CHAPTER - I

INTRODUCTION

This thesis attempts to find out the trial of the black women in search of self and

identity, racism, gender in the Color Purple and other two novels by Alice Walker who

introduced her own theory called “womanism.” Walker tries to indicate that Black

women should enjoy the benefits, the rights that all of the white women and men have.

She believes that Afro-American women should not be considered as slaves anymore.

She reflects her concern in her works with racial, sexual, and political issues, particularly

with the black woman’s struggle for spiritual and political survival. Black women in

America live a discriminated life and their humanity and black female self are denied not

only by white men but also by their own people, particularly by black men. Alice Walker

in her works highlights the problems of black women in their day to day life and leads

them to self discovery, overcome their disillusionment and recognize their own worth.

Walker felt committed to the fact that she had to create awareness among the media and

higher authorities to seek some relief for her people’s problems. Her novels deal with the

human experience in general specially the human experience from the perspective of the

suffering and the downtrodden, the oppressed. Mary Helen Washington in “An Essay on

Alice Walker, “In Sturdy Black Bridge: Vision of Black Women in Literature writes that,

‘from whatever vantage point one investigates the work of Alice Walker – poet, novelist,

short story writer, critic, essayist, and apologist for black women – it is clear that the

special identifying mark of her writing is her concern for the lives of black women’

(Washington 133).

African-American literature is produced in the United States by writers of African

descent. It begins with the works of late 18th-century writers such as Philip Wheatley

Olaudah Equiano. Pillis Wheatly was a new poet of England who contributed the literary

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practices to the people. Before the high point of slave narratives, African-American

literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. African-American

literature reached early high points with slave narratives of the nineteenth century and

Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance was a time of flowering of literature and

the arts in 1920s. African-American literature writers have got the recognition and

received some of the prestigious awards, including the Nobel prize to Toni Morrison. The

role of African Americans within the larger American society, African-American culture,

racism, slavery, and equality are some of the themes and issues dealt in the African

American literature. Apart from the other themes African American writing dealt with the

themes of spirituality, liberation, and gospel: ‘African-American writing has tended to

incorporate oral forms, such as spirituals, sermons, gospel music, blues, or rap’ (Ward

146). The place of African Americans in American society has changed over the

centuries, so has the focus of African-American literature. Before the American Civil

War, the literature primarily consisted of memories of people who have escaped from

slavery. A slave narrative is the genre that includes accounts of life under slavery and the

path of justice and redemption to freedom. The early distinction existed between the

literature of freed slaves and the literature of free blacks who had been born in the North

of America. Free blacks wanted to express their feelings in a different narrative form.

Free blacks in the North often spoke out against slavery and racial injustices using the

spiritual narratives: ‘The spiritual addressed many of the same themes of slave narratives,

but has been largely ignored in current scholarly conversation’ (Peterson 4).

At the turn of the 20th century, authors of non-fiction works such as W. E. B. Du

Bois and Booker T. Washington debated whether to confront or appease racist attitudes in

the United States. During the American Civil Rights movement, some of the authors such

as Richard Wright and Gwendoly Brooks wrote about the issues of racial

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discrimination and Black Nationalism. Today, African-American literature has become

accepted as a whole part of American literature, with books such as Roots: The Saga of

an American Family by Alex Haley, The Color Purple (1982) by Alice Walker which

won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award; and Beloved by Toni Morrison

attaining both best-selling and award-winning status.

In broad terms, African-American literature can be defined as writings by people

of African descent who live in the United States. It is highly varied and replicates the

voices of the people who have mostly faced racial discrimination. The general focus of

African-American literature is with the role of African Americans within the larger

American society, and what it means to be an American. As Princeton University

Professor Albert J. Raboteaue has said, all African-American study ‘speaks to the deeper

meaning of the African-American presence in this nation. This presence has always been

a test case of the nation's claims to freedom, democracy, equality, the inclusiveness of all’

(Coon 32). The issues of freedom and equality long denied to Blacks in the United States

are explored in the African-American literature, along with further themes such

as culture, religion, racism, slavery, segregation, migration, feminism, a sense of home.

African-American literature presents the African-American experience from the view of

African-American. In the early Republic, African-American literature represented a way

for the negotiation of free blacks and about their new identity in an individualized

republic. They often tried to exercise their political and social autonomy as a defense

mechanism against white public. An early theme of African-American literature was to be

a citizen in post-Revolutionary America, like other American writings.

Today African American Literature occupies a significant place in United States

with eminent writers like Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, and Walter

Mosley. The genre of African American is accepted as an integral part of American

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literature. African American literature has generally focused on themes of particular

interest to Black people in the United States of America. The issues of freedom and

equality which are denied to Black people are reflected in the writings. African-

American women’ lives have been critically affected by racism, sexism and classism,

which are system of societal and psychological restriction. The American society

compartmentalize its various ethnic groups by the racist, sexist and classist structure, and

defame the colored as inferior and characterizes males as center and females as margin

respectively. The groups of blacks are relegated to an underclass by virtue of their race

and similarly black women are relegated to a separate caste by virtue of their sex. The

greatest source of oppression of blacks in America is not only the racist and sexist

assumption but also the class exploitations which form the basis for victimization of

black women. Sexism paralyzed the minds of African-American women and even worse

defiled their sexual being and scarred them psychologically. Thus, the Black and

especially the Black female suffer from the twin evils of racial discrimination and gender

bias. Black women suffer not only because they are Black and female but also because

they are economically poor. In American society, the ideal concept of woman is not just

racist and sexist but essentially classiest. The black poor women who could hardly

approximate the norm are discriminated and dehumanized which eventually make them

lose their self-esteem and develop self-hatred. They struggle on their own but it becomes

a part of the black struggle. Brenda Elchelberger writes:

By and large, black women will define their struggle as part of black

struggle and not as part of women’s struggle because they know that if

sex barriers were removed there would still be race barriers…Black

women can visualize superficial sex barriers on the larger society going

away before race barriers. When we are viewed by the larger culture, we

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 are not looked on in terms of our class sex first, but in terms of our black

skin. (Elchelberger 16-28)

Another characteristic of African American literature is having strong tradition of

incorporating oral poetry into itself. In oral poetry, African American culture has many

examples which are included in spirituals, African American gospel music, Blues and

Rap. This oral poetry also shows up in the African American tradition of Christian

sermons. These examples of oral poetry have made their way into African-American

literature. However, while these characteristics exist on many levels of African American

literature, they do not give the exclusive definition of the genre. As with any type of

literature, there are disagreements as to the genre's definitions and inclusion of authors

and their works. For example, some people include in African American literature

writings which lack African American characters and situations and are not particularly

targeted at Black audiences. An example could be Samuel R. Delany’s outspokenly gay

science fiction, whose writings are not about African American issues, but who is

considered as a leading voice in African American literature. Some of the criticism of

African American literature over the years has come, surprisingly enough from within the

African American community. The major drawback is that the Black people are not

portrayed or rather projected in a positive light.

African American writing has deep roots in historical circumstances of slavery. In

fact, whether one is born in slavery or not, most major writers of African American

Literature before World War I started their literary works via some form of the slave

narrative. African American Literature can be described as a multi-faced nature of

oppression, protest against the sub-human condition of black people and the idea of the

Old Negro as servile docile. Much of literature of the period of enslavement was an

emphasis of the humanity of the blacks. In contrast to the cruelty and ignorance of pre-

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Civil War South, these narratives attempted at restoring the individual dignity of the

blacks. Only African descent experienced slavery over a long period of time. Even if

slavery degraded the enslaver, as Thomas Jefferson and Fanny Kemble persisted, only the

slave knew the depths of that degradation. Thus, only they could sing what DuBois has

called ‘The Sorrow Songs’. It was due to the special and bitter experience which was

later known as sorrow songs - ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ and ‘Steal Away to Jesus’.

