Artistic Exploration Of Living Environment For African Americans

Alice Walker(1944-), one of the leading voices of African American writers, occupies the incomparable position as a powerful mouthpiece for female African Americans. By naming herself "A.M., author and medium", Walker establishes her relationship with the society, with readers and with the colored people, and she positively bears the obligation of speaking out the predicament of African Americans, especially the survival of female African Americans. The Color Purple, Walker’s third story, gains her Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Female African Americans’ double oppression is expressed through the detailed illustration of the heroine Celie’s tribulation, struggle and rebirth. In the meanwhile, the novel reflects Walker’s womanist philosophy, and her wide ideological concern about the white and the colored, male and female, and their survival as a whole. Since its publication the novel has elicited wide discussion and interpretation from an increasing number reviewers, black and white, male and female. However, many of them have interpreted The Color Purple from the ideological level, such as Walker’s womanist philosophy, the controversial theme on race and homosexual relationships, profound influence of its epistolary form and so on. And few focuses on the study of the novel’s combination of form and contents.Based on the fact that walker combines her wide ideological concern with her artistic narrative strategies in The Color Purple, this thesis tries to examine the narrative strategies of this novel in the light of feminist narratology, revealing that Walker positively takes the responsibility of exploring the construction of the harmonious environment for African Americans’ survival in art.Through a close reading of the novel, this thesis employs Susan. S. Lanser and Showalter’s theories about feminist narratology to demonstrate Walker’s successful combining her ideological contents with the artistic form. It consists of five chapters. Chapter one offers the basic introduction to Alice Walker’s achievements and the novel The Color Purple, some critical comments on the novel as well as major ideas of feminist narratology that will be applied in this thesis. Chapter two provides a detailed discussion of Walker’s use of Celie as the central narrative voice to construct female authority:an illustration of the transformation of her narrative voice from personal status to open status. This chapter also gives a detailed explanation of the function of epistolary form and black women’s vernacular English, which provides an effective way and space for Celie to construct female discourse authority. Meanwhile, Walker just proves that black women’s vernacular English is immortal by endowing Celie the privilege of speaking the blacks’ vernacular. Chapter three discusses Walker’s successful exertion of the fixed internal focalization to construct female subjectivity:a clear explanation of how Celie gradually gets self-consciousness and subjectivity through her observation on Sofia, Shug and Albert. Chapter four illustrates the application of "quiltlike" narrative structure in The Color Purple to reveal Walker’s wide ideological concerns on men and women, on the whites and the blacks, and on all African Americans’s survival as a whole:an explanation of how Walker successfully employs the embedded narrative pattern of Shug’s Blues and Squeak’s transformation, Sofia’s experiences of struggle with the white mayor couple and Nettie’s experiences in Olinka village. The last chapter is the conclusion part, which makes an objective assessment of The Color Purple, finding that Alice Walker’s ideological contents and artistic narrative strategies are interwoven with each other:her writings not only embody her concerns about the existence of all people, but also plays the role of her artistic medium to positively probe into the harmonious living environment for the whole African Americans.