The Color Purple: A Womanist Buildungsromance

The Color Purple is a Buildungsromance written from womanist perspective. Alice Walker is credited for her coinage of ''womanist" as a term to differentiate from "feminist". According to Walker, a womanist is a feminist of color who loves other women; sexually or nonsexually; appreciates and prefers women's culture, women's emotional flexibility (values tears as natural counterbalance of laughter), and women's strength. Sometimes a womanist loves individual man, sexually and/or nonsexually, and she is committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. She is not a separatist, except periodically, for health. Womanist is also a universalist and she is capable. The womanism focuses on the importance of education of the black sisterhood, and the ultimate goal of t eh black sisterhood, and the ultimate goal of "survival whole" of her people, and womanism stresses love for nature with an immanent God. A womanist is different from a feminist, as Walker points out that the feminism is a theory focusing on the white women and it ignores the pain and need of the women of color. And Celie is a role model for the women struggling to free from oppression embodying Walker's explanation of her womanist theory.The thesis advances that as a Buildungsromance The Color Purple is different from the traditional novels with a theme on growing up. This novel emphasizes its concern on the growth of a black female, not on the growth of the adolescents or the white. It stresses the growth of not only the protagonist Celie, but also the growth of her black sisters and even black men, the former abusers and oppressors in her life.