Only the slaves knew and felt the double meanings of these songs. Slaves and ante-

bellum free Negroes were in the vanguard in attacking institutions and practices which

enslaved and degraded them. Slavery is indicated as the subgenre of slave narrative.

Slave narrative is a genre of African-American literature that developed in the middle of

the 19th century by the fugitive slaves about their lives in the South which were often

written after escaping to freedom. They deal with the cruelties of life under slavery, as

well as the persistent inhumanity towards the slaves. It was useful to the uncertain Black

people to define their identities based on the life stories of former slaves. The slave

narrative of 20th century helps the Black Americans deal with their lives with the words

of their ancestors. Most Black people during slave-era couldn’t read or write and they

didn’t had the freedom to think. The descriptions of the Black women were negative in

the early literature: ‘Black people often presented them as fat and doting mammies or as

seductive temptresses and jezebels, seducing and conquering with sex.’ (Smith 55)

During this period, the controversy over slavery led to impassioned literature on

both sides of the issue, with novels such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by Harriet

Beecher Stowe’s representing the abolitionist view of the evils of slavery. Southern white

writers produced the “Anti-Tom” novels in response, purporting to describe the life under

slavery, as well as the severe cruelties suffered by free labor in the North. The slave

narratives were integral to African-American literature with the writings of more than

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6,000 former slaves from North America and the Caribbeans who wrote their lives and

eventually 150 of these got published in separate books or pamphlets. Slave narratives

can be broadly categorized into three distinguished forms: tales of religious redemption,

tales to inspire the abolitionist struggle, and tales of progress. The most popular forms are

the tales written to inspire the abolitionist struggle because they tend to have a strong

autobiographical motif. Many of them are recognized as worth 19th-century writings by

African Americans now, with two of the best-known writings Frederick Gouglass's

Autobiography and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs (1861).

After the end of slavery and the American Civil War, a number of African-

American authors wrote nonfiction works about the condition of African Americans

people and their lives in the United States. Among the most prominent writers was W. E.

B. Du Bois (1868–1963), who had a doctorate in sociology from Harvard University, and

was one of the original founders of the NAACP in 1910. At the turn of the century, Du

Bois who has published a highly influential collection of essays entitled The Souls of

Black Folk (1903) coined the term “double consciousness” to explain what it is to be an

African on American soil. This feeling of being different with “double-consciousness”

was evident in the lives of the black people, and also in black art and black aesthetics.

Commenting on American Black history Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk says:

The history of the American Black is the history of this strife-this longing

to attain self conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better

and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be

lost…He would not bleach his black soul in a flood of White

Americanism, for he knows that Black blood has a message for the world.

He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Black and an

American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without

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 having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face. (Du Bois 16-

17)

The essays on race were groundbreaking and drew from Du Bois’s personal

experiences for describing the life of African Americans in rural Georgia and in the larger

American society. In The Souls of Black Folk Du Bois writes: ‘The problem of the

twentieth century is the problem of the color line’ (Du Bois 10). Du Bois believed that

African Americans should work together to fight against prejudice and inequity. He was a

professor at Atlanta University and later worked at Howard University

Another prominent author of this period is Booker T. Washington (1856-1915)

who in many ways represented opposite views of Du Bois. He was an educator and the

founder of the Tuskegee Institute, a historically black college in Alabama. Among his

published works are Up From Slavery (1901), The Future of the American

Negro (1899), Tuskegee and Its People (1905), and My Larger Education (1911). In

contrast to Du Bois, who adopted a more confrontational attitude toward ending racial

strife in America, Washington believed that Blacks should lift themselves up and prove

themselves as equals with whites before asking for an end to racism. While this

viewpoint was popular among some Blacks (and many whites) at the time, the political

views of Washington later fell out of fashion.

Elizabeth Keckley (1818-1907) was a former slave who managed to establish a

successful career as a dressmaker and catered to the Washington political elite after

obtaining her freedom. However, soon after publishing Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty

Years as a Slave and Four Years in the White House, she lost her job. Although she

acknowledged the cruelties of her enslavement and her resentment towards it, Keckley

chose to focus her narrative on the incidents that have moulded her character. Behind the

Scenes details Keckley’s life in slavery, her work for Mary Todd Lincoln and her efforts

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for liberation. Keckley was also deeply committed to programs of racial improvement

and protection and helped in finding the Home for Destitute Women and Children in

Washington, D.C. In addition to this, Keckley taught at Wilberforce University in Ohio.

Josephine Brown is the youngest child of abolitionist and author William Wells

Brown, who wrote a biography of her father, Biography of an American Bondman, By

His Daughter. Brown wrote the first ten chapters of the narrative while she was studying

in France, as a means of satisfying her classmate’s curiosity about her father. After

returning to America, she discovered that the narrative of her father’s life, written by her,

and published a few years before, was out of print. She produced the rest of the chapters

that constitute Biography of an American Bondman. Brown was a qualified teacher and

she was also extremely active as an advocate against slavery. Although not a US citizen,

the Jamaican Marcus Garvey (1887–1940), was a newspaper publisher, journalist, and

activist for Pan Africanism who became famous in the United States. He founded the

Universal Negro Association and African Communities League (UNIA). He encouraged

Black Nationalism and helped the African community to look positively upon their

ancestral homeland. He wrote a number of essays published as editorials in the UNIA

house organ, the Negro World newspaper. Some of his lecture materials and other

writings were compiled and published as nonfiction books by his second wife Amy

Jacques Garvey. The writings were Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, Africa

for the Africans (1924) and More Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey (1977).

Paul Laurence Dunbar, who was the first African-American poet to gain national

prominence often wrote in the rural, black dialect of the day. His first book of

poetry, Oak and Ivy, was published in 1893. Much of Dunbar’s works such as When

Malindy Sings (1906) includes photographs taken by the Hampton Institute Camera Club,

and Joggin’ Erlong (1906) presents revealing glimpses about the lives of rural African

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Americans of the day. Though Dunbar died young, he was a prolific poet, and a short

story writer, essayist, novelist. Some of the other popular writings were The Uncalled

(1898) and The Fanatics (1901).

Other African-American writers also rose to prominence in the late 19th and early

20th centuries. Among these writers is Charles W. Chesnutt who is a well-known short

story writer and essayist. Frances E. W. Harper (1825–1911) wrote four novels, several

volumes of poetry, and numerous stories, poems, essays and letters. In 1853, the

publication of Harper’s Eliza Harris which was one of many responses to Harriet

Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin brought her national attention. Harper was hired by

the Maine Anti-Slavery Society and in the first six weeks she managed to travel to twenty

cities, giving at least thirty-one lectures. Her book Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, a

collection of poems and essays published in 1854 were sold in big numbers within three

years. Harper was often characterized as “a noble Christian woman” and “one of the most

scholarly and well-read women of her day”, but she was a strong advocate of anti-

slavery.

The Harlem Renaissance was a flowering of African-American literature and art

from 1920 to 1940. It was part of a larger flowering of social thought and culture based in

the African-American community of Harlem in New York City. Harlem Renaissance in

1920s was a period of creativity among Black artists, writers, musicians, and entertainers

and it was a movement toward recreating a unique African American identity. It was a

time when Harlem in New York City became the capital of Black America. But as the

Great Depression of the late 1920s deepened and extended into the next decade, the

Harlem Renaissance became slow because of the little financial support to the artists.

