A Study Of Conceptual Metaphor In The Color Purple

The Color Purple (1982) is Alice Walker’s most famous novel, which helped her win the Pulitzer Prize (1983) and the National Book Award (1983). Thus, scholars at home and abroad have widely studied it from many perspectives:womanism, black feminism, eco-feminism, psychoanalytical feminism, queer theory, comparative studies, etc. There are only several studies done from the perspective of conceptual metaphor. Meanwhile, these studies either have a brief analysis of the conceptual metaphors or only treat the novel as linguistic material. This thesis explores it from conceptual metaphor perspective, and finds two important conceptual metaphors:LIFE IS WAR and WOMANISM IS THE COLOR PURPLE, which are relevant to the novel’s themes. Among them, LIFE IS WAR expresses the themes of sexism and racism; WOMANISM IS THE COLOR PURPLE reflects the womanism theme. In addition, LIFE IS WAR is a dominant conceptual metaphor, under which there are four sub-conceptual metaphors:POWER IS BIGNESS, WOMEN ARE MULES, WOMEN ARE TREES, and MEN ARE FROGS, which reveal characters’worldviews.Among the four sub-conceptual metaphors, POWER IS BIGNESS reflects most characters’belief of power having close relation to physical size. Because a man with big size often has big physical power, most characters believe power is closely related to size via’"POWER IS BIGNESS". However, big size doesn’t firmly guarantee power, because it cannot help characters overcome all the difficulties they confront. Therefore, what is metaphorical to the reader is literally true to the characters. WOMEN ARE MULES reveals most male characters and even lots of female characters regarding women as inferior as mules. In order to protect their master status at home, black male characters consciously adopt "WOMEN ARE MULES" to degrade women into inferior animals; under the influence of racism, sexism, classism and the ideological dimension of oppression, some black women unconsciously view themselves as mules. WOMEN ARE TREES hints Celie’s worldview of understanding women in terms of trees. Facing the meaningless and hopeless life, Celie understands herself as wood (a lifeless tree); under Shug’s guidance, she gradually finds the meaning of her life, then she views herself as a vital tree. MEN ARE FROGS reveals Celie’s regarding men as frogs, which demonstrates her scare and hate of having sex with men. Because of her painful sexual experiences, she deems men as ugly cold-blooded frogs via "MEN ARE FROGS".Walker uses the conventional metaphor POWER IS BIGNESS to equate power with size, but extends the LIFE metaphor to include the chaotic, violent, suffering aspect of life via LIFE IS WAR. She joins two metaphors WOMEN ARE MULES and WOMEN ARE TREES which seem impossible to coexist together, and makes generic metaphors HUMAN BEINGS ARE PLANTS and HUMAN BEINGS ARE ANIMALS to respectively specific metaphor(s) WOMEN ARE TREES and WOMEN ARE MULES, CELIE IS A BIRD, MEN ARE FROGS. Moreover, she creates WOMANISM IS THE COLOR PURPLE to offer a new mode of metaphorical thought to understand reality.