In Search Of Their Voices —A Comparative Study On Their Eyes Were Watching God And The Color Purple

Being at the bottom of the society, black women suffer from the binary oppression of sexism and racism; consequently, their voices have been marginalized and constrained by male-dominated patriarchal societies. In the closely woven net of the male-dominated discourse system, black women have to speak the males'languages and think in their modes, or else they have to remain silent. Their voices are completely dominated and subjugated by masculine discourse. Therefore, in order to break the bondage of patriarchal society, black women have to overturn the paternal discourse, find their own voices and set up their language system.As two brilliant black feminist writers, Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston show their concern on the black women's voices in their representative works respectively in The Color Purple and Their Eyes Were Watching God. Both Hurston and Walker have recognized the importance of voice in their heroines'self-liberation, so they portray two splendid images of black women who articulate their own voices in the Afro-American literature.Choosing the female voices as a deliberate cut-in, the thesis is devoted to a systematic comparative study about Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Color Purple. With the textual analysis of the voices of two black women Janie and Celie, this thesis aims to penetrate the inheriting and developing relationship between Hurston and Walker centered on the female voices in the two novels. Specifically speaking, the thesis compares the two protagonists'self-realization in lights of the voices of the individual black woman, the voices of female group and the voices of Afro-American culture, namely personal voice, communal voice and historical voice.The thesis falls into three chapters plus an introduction and a conclusion.The introduction part gives a brief literary review of Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker and their respective masterpiece. Besides, it reviews present research of the two novels at home and abroad, and states the necessity and significance of this research.Chapter One focuses on the personal voice in the two texts, in which the evolution of the two heroines'voice are analyzed and compared. Both Celie and Janie, the major female characters in two novels, discover their selves and win their liberation and independence, by discovering their personal voices and own languages. As for the evolution of their person voice, both Celie and Janie undergo the three stages from the initial silence to awaking to the final winning of voice liberty; they both suffer the dual oppression of racism and sexism. However, under the similar theme of female voice, the two novelists employ different story-telling techniques to achieve it. Hurston employs the traditional frame story genre and third-person narration to highlight the heroine's voice power, while Alice Walker subversively uses the epistolary form to emphasize the voice power of black women.Chapter Two focuses on the communal voice in the two texts, compares the different voice of the female groups in the two novels. Janie's voice is a lonely one, for she has no female models, no mother or female relatives whose example she can follow. Janie's liberation relies more on the personal experience and marriages rather than the black female group. However, there exists a black woman bond offering encouragement, inspiration and appreciation for Janie and her best friend Pheoby. This woman-to-woman bonding between the two black women friends is the budding origin of black sisterhood, which is carried out and inherited by succeeding writers like Alice Walker. In The Color Purple, Celie gets the liberation mainly with the help of black sisterhood. In this sense, Alice Walker develops the tradition of black sisterhood by recording a stronger communal voice of a black community.Chapter Three focuses on the historical voice in the two texts, in which the historical voice in the two novels are explored and analyzed. In the two novels, both Hurston and Walker utter the historical voice of black women, inheriting nurturance and inspiration from the diversity of African-American cultures. They both affirm the power of the black culture and traditions in helping black women to be courageous to utter their own voices. There is a common thing that both of the novels adopt Black Vernacular, the language of black folk culture, as their literary medium and the root of Afro-Americans'soul. As a professional anthropologist and a folklorist, Hurston mainly focuses on the oral tradition of Afro-American culture, such as Black Vernacular, the black sermon, folk tales; while Walker is not only concerned with the oral tradition, such as Blues, Black Vernacular , she also digs more to include the material folklore. In The Color Purple, the scenes of quilt-making repeat frequently, which symbolize the integration of the black women's selfhood and their deep sisterhood between each other.The thesis ends with a conclusion that there exists the inheriting and developing relationship between Hurston and Walker under the unified theme of the black women's search for their voice. This is helpful for the later comers to inherit nurturance and inspiration from their ancestors, so that they can develop and create a whole new world.