Numerous Black artists and musicians produced classic works in various fields

from Jazz to theatre; perhaps the best known for the literature that came out of it, is the

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renaissance. The poet Langston Hughes is among the most renowned writers of the

renaissance. Hughes first received attention in the 1922 publication The Book of

American Negro Poetry. Edited by James Weldon Johnson, this anthology featured the

work of the period’s most talented poets including Claude McKay who published three

novels, Home to Harlem, Banjo and Banana Bottom and a collection of short stories). In

1926, Hughes published a collection of poetry, The Weary Blues, and in 1930 a

novel, Not Without Laughter. Perhaps his most famous poem which he wrote as a young

teen is “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”. His single character is Jesse B. Simple, a

plainspoken, pragmatic Harlemite whose comedic observations appeared in Hughes’s

columns for the Chicago Defender and the New York Post. Perhaps the best-known

collection of Simple stories is Simple Speaks His Mind (1950) which published in book

form. Until his death in 1967, Hughes published nine volumes of poetry, eight books of

short stories, two novels and a number of plays, children books, and translations. Oprah

Winfrey, one of the most powerful women in the world, has played a significant role in

presenting the African American Literature to a vast audience through her Book Club

which includes the authors such as Edwidge Danicat, Alan Paton, and Lalita Tademy.

Alexis De Veaux says:

I see a greater and greater commitment among black women writers to

understand self, multiplied in terms of the community, the community

multiplied in terms of the world. You have to understand what your place

as an individual is and the place of the person who is close to you. You

have to understand the space between you before you can understand

more complex or larger groups. (Veaux 76)

The development of African American fiction is mirror of the relationship between

sexism and racism in America. The struggle in the tradition of these writers from the

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nineteenth century to the present depends on their attempts to use the range of one’s voice

and to express the totality of the self.

The novelist Zora Neale Hurston is another notable writer of the renaissance. He

is the author of the classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Dianne Sadoff

views Their Eyes Were Watching God as a heterosexual love that is undercut by

Hurston’s own ambivalence over the compatibility of marriage and the creative “voice”

that produces fiction. Sadoff makes the case most sympathetically, in as much as she

discerns ‘marks, fissures, and traces of inferiorization’ (Sadoff 4), that amount to ‘scars

of disguise or concealment because [Hurston] is black and female-doubly alienated from

a white and patriarchal mainstream literature’ (18). Although Hurston wrote 14 books

that ranged from anthropology to short stories to novel-length fiction, her writing is about

the obscurity for decades. Her work was rediscovered in the 1970s through a 1975 article

by Alice Walker, “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” (1975) which has been reprinted

several times, and which has also appeared in the book In Search of Our Mother’s

Garden (1983), a volume of Womanist prose which defines the Womanist as, ‘Womanist

is to feminist as purple to lavender’ (1972). Zora Neale Hurston in How It Feels to Be

Colored Me says: ‘I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in

my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all…I do not weep at the world – I

am too busy sharpening my oyster knife’ (Hurston 23).

While Hurston and Hughes are the two most influential writers of the Harlem

Renaissance, a number of other writers also became well known during this period. Some

of the writers who made an impact were Jean Toomer, author of Cane, a famous

collection of stories, poems, and sketches about rural and urban Black life, and Dorothy

West, whose novel The Living is Easy examined the life of an upper-class Black family.

Countee Cullen was another popular renaissance writer whose poems described everyday

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black life (such as a trip he made to Baltimore that was ruined by a racial insult). Frank

Marshall Davis’s poetry collections Black Man’s Verse (1935) and I am the American

Negro (1937), published by Black Cat Press had a critical acclaim. Author Wallace

Thurman made an impact with his novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro

Life (1929), in which he focused on interracial prejudice between lighter-skinned and

darker-skinned African Americans. The Harlem Renaissance marked a turning point for

African-American literature. Prior to this period, books by African Americans were

primarily read by other Black people. With the renaissance, African-American literature

as well as black fine art and performance art started to be absorbed into mainstream

American culture.

During the 1930s, Blacks were after equal pay, educational facilities, and equal

protection under the law. African American authors took up the challenging themes of

racism, poverty, self-assertion, and race relations. The most significant period for the

United States and for African Americans was in 1940s. At the time of World War II,

Blacks were primary segregated and assigned only in noncombat roles.

In 1950s, the rights of American African were under attack. All the efforts made

during the Forties were abolished during the Korean War. The literature of 1950s was

about love, discrimination, the prison system, protest, black sexuality, and black life in

Harlem. James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison were three new African

American Voices in 1960s who left an lasting impression. Baldwin’s works are deeply

personal and addressed to issues of race and sexuality. He wrote nearly 20 books such as

Another Country, The Fire Next Time, and Go Tell It on the Mountain, his most famous

one. Richard Wright, the author of Native son (1940), The Outsider (1953), and White

Man, Listen! (1957) believed that Negro writers must accept the nationalist implications

of their lives, not in order to encourage them, but to change and transcend them. In

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addition to the ideas of James Baldwin, Richard Wright Ellison believed that the most

important issue in America is race. In his idea, text is not an agent of change but must

engage in the culture. Two of America’s greatest Black leaders: Rev. Martin Luther King

Jr. and Malcolm X were assassinated during 1960s. Much of the art of Harlem

Renaissance was a response to the oppression of blacks in America which it had the voice

of alienation, anger and rage.

African American authors perfected their craft in the 1950s and early 1960s. The

Civil Rights Movement emerged in the 1960s for overturning the color bar and to lobby

for equal rights legislation for all was in full swing. Women became active on their own,

as they chafed at being sidelined by a largely male-dominated movement. Civil Rights

movement was a period for advocated Black Power. This was a new cry for Black

Nationalism, and Black separatism. The themes of the author’s works were Black pride,

self-actualization, and Black sexuality, justice, and race relations. Civil Rights Movement

was actually different for black liberation and Black Nationalism, the Black Panthers, the

student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, all grouped together as Black Liberation

Movement for the liberation of black male.

The Women’s liberation movement of the 1970s seemed to say nothing to Black

Women because they operated in the discourses which separated sex from race and from

class that established by white women for whom race was invisible. The important

literary figures of these times were Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and James Emanuel.

Many works were written dealing with the similar kind of literary themes as in the

Sixties. The eighties was a great time for female authors. African American female

writers became a part of American’s pop culture and started to make a mark in society’s

mainstream. Harriet Jacob’s early emphasis on the enslaved woman has been revived by

Black woman writers. A new era was dedicated to the African American literary tradition

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by the re-emergence of the mother figure. The most dominant themes of the period till

now constituted of Black female male relationships, self-identity, urban life, economic

power and Black unity. The writers dealt with the female main characters in their works.

As African-Americans are different from other Americans, African-American literature is

also unique. It has a different origin which has developed under specific historical and

cultural circumstances.

Feminist Movement derived momentum from politics of confrontation

precipitated by the cultural ethos of '60s. Feminist writings laboured to recover and

restore women’s roles to historical and social events in an attempt to redefine social

processes by liberating them from gender systems:

Black female writers as participant observers capsulize on a myriad of

levels, the insularity of their home communities. Due to systematic

institutionalized manifestations of racism in America, the Black

communities tend to be situated as marginated islands within the larger

society. The perpetual powers of white supremacy continue to drop down

on the inhabitants of the community, like a bell-jar surrounding the

whole, yet separating the black community’s customs, mores, opinions

and system of values from those other communities. Black female authors

emphasize life with in the community, not the conflict with outside

forces. (Cannon 77)

Harriet E. Wilson is the earliest female Afro-American novelist who published her novel,

Our Nig (1959) which deals with the plight of Frado, the Mulatto heroine. Risking the

possibility of hostile reactions, Harriet E. Wilson dared to confront the taboo on inter-

racial marriage, of which she was an offspring. Russell observes: ‘It has been noted that

before Our Nig, ‘miscegenation’ was never treated with any degree of normality in

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American literature’ (Russell 14). Harriet E. Wilson used the conventions of the

Sentimental novel for producing this unique form as well as the slave narrative.

