From Mule To Woman

Alice Walker, an African American novelist, poet, essayist, activist, and womanist, has been making sincere efforts to set up and carry on a matrilineal tradition of black writing. On the one hand, she appeals for attention paid to those black women writers and their works. On the other, she has been doing contributions to carrying on the African American women writing tradition. Amongst various themes such as race, gender, and politics in her works, she prefers to take the oppression of blacks by blacks as the main theme and particularly she tends to place her concern on the lives of black women. In this sense, The Color Purple is a perfect illustration. It's an autobiographical story about a black woman's transformation from a "mule of the world" into an independent woman. The publication of The Color Purple in 1982 was a great success and made her known internationally and one of the major writers in America. It's a book about racial and sexual oppression but it's read across race and gender; it's a book that has gained great honors and praises, but it has invited controversy and criticism at the same time.African American women's aphasia is not only a prevailing historical and social phenomenon but also a widespread cultural and literal phenomenon. Because of their race and gender, African American women carry on their shoulders the oppression by racism and sexism; thus, they are silenced, mutilated and objectified to be "mules." In contrast to making them invisible and voiceless, some African American women writers concern themselves with making African American women visible and giving them their due voices. Surely, this is Alice Walker's concern in The Color Purple. However, it's a pity that, judging from all the literature available, not many papers or theses, which approach it in an all-round way, have been found. Therefore, it's valuable to endeavor to explore African American women's aphasia in the novel and analyze its causes. Through putting Alice Walker and The Color Purple in the catalogue of American matrilineal tradition of black writing in American literature, this thesis intends to find out the historical, social and cultural reasons for Celie and other black women's aphasia from multi-perspectives of religion, race, and gender and to reveal the interrelations among religion, racism and sexism to impose aphasia on them, and to discover the ways for them to gain their voices, which are implied in the novel.By doing so, some conclusions can be drawn. First, in this novel, religion, racism, and sexism have interlocked reciprocally to oppress and exploit Celie and other African American women physically and spiritually: religion is racialized and sexualized, racism is sexualized, and sexism is racialized; race and gender are the sources of oppression for black women in the story. Second, religion, racism, and sexism have interacted to impose aphasia on them: the external oppression from religion, racism, and sexism silences Celie and other black women historically and socially; the internalized self-hatred generated from religion, racism, and sexism cripples them spiritually. Last, Alice Walker has ideally "cured" their aphasia accordingly by the transformation of sexualized and racialied Christianity into Christianized animism, the exploration and reconstruction of black racial consciousness, and the examination and reconstruction of three relations in the black community.This thesis consists of eight parts. First, it's an introduction in which the writer describes briefly the lives of African American women as "the mules of the world" and the matrilineal tradition of black writing, demonstrates Alice Walker's contributions to the tradition and the whole American literature, and presents the structure of the whole thesis. The body of the thesis is made up of six chapters. In chapter one, the social and personal background of writing The Color Purple, literature review and the gist of the novel will be included. From the aspects of epistolary style, survival philosophy and language, chapter two proves that aphasia is a prevailing phenomenon in the novel. Respectively from the three perspectives of religion, race and gender in the next three chapters the writer analyzes the reasons of African American women's aphasia and its impacts on both black women and men. Chapter six illustrates the four means for black women to claim their voices in consistence with the previous four chapters. The conclusion is drawn in the last part that by writing such a novel, Alice Walker not only presents the reasons for African American women's aphasia but also the ways to free African American women from bandages and to realize their existence.