The Color Purple: Achieving A Womanist Selfhood

The Color Purple (1982) is an epistolary novel featuring on women characterization. The work best substantiates its author, contemporary African American writer Alice Walker's personal speculations on women's conditions-how they struggle to reconceptualize their own position in relationship to other power-based social institutions that have perpetuated the different forms of inequalities. Walker's women in this novel experience various degrees of transformation. Emerging from a formerly invisible presence, they break away from a traditionally subservient gender mold and eventually progress to a gallery of personalities who take the spotlight of men's stage. The thesis is intended to examine how Alice Walker embodies her womanist idea through the characterization of her fictional women in The Color Purple. They would not accept the identity forced on them by their men or any other authority; instead, they try to define their own selfhood. Walker approaches the issue of female self-identity from three distinctive levels. On the first level, Walker keeps track of the courses that women characters, especially the protagonist Celie, gain their spiritual identity. Walker attaches much importance of women bonding, the inner strength and beauty in shaping a whole spirituality for female individuals. Grappling with feelings of self-doubt and worthlessness that engender the loss of selfhood, the female characters ultimately declare their self-autonomy over themselves. On the second level, Walker explores Celie's reconstruction of her sexual/gender identity that run against social prescriptions. With the help of Shug, Celie is able to challenge the conventional sexual and gender relations that confined her previous self-consciousness. In so doing, Celie's petrified sexual feeling is revived and she begins to view the gender role in a new light. On the third level, Walker extends her critique in a cultural context. By juxtaposing Celie's domestic narrative with her sister Nettie's letter from Africa, Walker presents us with an alternative version of black history told from a post-colonial point of view. Walker's intuitive female approach in her interpretation of women's texts unfolds "a powerful but neglected women's culture." The fictional women's experiences of acquiring their selfhood are truly inspirational for anyone who shares the similar identity crisis and is aimed to define his or her own selfhood against all odds.