A Traumatic Study Of Alice Walker's The Color Purple

Among so many black female writers,Alice Walker is regarded as one of the most outstanding and prolific authors who has devoted to women's writing and who has written many profound works for the world.Her main novels include Meridian(1976),The Third Life of Grange Copeland(1970),and The Color Purple(1982),etc.Walker's career as a writer took flight with the publication of her third novel,The Color Purple,in 1982.Set in the early 1900 s,the novel explores the female AfricanAmerican experience through the life and struggles of Celie.Celie suffers terrible abuse at the hands of her step-father,and later,from her husband.Her renowned compelling work won Walker both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction in 1983.Since the publication of The Color Purple,studies on it have been continuing for quite a long time.Disputes and praise come from all over the world.In terms of foreign study,many scholars and critics perceive The Color Purple from different perspectives such as womanism,feminism,lesbianism and female's liberation from patriarchal society.Other angles also have been reached such as the themes of the novel,symbols,characteristics,epistolary structure and the awakening of female consciousness.Some researchers analyze the protagonist's sisterhood and friendship among female characters especially Celie and Shug,Celie and Sophia,and Celie and Nettie.Some make comparisons between The Color Purple and other black female writers' works on the culture such as blues and quilts.All these discussions and studies are useful for us readers to better understand the novel itself and the main theme inside.Domestically,Chinese scholars have also begun to pay attention to the novel since it was introduced into China through translation.Quite a few scholars study it such as Yang Renjing,Taojie and Chen Xiao and so on.In CNKI(China'S National Knowledge Infrastructure)there are a lot of Ph.D dissertations,MA theses and academic papers devoted to the study of The Color Purple including characterization,the usage of symbols,themes like womanism and racial discrimination and the causes of these females' bitter lives from the perspective of post-colonial feminism.All the studies and research seem to be sufficient from these perspectives.Even though a few critics have set foot in trauma theory,they have compared The Color Purple with other novels from the macroscopic point of view,few critics and scholars study both the main male characters and female characters from the perspective of trauma theory.Therefore,based on the research findings of previous scholars,this thesis intends to interpret The Color Purple from the perspective of trauma theory,digging out the deep causes of the main characters' traumatic experience and their ways of selfsalvation and recovery,thus further broadens the research field of trauma research.This thesis is mainly divided into three parts and each part has their individual focus and concentrates on different aspects.Firstly,here comes Part One,the foremost part.This part mostly includes the introduction part,introduction to Alice Walker and her novel The Color Purple,introduction to the trauma theory,literature review and the structure of this thesis.Seeing from this,it can be read that some related information of Alice Walker and The Color Purple,basic information of the authors and the novel.And then the theoretical foundation—trauma theory will be deeply talked and the related research will be also mentioned here.Besides that,studies on The Color Purple from home and abroad will also be sorted out and listed.And in this part,three questions supposed to be solved will be raised.1)What's the revelation of Trauma in The Color Purple? 2)How do the main characters in the novel gain their salvation by overcoming their own trauma? 3)What's the significance of Alice Walker's The Color Purple for the later black women's writing?Part Two covers three chapters,which deal with trauma reflected in The Color Purple,the causes of trauma and salvation and recovery from trauma respectively.First of all,trauma in The Color Purple will be found and analyzed.From the three main female characters and two male characters,it is visible that these protagonists in this novel have their own individual traumatic experience and suffer different torture and abuse from others and that society more or less.And then,to get a deep analysis of them,causes of trauma that lead to their unfortunate life will be focused on.After the traumatic experience,these protagonists never lose their hopes for life.On the contrary,they gradually get cured by self-recovery and self-salvation.The last part comes to the conclusion,which concludes the development of the thesis and the research results of the thesis.