Alice Walker’s Inheritance Of And Transcendence Over Virginia Woolf’s Feminism

Virginia Woolf is a prominent British female writer and literary critic in the 20th century as well as a feminist ahead of her time.In her literary career,Woolf creates voluminous works,among which A Room of One’s Own is generally listed as one of the pioneering feminist works,Mrs.Dalloway is usually praised as the classic of stream-of-consciousness fictions,and Orlando:A Biography is often regarded as a fascinating modernist work that subverts gender and history.In the three books,Woolf discusses feminist ideas such as gender inequality,female writing,sisterhood,and androgyny.Alice Walker is a distinguished black female writer,poet,and feminist in contemporary America.As the first African-American female Pulitzer Prize winner,Walker is famous for The Color Purple which criticizes sexism,and By the Light of My Father’s Smile which discusses the relation between black men and women.Her essay collection In Search of Our Mothers’Gardens elaborates womanism,probes racism and sexism,and concerns black women,which establishes Walker’s position as one of the core figures in black feminist movement.Although there is no similarity in the time they lived and are living,in their nationalities,and races,both Woolf and Walker are significant figures in the history of feminism,and traces of Walker’s inheritance of and transcendence over Woolf’s feminism can be found in their works.At home and abroad,abundant researches have been done on Woolf and Walker,but there are only a few that compare and contrast the two feminists.Therefore,this thesis intends to probe deeper on this area.This thesis finds that Walker inherits Woolf’s feminist ideas about the construction of female literary tradition,the concept of sisterhood,and the proposal of gender harmony,but Walker also transcends Woolf’s feminism by resetting the center of feminist concern to black women.This thesis consists of three parts:introduction,body,and conclusion.The introduction part first introduces Woolf’s and Walker’s literary achievement and their works to be referred in this thesis.Then it summarizes related research at home and abroad on Woolf’s feminist thoughts and her three works,as well as Walker’s womanism and her three books.At last,this chapter states the research significance and overall structure of this thesis.The first part of the body expounds the source,content,and influence of Woolf’s feminist thoughts and Walker’s womanism.The second part of the body analyzes Walker’s inheritance of Woolf’s feminism,that is,they all search for female literary tradition,embrace the concept of sisterhood,and advocate the harmony between men and women.The last part of the body examines Walker’s transcendence over Woolf’s feminist ideas.In terms of tracing female literary tradition,Woolf focuses on upper and middle class writers,while Walker explores black female writers and black women’s creativity.As regard to embracing the concept of sisterhood,Woolf depicts the romantic love between the upper white ladies Clarissa and Sally in Mrs.Dalloway,whereas Walker presents the sisterhood among a number of black sisters in The Color Purple,On the issue of pursuing gender harmony,Woolf proposes androgyny and subverts the binary opposition of gender through Orlando’s gender transformation and cross-dressing,but Walker advocates gender reconciliation,and breaks through gender opposition and achieve gender harmony through the reconciliation between wife and husband in The Color Purple and the reconciliation between father and daughters in By the Light of My Father’s Smile.The last part of the thesis makes a conclusion.Walker absorbs Woolf s feminist ideas,but she realizes Woolf s limitations and achieves transcendence by refocusing on black women.The significance of this thesis lies in that it provides a new perspective for the study of feminism in the Third World in the context of multiculturalism and a better understanding of Western feminist literary criticism.