Afro-American women published few novels in sixties. Poetry and drama

dominated the literature because of the immediacy of these forms and the connection that

literature should be as accessible as possible to black communities. The result of that

change in perception about audience was that Afro-American writers consciously began

to view their communities as the group to which they were writing. Black women’s lives

have been affected by the racist and sexist forces in American society. The sixties black

women writers have written their works as a political gesture to prove the individuality in

the society, and lately they have tried to go beyond the race and gender by asserting their

human identities and understanding their black selves. The black women writers are now

in a position of changing all the misconceptions. Claudia Tate in Psychoanalysis and

Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race says, ‘They cut through layers of

institutionalized racism and sexism; uncover a core of social contradictions and intimate

dilemmas which places all of us together regardless of our race or gender’ (xx-xvi).

In the novels written in the early seventies, it is not only that an individual heroine

accepts the sexist and racist definitions of herself, but the entire black community, men

and women, accept this construct resulting in the subjugation of many black women. Few

early Afro-American women’s novels focused on the role of black woman as mother,

because of the negative stereo type of the black woman as mammy that pervaded

American society. The 1970s was an important decade for Afro-American literature

because it was a time that saw the increase in production of prose writings by Afro-

American women writers who expressed themselves in the novel, the short story, and the

autobiography. This decade began with Toni Morison’s The Bluest Eye, Louise

Meriwether’s Daddy was a Numbers Runner, and Alice Walker’ The Third Life of

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Grange Copeland ended with Michele Wallace’s Black Macho and Myth of the

Superwoman (1979) and Mary Helen Washington’s edited work, Midnight Birds(1980).

These writings analyzed the role of black mother in the 1970s, especially Toni

Morrison’s Sula and Alice Walker’s Meridian. In 1970s, the Afro-American woman

writer found herself in a unique context where her Afro-American identity as well as her

motherhood could be turned into assets and sources of strength. This meant a qualitative

change in the psychological environment because they had been used to accessory role in

a male dominated society where the cultural perspective was heavily slanted in favour of

whites. Many writers suggested that women must struggle against the definitions of

gender. Jeanne Nobles, in Beautiful, Also, Are the Souls of My Black Sisters (1978),

argues that the black women writers of 1970, ‘by pass[ed] the popular theme of black

reactions to a racist society’ (Nobles 188). The language of the fictions of this era

therefore could be treated as a language of protest. Afro-American women writers vividly

depicted the victimization of their protagonists. Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Alice

Walker, and Toni Cade Bambara all exposed sexism and sexist violence in their own

communities. But it is not so much that they depicted an altered consciousness in their

protagonists; rather, it is that their attitudes towards their material, and the audience to

which they addressed their protest.

The novels of the early seventies emphasise that the white society must change,

and also debate that the black community's attitudes towards women must be revised.

Interestingly, in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye it is Claudia McJeer, while in Alice Walker’s

The Third Life of Grange Copeland it is the grandfather, Grange, who must kill his son,

the fruit of his initial self-hatred, in order to save his granddaughter Ruth. Both Claudia

and Ruth possess the possibility of constructing their own self definitions and affecting

the direction of their communities, because they have witnessed the destruction of

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women in the wake of prevailing attitudes. Walker in this novel highlights the problems

of black women in their day to day life. They are led to self discovery and self knowledge

and attain regeneration.

By the mid-1970s, the fiction makes a visionary leap. In novels like Morrison’s

Sula and Alice Walker’s Meridian, the woman is not thrust outside her community. Toni

Morrison is the famous black African American writer who helped promote Black

literature and authors when she worked as an editor for Random House in the 1960s and

‘70s, where she edited books written by Toni Cade Bambara and Gayl Jones. In the 20th

century, Morrison emerged as one of the most important African-American writers. Her

first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. Among her most famous novels

Beloved was the one novel which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. This story describes a

slave who finds freedom and kills her infant daughter for saving her life from the life of

slavery. Another important novel is Song of Solomon, a tale about materialism,

unrequited love, and brotherhood.

Morrison is the first African American writer who has won the Nobel Prize for

Literature. Toni Morrison in her writing spoke about the background of a black

community in a small town Lorain, Ohio. This background is reflected in her three

novels, The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1974), and Song of Solomon (1977). Morrison was a

teacher at Howard University and she became an editor in a major publishing house and

conducted her own creative writing while working on other authors. Morrison's mastery

over language and the startling traits both physical and psychological give her fiction a

model which makes it unique in American fiction. Her work had a sense of folklore and

myth which owes something to Latin American writers. Within the context of American

fiction, as defined by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Morrison's work considered to belong to the

tradition of romance. Toni Morrison's novels have moved from the rebellious-woman

18
stance of the mid-seventies and the focus is on men as much as women. She tries to

figure out the possibilities of healing and community for her women characters. Morrison

in The Bluest Eye (1970) depicts the relationship between western standards of female

beauty and the psychological oppression of black women. Pilate in Song of Solomon

derives her accumulated wisdom from her father and primarily benefits Milkman, her

nephew, in comparable to any other woman in the novel. To one degree or another, she

chooses to stand outside of it, to define herself as in revolt against it.

As a radical, Sula exists primarily as and for herself not to be a mother or to be

the lover of men. Meridian takes a revolutionary stance by joining a social movement, the

Civil Rights Movement. She gradually creates a community of support. It is important

that both of these women claim their heritage. Sula and Meridian are who they are

because of their maternal ancestry and their knowledge of that ancestry; and it is from

their mothers that they acquire their language. The novel, Sula was nominated for a

National Book Award and Morrison called it a novel of good and evil. Morrison in

Behind the Making of the Black Book hopes that this novel will enable African Americans

to, ‘Recognize and rescue those qualities of resistance, excellence and integrity that were

so much a part of our past and so useful to us and to the generations of blacks now

grouping up’ (Morrison 86-90). Morrison thinks that the Africans must be united to for

their survival and she passes the message that the Africans are one, so they should look at

themselves as one people, and she stresses that only the collective struggle can stop

oppression. Morrison says: ‘I simply wanted to write literature that was irrevocably, in

disputably Black, not because its characters were or because I was, but because it took as

its creative task and sought as its credentials those recognized and verifiable principles of

Black art’ (Taylor 34-35).

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 The heroines of the mid 1970s are socio political actors in the world. Their stance

is rebellious; their consciousness has been changed precisely because of the supposed

crimes they are perceived as having committed against Motherhood. Yet they are

wounded heroines and their communities are deeply entrenched in their view of woman

as essentially a mother or as the lover of a man. By the mid-seventies, Afro-American

women fiction writers like Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Toni Cade

Bambara, and Gayl Jones had not defined their cultural context as a distinctly Afro-

American one and they probed many facets of the interrelationship of sexism and racism

in their society. Not only had they demonstrated the fact that sexism existed in black

communities, but they had also challenged the prevailing definition of woman in

American society, especially in relation to motherhood and sexuality. And they had

insisted not only on black women to Afro-American history as central, but also on their

radical significance to present day social and political developments in America.

Although these recent writers have preserved the revisionist mission that inspired that

ideal, they have liberated their own characters in an enterprise to uplift the race. The

result is not only greater complexity possible for their heroines, but also greater

complexity and artistic possibility for themselves as writers. Alice Walker is a good

example in this matter.

