Transgression: An Access To Self

During her literary career Alice Walker insistently focuses on three major themes: race, gender and self-forging, which are fully presented in her novel The Color Purple (1982). Regarded by the critics as a representative text for Walker studies, The Color Purple accords with her womanist contestations via embedding both gender and racial themes in the peculiar historical and cultural background of African Americans. In this novel Walker points out a means of black American women's reestablishment of Self. Departed from Judith Butler's theory of "Gender as Performance", this thesis focuses on diverse female images appearing in the novel as the Other, and, by tracing back to racial, gender, social, religious and historical causations, it ascribes the engendering of the Other to the functioning of power. By employing Feminism, Queer theory, Psychoanalysis and Postcolonial theory, the thesis analyzed multiple transgressive performances in the novel, which subvert phallocentralism as well as white supremacy. On the one hand, it underscores the significance of androgyny in deconstructing the binary opposition within gender matrix and prompting women's self-realization. On the other hand, the protagonist's de-marginalizing black heritage is highlighted for it serves as an efficient strategy in establishing racial identity of the Afro-American. In this way the thesis suggests transgression as a means of self-forging. The globalization tendency today makes it a worthwhile job to explore the connotative meaning of Walker's The Color Purple. Not only does it shed light on our understanding of American cultural conflicts and literature development, it also drops a hint on possible means of women's emancipation in the global context.