Individual And Community Responses To Trauma

Under the double oppression of sexism and racism, African American women's livelihood, especially their psychological world is fragmented and falling apart. As the most influential female writers of color in America's contemporary literary circle, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison have portrayed the hardships of being black women. The Color Purple and The Bluest Eye are highly representative works and are the target of our present study. This thesis adopts a womanist perspective to examine the trauma of heroines Celie and Pecola resulting from double oppression, and by analyzing the black female individual's and her black community's different responses to trauma, we explain why the former story wins a happy ending and why the latter one closes up in tragedy."Womanism" is invented by Alice Walker to mean a theory for "black feminist or feminist of color". The essence of womanism is "the survival and wholeness of entire people"; in fictions this essence is expounded through the theme development pattern of "facing trauma—making response—producing result". The present thesis believes the "response" part holds decisive power: womanism stresses that female individual should respect individual spirit, enjoy female bonding, seek artistic outlet; and community should offer female individual its full support. In the face of similar traumas, Celie and her community make positive responses in accordance with womanist ideas, thus achieve a happy ending; Pecola and her community make negative responses opposed to womanist ideas, so bad situation becomes worse, and they end up in tragedy.Womanist perspective is new and ideal in analyzing the two fictions, and another novel proposal of this thesis is that it centers on black individual and community responses to trauma. The conclusion is: The Color Purple and The Bluest Eye prove from contrary sides the vital importance of individual spirit, female bonding, artistic outlet, community's support in ensuring black women's emancipation; womanist theory envisions an ideal state of female survival, passes along black women's life wisdom, and points out a road to endeavor and strength for the suffering black women.