The novels of the late seventies and the eighties continue to explore these themes

that sexism which is connected to racism must be fought against. The fiction of this

period Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1978) and Tar Baby (1980), Gloria Naylor’s The

Women of Brewster Place (1980), Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters (1980), Alice

Walker's You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down (1981) and The Color Purple (1982),

Joyce Carol Thomas’s Marked by Fire (1982), Ntozake Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress

and Indigo (1982), Audre Lorde’s Zami (1982), and Paule Marshall’s Praisesonq for the

20
Widow (1983) look at ways in which the interrelationship of sexism and racism has

affection on the quality of black women’s lives.

Walker’s Celie (The Color Purple) comes close to liberating herself with the help

of the community of her black sisters, Nettie, Sophie, and Shug, and is able to have

positive affection on the men of her world. In contrast to the novels of the early seventies,

with the presence of a strong woman’s community, the major protagonists do survive

from oppression and with the possibility of wholeness. Alice Walker reminds us in The

Color Purple, one-third of which is set in Africa, that ‘black women have been the mule

of the world there, and the mule of the world here’ (273). While Morrison sees no

practical way out of the marsh of sexism, racism, and class privilege in the Western

world, Alice Walker sees the possibility of empowerment for black women and says that

women should create a community of sisters which can change the present day unnatural

definitions of woman and man.

A notable writer of the renaissance is novelist Zora Neale Hurston, author of the

classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Though Walker wrote 14 books that

ranged from anthropology to short stories to novel-length fiction, her writings fell into

obscurity for decades. Her work was rediscovered in the 1970s through a 1975 article by

Walker, “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston”, published in Ms. Magazine. Walker found in

Hurston a role model for all female African-American writers. Despite the varying

ideological persuasions of its authors, recent criticism of zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes

Were Watching God has almost been unanimous in its assumption that Jania Crawford

attains a powerful and independent cultural voice as a result of her experiences. For in

this work Hurston portrays the development of Janie Stark as a black woman who

achieves self implement and understanding. It is interesting to note, however, that

Hurston was obviously aware that the literature of that time focused on the black

21
woman’s drive towards economic stability and “feminine” ideals. She constructs the

novel so that Janie moves through three different stages that embody different views of

black women. In her relationship with her first husband, Logan Killicks, Janie is treated

like a mule; she is rescued from that state with her marriage with Jody Starks, who loves

her and wants her to become a lady, “The Queen of the Porch.” But Hurston critiques the

achievement of economic stability through feminine submission in marriage as the

desirable goal for the black woman. She portrays the disastrous consequences of this goal

on Janie that she becomes, in this situation, a piece of desirable property, cut off from her

community and languishing in the repression of her natural desire to be herself and to

know the others . Though Janie’s relationship with Tea Cake is not ideal, Hurston does

present us with a vision of possibility in terms of some parity in a relationship between a

woman and a man, not by gaining material or ownership of property but by their desire to

know one another.

It is significant that Hurston characterizes this relationship as play, pleasure,

sensuality, which is for her the essential nature of nature itself, as symbolized by the

image of the pear tree that leaks the novel. It is also critical to an appreciation of

Hurston’s radical effect on the tradition of Afro-American women’s fiction that the

language of her novel is so different from the language of the “conventional” novel of the

times. In It Rooted in black English, Hurston uses metaphors that derived from nature’s

play to emphasize the connection between the natural world and the possibilities of a

harmonious social order. And in keeping with her choice of language, she structures her

novel as a circle, in which with the returning Janie explores her own development by

telling her story to Pheoby, whose name means “the moon”, and who is her best friend

and the symbolic representative of the community. Justine Tally points out that:

22
 African American Women Writers are located at the core of our

discussion in the relationship of history to fiction since, historically, they

have been denied the entrance in to historical and literary discourse by

both race and sex. Black Women Writers of the 1980s and 1990s strongly

claim the authority to control discourse, achieve power and rewrite (re-

right) history. (357-8)

Afro-American women have written of themselves as women under special

conditions of colonization. Black women writers not only make it possible to understand

how a convergence of racism, sexism, and class antagonism marks the Third World

woman’s peculiar position in discourse, but also their works as the truth value of any

unitary or dualistic apprehension of the world. Thematically and stylistically, the tone of

the fiction of the eighties communicates the sense that women of Colour can no longer be

perceived as marginal to the empowerment of all American women and that an

understanding of their reality and imagination is essential in the process of changing the

entire society that must undergo transformation in itself.

Walker was born on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia, the eighth child of

Willie Lee and Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker, who were sharecroppers. Walker was

blessed with a mother who had never read a book of herself, but appreciated her youngest

daughter’s housework. Minnie Lou Walker knew the value of her children’s education as

she wasn’t educated. One of Walker’s sisters turned out to be what Walker calls in

O’Brien interview ‘one of those Negro wonders-who collected scholarships like trading

stamps and wandered all over the world‘ (O’Brien 185-211).

Walker remembers from her childhood that she was different from other children

as she used to spend more time on reading. While she was of eight years age, one of her

brothers shot her in the right eye with a BB gun and she has been blind in that eye ever

23
since: ‘Walker came to see this wound as a “patriarchal wound” convinced that her

brother intended to shoot at her, ….drawing a parallel to other injuries, physical and

psychological, inflicted on women because of their gender’ (Smith 55).

The oldest college for black women in country was Spelman, devoted to its

educational programme to refining the students according to traditional standards of

Southern Womanhood. During the years 1961-1963, when Walker attended Spelman,

Civil rights organizers movement she was drawn towards the political activism along

with some of the her students that contrasted sharply with the college's conservative

mission. Immediately, Walker got transferred to Sarah Lawrence, an elite, mostly white

women's college in Bronxville, New York. The summer before her senior year, she

visited Kenya and Uganda on an educational grant. She returned to college as pregnant

woman and was suicidal. Her mother looked upon abortion as a sin. When Walker went

out to her two sisters, one never replied and the other called her a slut. Feeling at the

mercy of everything, including her own body, she slept for three nights with a razor blade

under her pillow. At the last moment one of her friends saved her life by giving her the

phone number of an abortionist. This confrontation with suicide and abortion together

with the isolation which she experienced after her childhood eye injury profoundly

influenced Walker. Emerging from her despair, Walker wrote poems steadily for a week,

slipping each finished poem under the door of the poet Muriel Rukeyser, then writer in

residence at Sarah Lawrence. With Rukeyser's help, the poems were later published as

Walker's first book, once, in 1968 making a successful debut as a poet. The volume went

almost into a second printing and Walker said on her publishing:

By the time Once was published . . . the book itself did not seem to me

important; only the writing of the poems, which clarified for me how very

much I loved being alive. . . . Since that time, it seems to me that all of

24
 my poems – and I wrote groups of poems rather than singles are written

when I have successfully pulled myself out of a completely numbing

despair, and stand again in the sunlight. Writing poems is my way of

celebrating with the world that I have not committed suicide the evening

before. (MG 249)

After graduating in 1965, Walker briefly worked for the New York City Welfare

Department. She had resolved to become a writer. Her first publication was an essay

about the civil rights movement which won The American Scholar's essay contest in

1966. Walker wrote the creative legacy, an essay of “In Search of My Mother’s Garden”,

a collection of essays, articles and the “Womanist” prose about race, gender, class,

reviews and speeches which she wrote between 1966 and 1982. The title celebrates those

black women throughout the generations who kept alive in spite of the racism and sexism

that often denied them the means of expressing their art. Walker writes about mothers

and grandmothers who were bleeding with madness by springs of creativity in them for

which there was no release.

