Alice Walker's Reconstruction Of Femininity In The Third Life Of Grange Copeland

Despite the fact that gender roles varied across cultures,virtually all societies were to some degree patriarchal,forcing girls and women to live up to a challenging set of expectations by performing feminine roles,namely femininity.Femininity,at its core,was about power and,therefore,a hotbed of inequality.White southerners used the ideals of femininity for shoring up patriarchy and providing justifications for white supremacy since they alleged women should obey to men's rule if they were to be feminine and black women were not true women.But that didn't mean black women were free from the constraints of femininity.In The Third Life of Grange Copeland,Alice Walker demonstrated how the myths of femininity exerted powerful influences in the lives of black women by portraying three main female characters,among whom Mem and Margaret were both caught in despair and destruction under the intertwined oppressions of racism and sexism because of their blind identification with and conformity to the white-dominated norms of femininity.Only Ruth,the third generation of the Copeland family,managed to break through the bondage of femininity by fostering self-valuation,self-definition and self-realization.This thesis aimed to probe detailedly into the degree to which the three generations of female Copelands deferred to and violated femininity by examining their lives.Building on Barbara Welter's(1966)assertion that traditional feminine virtues resided in piety,purity,submissiveness and domesticity,it contended that Walker reconstructed femininity on the basis of the traditional feminine virtues instead of abandoning them all,which mirrored the difference between Walker's womanism and radical feminism and provided a road map for constructing contemporary femininity and a healthy relationship between men and women.