Rewriting The Black Female Body-The Body Representation In Alice Walker's Novels

Alice Walker is the representative of Afro-American women writers in the 20^th century. Her novels graphically mirror the living situation of black women as the marginalized "Others" in American society. The embodiment of her female characters and basic instincts that derive from the body can be easily found in all of her novels. The body, where the resistant power exists, becomes Walker's vehicle to rewrite the negative or stereotyped images of American black women in white classics. My thesis sums up her characteristics of body representation, which are direct and poignant, to illustrate her usage of "the body" as the symbols of both pain and freedom. Her exposure of the confined and tortured bodies shows black women's vulnerability and deprecates the twin evils of racial discrimination and patriarchal exploitation. More importantly, in order to revise simplified and demonized black female images in white discourse, she positively interprets the eccentricity of her female characters and celebrates reconciliation of their bodies and soul, endowing those new entities with beauty. The thesis gives two examples of her representation of this integration of body and soul: one is the incarnation of history and culture, the other is spiritual salvation road initiated by the body. The black female body in her novels serves as a symbol that demonstrates Walker's ideal femininity and ideal living status of "survival whole".