Walker’s writings which include novels, stories, essays, poems focus on the

struggle of African Americans, particularly women who faced racism, sexism, and

violence. Walker’s writing depicts the role of women of colour in history and she is

sympathetic of people of all sexualities, ethnicities, and races. She says:

In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be

contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful. It’s so clear that

you have to cherish everyone. I think that’s what I get from these older

black women that every soul is to be cherished, that every flower is to

bloom. (Christian 42)

25
Walker attended the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference in Vermont in summer, and in 1967

she received both a Merrill Writing Fellowship and a McDowell Colony Fellowship. She

married Melvyn Leventhal, who was a civil rights attorney and conscientious objector to

the Vietnam War in March 1967, and then they moved to Mississippi. Walker worked on

voter registration drives. She started to teach black history to Head Start teachers, and

served as writer in residence at Jackson State College (1968-1969) and Tougaloo College

(1969-70). A National Endowment for the Arts Grant in 1969 supported her work on her

first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970) into which she incorporated some

aspects of her own family's history as sharecroppers. She finished The Third Life of

Grange Copeland, days before her daughter Rebecca Grant Rosenthal was born.

The Third Life of Grange Copeland, a three generational account of the Copeland

family, begins in rural Georgia in the 1920’s and ends during the early stages of the Civil

Rights movement in the early 1960’s. Grange who is the protagonist of the novel, a poor

sharecropper is virtually a slave in cotton era Baker County, the more he works, the more

money he ends up owing to the man who owns the fields he works and the house he lives

in. Eventually life becomes too much for him and he decides to leave the family and runs

away from his debts to start a new life up in North. After declining a loan from a white

landowner which he knows he can’t pay back, Brownfield begins to head North on foot

to follow in his father's footsteps. Brownfield goes to a woman named Josie who owns

and operates a lounge/brothel called the Dew Drop Inn. Brownfield winds up sharing a

bed with Josie, her daughter Lorene, and Josie’s deceased sister’s daughter Mem.

Brownfield begins to like Mem and eventually marries her. Brownfield beats and

eventually kills Mem and is jailed for an arbitrary seven years. Finally Grange returns to

Baker County, which is the only place he knows of as home. The novel records the

influence of racism and poverty on one family by emphasizing what it does to individuals

26
and by showing what individuals must do to keep alive kinship, the strongest weapon that

black people have to fight against injustice. Walker uses a Southern womanist form, as a

model for her first novel. Only when Grange learns to love himself and his granddaughter

Ruth is the destructive pattern changed. In the end, Grange proves the ‘some men, in

order to live, can't be innocent’ (TLG 206). Grange is the personification of selfless love

and affection in the affection of economic struggle. Grange must contend with the

restrictiveness of economic order, of capitalism on their lives. Grange’s love for his

granddaughter Ruth made his decision to kill his son an essential act. He does not want to

lead her to a life of pain. Walker in this book explores the intersection of racism and

sexism in the oppression of African American families depicting black men who vent

their anger on their own women. So she writes; ‘I do not intend to romanticize the

southern Black Country life. I can recall that I hated it generally-the hard work in the

fields, the shabby houses, the evil, greedy men who worked my father to death and

almost broke the courage of that strong woman, my mother’ (79).

After the publication of her novel, Walker left the South with a Radcliffe Institute

fellowship to teach courses on black women writers among the earliest such courses at

the University of Massachusetts at Boston (1971-1972), and Wellesley College (1972-

1973). Her second collection of poems, Revolutionary Petunias (1973) received a

National Book Award nomination and won the Lillian Smith Award of the Southern

Regional Council. The following year her first collection of short stories In Love and

Trouble (1973) received the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy

of Arts and Letters. Both volumes draw on Walker's years with the civil rights

movement, taking a critical view of sexism within the conventional black communities

and the revolutionary groups, as well as of revolutionaries contempt for people whose

acts of resistance or strivings for fulfillment are theoretically incorrect. In 1974, Walker

27
wrote a tribute to the poet Langston Hughes and she wrote a biography for children.

Walker moved to Brooklyn, New York, in 1974, and became a contributing editor.

In her second novel, Meridian (1976), she continued to weave the themes of

revolution, sexism, and the traditions of black communities using autobiographical

material, particularly in portraying a Southern black women's college and the civil rights

movement's transformation into the militant Black Power movement, and the role of artist

in time of revolution. Walker depicts Meridian’s struggle for personal transformation in

the political movement of the 1960s. As Karen Steins writes:

. . . the novel points out that the Civil Rights Movement often reflected

the oppressiveness of patriarchal capitalism. Activists merely turned

political rhetoric to their own ends while continuing to repress

spontaneous individuality. To overcome this destructiveness, Walker

reaches for a new definition of revolution. Her hope for a new society

inheres political change, as well as personal transformation. (Steins 66)

Told in patch worked episodes that double back in time, Meridian is the story of a

woman who leaves her home in the rural South for joining the civil rights movement and

entering into the college. Meridian’s guilt in rejecting the traditional values of

motherhood and her ambivalence about revolutionary violence once the movement turns

into militant movement gives her an almost mystical physical illness and a saintly

dedication in advancing towards her people. She comes to the realization after suffering

debilitating guilt for having failed in the other roles imposed on her. Meridian is depicted

as a woman in the process of changing her mind. She carries out spontaneous non-violent

organizing efforts in a small community and virtually alone. Her eccentricity serves as a

critique of the elitism, sexism, and militancy of the Black Power movement long after it

has lost its strength, and she offers hope and the novel shows that the nonviolent change

28
is still possible. Barbara Christian in Everyday Use writes that the main struggle in

Meridian is the fight between a natural life driven by spirit and society’s deadly strictures

while:

. . . the concept of one life motivates meridian in her quest toward physical

and spiritual health, the societal evils that subordinate one class to another

one race to another, one sex to another, fragment and ultimately threaten

life. The novel Meridian . . . is built on the tension between the African

concept of animism, the spirit that inhabits all life: and the societal forces

that inhabit growth of the living toward their natural state of freedom.

(Walker 135)

She and Leventhal got divorced in 1977. A second McDowell Colony Fellowship

and Guggenheim Grant supported her literary work from 1977 to 1978. New York was an

unsuitably urban to work on her next novel, which was to be set in the rural Georgia of

her childhood and she moved to northern California in 1979. Before completing this

novel, she published her edition of Zora Neale Hurston’s writings (1979); In Search of

Mother’s Gardens was an important first collection of ‘womanist’ essays which got

published in 1983. Traditional figure of a black mother in literature appears a figure of

towering strength. In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel whom Walker considers her literary

foremother, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), an old grandmother, a former slave

bought and sold like a bag of rice and forced to raise granddaughter in the white folk's

back yard, accurately describes her position as woman in this society: ‘De nigger woman

is de mule uh de world so far as Ah can see’ (Hurston 37).

Her third book of poems contained Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the

Morning (1979), Hourses Make a Lanscape Look More Beautiful (1984) and Her Blue

Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems (1965-1990). In the novel, In I’ll See You in

29
the Morning, Walker says: ‘We are not white. We are not European. We are black, like

the Africans themselves…We and the Africans will be working for common goal; the

uplift of black people everywhere’ (45). Her second collection of stories, You Can't Keep

a Good Woman Down (1981) repeats the theme of healing oneself of past guilt to face the

future with courage. Like Revolutionary Petunias, Good Night, Willie Lee, I Will See You

in the Morning is about the vital connection between love and lasting change, though the

emphasis is on the altering of love relationships between women and men as the

foundation for a radical and irreversible transformation in society and affecting on the

people. You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down clearly signals black female celebration

rather than predicament, and marks a transition in Walker's broadening vision for the

potential lives of her black heroines. Although You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down is

clearly different in subject matter in comparison to Walker’s previous works.

