A Study On The Awakening And Liberation Of Black Women In The Color Purple

Alice Walker is an influential black writer in the world. Greatly affected by feminism, she regards striving for women liberation and racial equality as her life- long career. Most of her works are created based on her native region---the deep South of Georgia and Mississippi, concerning black women cultural history in the southern America, showing black women's hatred and love, and reflecting their struggles for complete selfhood and equal rights. The Color Purple, Alice Walker's representative work (Encyclopedia of World Biography,2005), has been kept being very popular since its first publication in 1982, aroused huge attention in the critical field, and created lots of enlightening research of its form, theme and content. Combined with African-American cultural traditions under their historical background, this essay explores the path of black women's way to liberation and spontaneously awaking.In this thesis, the dual oppression upon black women will be deeply analyzed, and then the barriers against black women awakening and libration can be seen. Dual oppression mixing with dual consciousness brings the awakening and liberation path of black women into an extremely complicated and twisted situation. By exploring this complicated and twisted situation and following the struggles of black women for their liberation, black women's psychological course will be vividly manifested. At the end of this paper, the power source of awakening and liberation of black women, which is African cultural heritage, will be analyzed.The specific contents are distributed into four chapters.Chapter 1 is the introduction part of this thesis. This chapter mainly introduces the basic information of the author Alice Walker and her works The Color Purple, providing a better understanding of this paper for the readers. At the same time, the research framework is also stated in this chapter. Based on the framework, the structure of black women awakening process will be clearly manifested.Chapter 2 explores the root of the dual oppression upon black women. This chapter mainly analyzes the double oppressions of black women reflected via The Color Purple. On one hand, black women's violence and sexual and oppression from black men will be discussed. On the other hand, the racial oppression of black women derived from white people will be another issue to be discussed in this chapter stemmed from Celia and Sofia story.Chapter 3, which is divided into two different parts, focuses on the awakening and liberation of black women. The first part is an analysis of double consciousness of black women. The situation of black women can be better understood by analyzing the double consciousness of black women. Linked with the first part, the second part is the exploitation to liberation and proposes Walker's tentative solution ----womanism in the hope of curing the social diseases of racism and sexism and promoting black women's emancipation;Chapter 4 makes a detailed analysis of the African culture. The African culture as the source of power for back women's awakening is deeply explored in this chapter. Alice Walker clearly shows her deep love and her attachment to African culture in her writing. She uses the quilt-making through her master piece The Color Purple, showing that black women adhere to African culture in the process of their awakening and liberation.Chapter 5 delivers a summary of the thesis which points out the definite road for black women to obtain liberation. The primary task of "womanism" is to liberate women from the oppression of patriarchy in order to give them an independent personality, including economic and emotional independence and The Color Purple renders one of the best illustrations for the theory.