Literature Paper
In Equality, Dominant culture, Feminism,
Victimization in Alice Walker’ works
Paper ID
IJIFR/ V2/ E2/ 014
Page No
326-331
Subject Area
English
Alice Walker, Suppressive Life, Human Beings, Black American, Racism, Violent Society,
Womanist, Awful Predicament, Class Exploitation, Traditions And Practices Of Slavery
Key Words
Kumar. E
Dr. R. Mummatchi
Research Scholar,
Karpagam University, Coimbatore (TamilNadu)
Principal (Retd.),
Rathinam Arts And Science College, Coimbatore
Abstract
Alice Walker the feminist deals with the oppression of black women and men. Her quest is a
new identify for black women, a self – awareness which will make them self-dependent
socially, emotionally and spiritually. , victimization, Dominant customs and In Equality, civil
Rights Revolution – all these form the sum and substance of her work. The blacks in America
and the Dalit’s in India are the marginalised and exploited people, their marginality being
primary social and economic. We, hear their protest voices in their literatures. The black
American asks a pertinent question to Providence in his baritone. So, I finally speak
suppressive life of human beings of Alice walker works.
1
Introduction
Alice walker is the brightest star in a galaxy of black American women writers. As a fighter
against social injustice Alice walker is inspirational; as a black woman struggling with divorce,
motherhood and car boxes, she is engaging and emphatic. She is the author of the novels The Color
Purple, which won the Pultizer Prize in 1983, The Temple of My Familiar (1989) Meridian (1976),
Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), By the Light of My Father’s Smile (1998), The Third life of
Grange Copeland (1970), You can’t keep a Good Woman Down, In Love and Trouble. The Way
Forward is with a Broken Heart and now is the lime to open your heart. Her non-fiction, ‘In Search of
My Mother’s Garden’ is both a memory as well as a series of observations on African American
women’s culture. She is also the author of several collections of short stories, essays and poetry as
well as children’s books. Her books have been translated into more than two dozen languages. Born
in Eatonton Georgia, Alice walker now lives and teaches in San Francisco.
The first book to be published by a slave in America was An Evening Thought Salvation by
Christ with Penitential Cries by Jupiter Hammon. It was in the year 1760. Hammon was followed by
a delicate girl called Philis Wheatly who not only produced a fair amount of poetry, but also won the
attention of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson as well a number of prominent people in
England. Another slave who was employed in the home of president of the University of North
Carolina was George Moses Horton who composed poems and published them in 1829. His
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biography by Richard Walswer was published in the 1970s under the title The Black Poet. In 1845 an
anthology of Black poetry was published in Paris. This book was called Les Ceneles and contains
poems of those free men of colour who had migrated to France and had come under the influence of
Alexander Dumas who encouraged black arts like sculptor, music, painting and poetry in France.
2 Contemporary African – American Literature
Whit these brief historical facts, we shall come down to contemporary African – American
literature. We shall not dwell much upon the Harlem Renaissance, though an important cultural event
in the history of African – Americans let recall hurriedly the 1940s, and 50s when three great Black
writers made invaluable contribution to what at that time was called ‘Literature of the Blacks in
America’ and to the American literature in general. Native Son by Richard Wright, Invisible Man by
Ralph Ellison and Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin produced new vistas for mapping
racial prejudice through a genre which subverted all the accepted notions about the blacks in America.
The three novels not only offer a graphic account of the black life in America during those days but
also they are essentially interrelated thematically as well as in their narrative structures.
We all know that people from different nations in Europe had come to settle down in America
in the 16th century.
African – American literature today opposes several things in the literature of the white
Americans. ‘Negro’ now is no larger a marginal character and a protagonist who asserters his racial
identify. He opposes even the earlier image of himself as portrayed by the Harlem writers - a docile
self –conscious, submissive black man knocking at the door.
Though they practiced the same religious faith and had similar racial features and appearance,
they had brought with them the national identity and ethos which in each case in unique. In this
already existing heterogeneity was added the black race with the Negroid features. It was, as it seems
now, a mole on a beautiful bright face of raw Virgin land. Alice Walker’s The Color Purple is the
story of a woman who is constantly raped by her stepfather and unable to narrate her shameful
experiences to anyone, writes letters addressed to God. The liberation of black woman, asserts
Walker, is in the hands of a black woman herself. She depicts the two black women engaged in
lesbian acts through which Celie, the protagonist, attains enlightenment. Lesbianism neglects the
existence of man. It is not necessarily associated with sexual indulgence between women. It is an
emotional reliance on one’s own sex rather than on the opposite. But Alice Walker’s novel had
enraged black men in America, and what resulted is history.