The Color Purple (1982), Walker’s third novel got nominated for a National Book

Critics Circle Award when it was published, and the following year she received both the

Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award. Walker was named distinguished writer in

Afro-American studies at the University of California in the spring of 1982 and in the fall

taught at Brandies University as the Fannie Hurst Professor of Literature. The Color

Purple is a woman’s story about pain, suffering, endurance, and friendship, a story of

hardship and hope, of reunion and reconciliation. In this book, Walker depicts how the

black women have been oppressed due to their relationship with black men and only the

sisterhood that can make the black women free and empowered. Bernard Bell in his book,

The Heart of a Woman comments:

The Color Purple is more concerned with politics of sex and self than with

the politics of class and race…its unrelenting, and severe attacks on male

hegemony, especially the violent abuse of black women by black men, is

30
 offered as a revolutionary leap forward into a new social areder based on

sexual egalitarianism. (69)

The novel is the story of Celie, a barely educated lady, who is raped by her stepfather and

then married off to Mr._, who needs a good worker to look after his children. Her

stepfather told her that she had better tell no one but God about the rape. Celie starts

writing letters to God. After her children are taken away by her stepfather, her sister

Nettie is forced to leave leaving Celie wholly alone. However, she slowly develops an

extended family that includes Shug, her husband’s mistress and Sofia, who marries

Celie’s stepson. The love that Celie and Shug come to share not only awakens Celie’s

sexuality but also allows to express her freedom, and to say what she thinks and helps her

in regaining her identity. She develops into an independent woman with a sense of self

and a creative talent that she eventually expands into a business making the most

comfortable pants available. Eventually, with the help of Shug, Celie finds the letters that

Nettie has been writing her for years and that Mr._has been hiding. Reading the letters,

Celie finds out the truth about her family and her children. She gets disturbed by the fact

that God had allowed such things. Then she stops writing to God and starts writing to

Nettie. She explains to Shug, ‘he gave me a lynched daddy, a crazy mama, a lowdown

dog of a step pa and a sister I probably won’t ever see again. Anyhow, I say, the God I

been praying and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other men I know. Trifling,

forgetful and lowdown’ (CP 89). The novel ends with happiness and reconciliation.

Walker emphasizes the universal oppression of black women in The Color Purple.

Bernard Bell in The Afro-American Novel and It’s Traditions points out that The Color

Purple is:

more concerned with politics of sex and self than with politics of class

and race…it’s unrelenting, sever attacks on male hegemony, especially

31
 the violent abuse of black women by black men, is offered as a

revolutionary leap forward in to anew social order based on sexual

egalitarianism. (263)

Throughout 1980's, Walker travelled extensively. She spent her time lecturing and

reading her works at Universities and conferences and joining delegations of writers, of

other countries. She also appeared and spoke at public gatherings, at places where Nelson

and Winnie Mandela's visited San Francisco in 1990. Walker wrote her fourth book of

poems, Horses Make a Landscape More Beautiful (1984), and second volume of essays,

Living by the Word (1988), which reflect the extension of her political commitments to

the environment, animal rights, and anti-nuclear protests; the stretching of herself

definitions as an African American to make interracial and international connections; and

sounds and smells of her rural home near Navano, California. Her fourth novel, The

Temple of My Familiar (1989), reaches far corners of the earth and weaves together the

voices of characters of different cultures, economic classes, and times and between

different species or creations. The novel focuses on the three couples. The Temple of My

Familiar (198) continues the expansion of scope in her novels to include all people. In

this “romance,” we find American, Caribbean, south American, and African people,

many of people who have ancestors of white, black, Native American, or Asian. Also,

Walker deals here not only with working class people but also with college professors,

the middle class, and artists. Primarily the novel tells the story of two marriages.

Walker’s belief in this novel is the necessity of seeing the world, and its entire people as a

whole. We can see in the novel certain dimension of androgyny in these ancestors’

selves, as gender duality integrates in the wholeness of the cosmos and the nature. As

Dieke points out, ‘for Alice Walker creative intelligence is an instrument for prompting

32
the acceptance of nature as ultimately spiritual, and existing independently of any

subjects’ (510).

The Temple of My familiar extends to the revision of the history of people of color

not only in the United States but also in South America and Africa prior to colonization.

Walker places a feminine ancestral figure, the goddess archetype, at the center of the

skeleton of her text which has lived through all those half million years. Lissie Lyles, the

ancestor, will tell us the stories of her previous lives, since she has been transfigured

many times either as a human or as an animal. The recollection of all memories from her

previous, the multiple storytelling structure to which the text turns will arouse the reader's

consciousness about themes and issues that have been traditionally left out from

historiography, since historical discourse has been at the service of supremacist, colonial,

patriarchal ideologies. Walker, with the help of the dream of the memory, since the

memory, as the mind, has the capacity to dream takes us back to the origins of culture

and civilization in an attempt to explain the wounds that modern societies inflict on

people of colour all around the world.

Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) is the latest novel of Alice Walker which is

about the life of a barely glimpsed character from these works. Combining fact and

fiction, communing with the spirits of the living and the dead, Alice Walker in this novel

strikes with graceful power at the heart of one of the most controversial issues of our

time, the female genital mutilation. Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) follows the story

of Tashi, an African woman of the fictional Olinka tribe where she undergoes female

circumcision (female genital mutilation, or FGM*), and examines the reasons for her

decision and the consequences that are followed by it. The central theme of the book is

the cause and effects of FGM as a cultural practice in the novel, and this is horrifying. It

shows you how and why the practice is allowed to continue, how women can allow their

33
daughters to be mutilated, how women can mutilate the daughters who are brought to

them and how and why men’s actions ensure that it continues to happen. It shows the

physical consequences of FGM, the risks and dangers of the mutilation itself as well as

the permanent damage on the people, that it does even while being “successful”. It shows

the way that women are emotionally deadened, locking up a weeping child inside their

hearts, because it is the only way of their survival. As a personal account of one woman’s

story, Possessing the Secret of Joy is heartbreaking. Tashi herself is not “bathed” at the

proper time (as a baby or in early girlhood) but chooses to undergo FGM as an adult

woman.

The physical and emotional consequences for her personally, and the pain of

her earlier experiences when her older sister had bled to death following FGM, reach

out across her whole life. Damaged physically and in her soul, the rest of her life is a

struggle to come to terms with and she doesn’t even heal, even to acknowledge, what

she has done. In the end, she triumphs but, of course, that cannot mean that she lives

happily ever after. The most important aspect of this novel is to expose the myth of

choice. Tashi chooses to undergo FGM. But in reality, she doesn’t have any choice.

