| Alice Walker(1944-)is one of the outstanding black female writers in the American literary world.Her masterpiece The Color Purple(1982)has been well received by experts and scholars from home and abroad since its publication in 1982,which made her win the Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award.In addition to The Color Purple,Walker’s other novels,such as The Temple of My Familiar(1989),The Third Life of Grange Copeland(1970),and Meridian(1976)also received extensive attention and comments.In her works,Walker focuses on the survival and fate of black women,exposing the double oppression of black women by racism and sexism,and actively seeking the way of self-liberation of black women.Compared with her long novels,her three short stories:In Love and Trouble:the Story of Black Women(1973),You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down(1981)and The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart(2000)have not received much concern.It is worth noting that Walker’s short stories and long novels are entwined with each other,and their influences in literature can not be ignored.In short stories,Walker portrays black women’s oppression,resistance,and their pursuit of love and freedom,which reflect her "womanism".Considering the limits of the systematic study on three collections of short stories,this thesis,by attempting to combine the author’s own identity crisis,aims to systematically study Walker’s construction of black women’s subjectivity in her short stories.As for the term of "subjectivity",it consists of many discontinuous aspects of identities,including race,gender,sexual orientation,class,etc.This paper interprets the absence and construction of racial and gender identity of black women.The writer’s own life experiences are deeply related to those of the black women in her novels and short stories.Moreover,deconstruction is a strategy for construction,as Jacques Derrida puts forward to eliminate the binary opposition.The final goal of construction of black female subjectivity and deconstruction of male supremacy is to realize survival and wholeness of entire people.The whole paper is divided into five chapters.The first chapter is the introduction part.First of all,it briefly introduces the writer Alice Walker and her works and then makes a summary of the study on her short stories from home and abroad.Secondly,it briefly describes the idea of"womanism" proposed by Walker and the core concept of "subjectivity".Then it relates the identity crisis of the writer herself.Finally,it summarizes the theme and the overall structure of this paper.The second chapter mainly discusses the black women’s lack of subjectivity.This chapter analyzes the concrete manifestation of black women’s lack of subjectivity in the context of social and historical background.The third chapter chiefly elaborates the deconstruction of male supremacy from the aspects of racial and gender identity.The white male supremacy is deconstructed by analyzing their spiritual emptiness in contrast with blues black female singer and expressing the irony for them.The black male supremacy is deconstructed by presenting their fear of facing up to the history of black slavery.Besides,some black men in the second collection of short stories became abandoned.The fourth chapter analyzes the construction of black women’s subjectivity.This chapter discusses Walker’s construction of black women’s subjectivity from the aspects of racial and gender identity.Black women’s racial identity is constructed mainly by remembering the enslaved history of the black,singing blues,and sewing quilt,etc.In the construction of gender identity,the author of this thesis mainly discusses black women’s pursuit of free love:both the homosexual and heterosexual love.The fifth chapter is conclusion.The construction of subjectivity is a long and gradual process.Through the deconstruction of male supremacy and the construction of black female subjectivity,Alice Walker aims to achieve a dynamic balance to realize the ultimate goal of"womanism"—survival and wholeness of entire people. |
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