Creating New Black Women Images: From Their Eyes Were Watching God To The Color Purple

The conventional depictions of African-American women in American fiction can be classified into three categories: Aunt Jemima or mammy, the black mistress and the tragic mulatto. None of these stereotypes is positive. In the journey from the passive stereotype to a more positive, more complex view of the black woman as she appears in American literature, Zora Neale Hurston's work is transitional. It marks the beginning that the black woman image goes from stereotype to character.Their Eyes Were Watching God is Hurston's best-known novel, which was published in 1937. In this novel, she breaks down the stereotype of inferior black woman and creates a new black woman image Janie, who searches, over twenty-five years and three marriages, for her true identity. This novel establishes the framework for contemporary black feminist literary tradition. Hurston is widely acknowledged by womanists as being the first American woman writer to explore realistically the psyche of black women. But at the time when it was first published, it was criticized severely for not fitting into the mainstream of black male protest literature. It was shelved and forgotten until decades later Alice Walker carries on, develops and perfects this tradition in The Color Purple by presenting a black girl Celie's growth from an innocent girl to a matured independent woman.This paper tries to discuss black women images created in Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Color Purple to express the idea that both writers create new women images in American literature. It also tries to explore the inheriting and developing relationship between the two novels by analyzing the symbolic meaning of the major images of mules, pear tree and the color purple, especially to explore the concrete reflection of womanist philosophy in the two novels.