly. Her writings concentrate on the survival status of black women who are living in the crevice between the mainstream white culture and black male culture. Alice Walker has been concerned with black women's suffering and struggling and actively explored the way that black women could follow to achieve their self-independence and spiritual freedom; hence she was called"black Virginia Woolf".The novel By the Light of My Father's Smile which was published in 1998 expands and strengthens the theme of black men's oppression to black women. The research about the book abroad mainly is limited on the comments on the novel itself, such as the dictions and the theme of sex violence, lacking of the systematic studies. The studies in our country focus on postal-colonialism, womanism, feminism, sex violence, and narrative techniques, with few studies from the perspective of ecofeminism. Therefore, this thesis concentrates on the interpretation of the novel By the Light of My Father's Smile from the perspective of ecofeminism by means of thematic analysis to reveal Alice Walker's ecofeminist thoughts of"survival whole"embodied in it, that is, to realize black women's liberation, physically and mentally, and at the same time, to establish a new equal and harmonious relationship between men and women, between the whites and the minorities, and between human beings and nature.