She does it to fit in, to stop the offending of other women, to become a proper woman

herself, to honour the traditions of her people and the culture of them, to mark herself

out as distinctly Olinka, to give herself the chance of becoming a wife. She believes

that it will improve her lot in her life. She does not know what far reaching, terrible

consequences FGM will have for her health and wellbeing. It does not occur to her that

she can lead a life without marriage. She does not realise that she has been lucky to

escape of FGM in her youth. The novel speaks of regret over Tashi’s choice. There can

be no regret, because in reality there was no choice and everything was inevitable, all

was arranged and she herself had little to do anything to it. The story and the characters

34
are powerfully drawn. The shifting viewpoint and the flashback/flash forward method

of storytelling are appropriate, and well managed. But, there is a sense in which the

political purpose of the book to make FGM come alive and show its full horror in over

the story. Alice Walker lives in San Francisco now and continues to observe and listen

to black women wherever they are. The novel deals with a story of pain, discovery of

secret of life and happiness. In Possessing the Secret of Joy Walker says:

Many African women have come here as enslaved women. They were

sold into bondage, circumcised and infibulated. It was those sewed up

women who fascinated the American doctors who flocked to the slave

auctions to examine them, as the women stood naked and defenceless on

the block. They learned to do this ‘producer’ on other enslaved women;

they did this in the name of Science . . . They found a use for it on white

women. . . .They wrote in their medical journals that they’d finally found

a cure for the white woman’s hysteria. (13)

The term “womanism” was first used by Walker in her book In Search of Our

Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983). When Walker, in her book In Search of Our

Mother’s Gardens, draws the beautiful comparison that “Womanist is to feminist as

purple is to lavender” (1984), she could not have better expressed the close relation that

exists between these two words, Feminism and Womanism. According to Walker, a

womanist is ‘A black feminist or feminist of color. . . [with] outrageous, audacious,

courageous or wilful behaviour. A woman who loves other women, sexually and/or

nonsexually’ (297).

In reality, Walker’s women in purple build a wall of camaraderie around

themselves. They share in each other’s pain, sorrow, laughter and dreams, and come to

each other’s rescue. They are sisters in body as well as in spirit and the sprit cannot be

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broken. They find God in themselves and “they loved her fiercely”. The women in Alice

Walker’s fiction do not understand the complexity of their problem because their limited

worlds cannot help them and they are forced to do everything haphazardly. The

distinctive feature of these women is the massive quality with which they carry their

suffering. Some are generous and proud. Some are forgiving even to the men who

mistreat them very badly. Some are trusting and patient. The new women overcome

impassable odds to change their condition. They are all resilient to a point. All of these

qualities contribute to the success of Walker’s literary style and effect. Gallery of women

in Alice Walker’s work is the living example of man’s inhumanity to women. The focus

of our attention will be Alice Walker’s Womanism. Alice Walker in an interview with

John O’Brien said: ‘I am preoccupied with the spiritual survival , the survival of whole of

my people. But beyond that. I am committed to exploring the oppression, the insanities ,

the loyalties, and the triumphs of black women’ (O’Brien 192) .

The expression Womanism has its origins in a unique American women’s cultural

and socio-political stance. Walker regarded this concept as description of black American

women’s ethos in contrast to Feminism and Womanism is a predominantly white middle-

class woman’s perspective. Jacquelyn Grant says: ‘Black feminism grows out of Black

women’s tridimensional reality of race/sex/class. To speak of black women’s

tridimensional reality, therefore, is not to speak of Black women exclusively, for there is

an implied universality, which connects them with others’ (Grant 86).

However, there is at least one important difference between them, i.e. giving

Womanism an additional dimension and taking it one step further than (conventional)

Feminism: colour to Walker, “womanist” is more stronger i n comparison to

“feminist,” as if purple is m o r e darker than lavender . In respect of Walker’s choice

of word, “womanist” and “womanism,” instead of “feminist” and “feminism,” will

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be d i s c u s s e d i n The Color Purple which demonstrates black women’s hardships,

oppression of black women, humiliations and maltreatment not only in the Southern

United States, but also Africa, their motherland. Although the term, “Womanism”

was in use from the 19th Century, Walker was the first to use the term to describe “Black

feminist or feminist of colour”. (Collins)

Womanism defines different things, which makes it difficult to understand

what Walker is saying. John K. Roth, in American Diversity, American Identity,

points out that Walker’s straightforward presentation of the black life in the Old rural

South is objected to by chiefly black male critics who see growing “feminism,” in Alice

Walker’s work which Walker names “Womanism,” as at odds with her commitment to

her own race. Walker is considered as a betrayer of her race by those critics and

reviewers because she portrays degenerated and scornful black male characters. This

is because what she presents appears to be reaffirming those old stereotypes of African

Americans and African society. Walker calls herself “womanist prose” and she insists her

reputation as a black feminist on theoretical grounds, coining the term “Womanism” for

referring to black feminism. An important aspect of womanism is the fundamental focus

on racial inequality.

Black Feminism is the indication that women of color have been oppressed by

sexism and racism, that there was a failure to recognize and address these issues in the

Feminist Movement and the Black Liberation Movement, and that women of color have

their own agenda that neither movement can take on this idea: ‘Black Feminism focuses

on the experiences, needs, and desires of women of color’ (Aldridge 191-203). In

establishing why Black Feminism is relevant, it must be established that women of colour

have been thrice victimized: by racism, sexism and economic exploitation. These three

oppressive forces affect women of color simultaneously and equally relentlessly and also

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effect on their lives: ‘The goal of Black Feminism is to create a criterion by which

women of color can assess their realities, both in thought and in action’ (Hudson-Weems

205-217).

To a writer such as Alice Walker, whose perceptions are shaped by her own

black womanhood and who can take us into the dark recesses of the soul, the Black

mother is the symbol of an individual profound, tragic, mysterious, scared and

Unfathomable source who is strong in many ways, but not in all ways. These women

struggle to survive. In Walker's fiction, the black woman qualifies neither as a super sex

object nor evil black bitch; instead, the reader sees females searching for their identity,

love and happiness. The sex and love lives of these poor, ugly, black women have seldom

been shown with any depth in fiction, Mary Helen Washington in “The Fiction Become

Our Reality-Black Women Image Makers” notes, ‘Most writers are men, and that

certainly explains why our women have usually been portrayed so poorly and in one

dimension’ (Washington 14).

Alice Walker's ideological position stresses on the rebellion and liberation of

people, drawing on her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, arguing that her

fiction must speak to the "Survival of the Race", or advancing her programme for a

“Womanist” ideology. Her work addresses specific social and political issues. The

feminist theory seemed to have played significant roles in moulding the lives of women

characters of Alice Walker. They gain their empowerment by feminist/womanist

consciousness during the process of their development. Walker coined the word

womanism which is a ‘call to reject white feminist definitions to female identity’ (Grant

66).

The primary contention of the study is to confire to the study of Race, Gender and

Identity in the select novels of Alice Walker. The thesis entitled “Race, Gender and

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Identity in the Novels of Alice Walker” traces the growth of black women characters and

factors contributing to their growth in the novels of Alice Walker. It profusely uses ideas

from Walker’s three novels to trace this growth. The thesis is divided into five chapters

and a humble attempt is made in the following chapters to study the way that Walker

tackled Race, Gender and Identity in her works to achieve the desired goals. The

following is the chapterization.

Chapter I: This chapter discusses briefly the history of African American

literature and gives information about the different women novelists, their backgrounds,

and the era in which they lived. This chapter deals with the short critical biography of

Alice Walker followed by a discussion of her achievement as a writer and about the

women in her fictions.

Chapter II: This chapter evokes the role of emancipation, gender and race in The

Color Purple and the role of Celie, the heroin in the novel. It deals with the works of

Walker and with the “breaking down” of the black woman stereotype. It deals with

Walker’s fiction that oscillates between her identity as “black feminist” or “woman of

color” and a generalized feminist position in which race is consciousness of her own.

Chapter III: This chapter deals with Walker’s novel, Meridian. It deals with

Civil Rights Movement and focuses on the character Meridian, the roles of race, gender

and identity in the time of Civil Rights Movement and examines the effect of that time on

the life of black women.

Chapter IV: This chapter deals with The Temple of My Familiar and the

elements of ethnic identity and Afro centric community. It discusses about Walker’s

belief in the necessity of seeing the world, and all its people as a whole.

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 Chapter V: The last chapter, Conclusion is an attempt to analyze the role of race,

gender and identity, civil rights and liberation of women in the context of African

American Women writers with special reference to Alice Walker.

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