Black Women in Alice Walker´s "The Color Purple"

Abstract

Alice Walker is an American novelist, poet, and activist whose literary production is popular because of her treatment of African-American culture. Her novels are mainly focused on women and the most popular of all them is “The Color Purple” (1982). It tells the story of a black young woman: how she grows up and lives in a town in Georgia. When “The Color Purple” was published in 1982, it was the subject of a great controversy due to the themes that are treated in this novel. It was published in a time when themes like sex, violence or homosexuality were banned or challenged. Apart from topics like the family, marriage, love, or religion, we can find in this literary work a very important issue, which is the basis of the novel, that is the oppression that African-American women suffered from African-American men. After establishing a contextualization of Alice’s Walker’s figure and her work in North American literature, we will be studying from the perspective of gender studies, how the female characters of Alice’s Walker’s story, and more specifically the protagonist, Celie, fight against all the adversities of life and gain the total freedom to be who they want to be. We will see the process by which women in this novel discover their sexual identity, how they find their feminity and their true selves, and also, the process that will take them out of their position of oppression, which will be achieved thanks to the mutual support among the women protagonists of the story