Afro American Literature and Dalit Literature are produced the juggernaut of social, religious
and casteist oppression under which the Dalit’s of India and the blacks in Africa and some parts of
America eke out their too heavy a burden of life.
The causes and circumstances leading to the age-old existence of oppression and despair of
the lives of the marginalized class of nation’s vast majority of people can be enumerated thus: 1.The
self-down-gradation of these people since ages, suppressing even the slightest protest against injustice
that sought to find a voice. 2. The conditions of abject poverty, unhealthy and insanitary conditions in
which these people had been sheltered, but, they held a belief that they were accursed to live such
lives. 3. Even the minimum rights as human beings denied to them, rendering them incapable of
seeing the light of freedom and comfortable living, thanks to the age-old ideology taught to them by
the upper castes in India and the white race in other countries, that they were fated to be ewers of
wood and drawers of water-mere slaves! The portals of education were never opened for them to taste
the power of freedom.
Kumar. E, Dr. R. Mummatchi: In Equality, Dominant culture, Feminism, Victimization in Alice
Walker’ works
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Volume 2, Issue 2, October 2014
14th Edition, Page No: 326-331
Legislation and the process of reorientation of the social system have begun to yield results. But the
damage done over the years cannot be compensated overnight. The battle for rights has begun and the
new dawn of freedom and equality is appearing in the sky, though darkened by sporadic incidents of
oppression in some quarters still occurring.
Inequality is the main cause of marginality Inequality is a source of insecurity, injustice and
exploitation. Marginalised sections of society are generally beyond the pale of the dominant culture.
Their existence is, by and large, peripheral. All cultures and societies, advanced or disadvanced, have
power centres in their corpus.
The marginalised groups or sections are consciously or unconsciously distanced from the power
centres. They are scattered here and there and lack cohesiveness and strength. Deprived of economic,
political or religious power, as they are, they grope in the dark for survival. They live in physical or
psychological ghettos. The social organization in which they are imprisoned by custom and tradition
builds walls of segregation around them. However, they struggle for emancipation.
But the times are changing. Democracy all over the world has given all such marginal groups of
people an opportunity to share freedom with their compatriots. It has made them aware of their
human rights and civil liberties. They enjoy the right of franchise, which is a political weapon.
Education and freedom of expression give voice to the voiceless. The death of colonialism has given
birth to political awareness and freedom creating thereby aspirations in the minds of the people for
attaining equal status and dignity. However, there are sections of people who are deprived of equal
opportunity, equal social status and equal individual dignity. Naturally, they express their concerns,
anxieties and anguishes in their writing. ‘Who are we?’ ‘What is our future?’ ‘What is our status?’ etc.
Questions like these haunt their minds. They have a quest for their identity. Yes, identity is their
problem. Dreams they have and nightmares they confront. They explore their past and struggle for
their future. They excavate their long past to trace the fossils of their forefather’s existence and also
forge their future. Their literature is indeed a creative excavation for their heritage.
3 The Marginalised And Exploited People
The blacks in America and the dalits in India are the marginalised and exploited people, their
marginality being primary social and economic. We, hear their protest voices in their literatures. The
black American asks a pertinent question to Providence in his baritone.
Freedom without bread is meaningless. The blacks felt that slavery with bread was better than
freedom without bread. But it was also true that bread with slavery is poisoned bread. The option
before them was obvious and clear. They chose freedom because it gave them strength to struggle.
“All men were created equal”. This was the corner-stone of the American Constitution. Here ‘all
men’ did not include ‘black men’. That was the unfortunate reality. Or surrealist? The American
blacks have fought long legal battles in American courts to affirm their rights.
America always cherished the dream of liberty, equality and happiness. These are the
irreducible and inalienable rights of the citizens of the U.S.A. They are guaranteed by the
Constitution. But often they were violated. The American Dream remained illusive. American
blacks also preserved that dream under their heavy swollen eyelids and held it tightly between their
thick bleeding lips. But it was snatched from them time and again. This racial dilemma remained
unresolved. The black American was caught between the American Dream and the American
Dilemma. What it means to be an American Negro is a perplexing problem entangling him into a
predicament. Black literature is concerned with this situation. Women here and elsewhere do not
enjoy equal status and individual dignity in the male-dominated world. That makes them marginal
socially, politically, sexually and culturally. Their sexual exploitation ultimately leads to social,
Kumar. E, Dr. R. Mummatchi: In Equality, Dominant culture, Feminism, Victimization in Alice
Walker’ works
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ISSN (Online): 2347-1697
International Journal of Informative & Futuristic Research (IJIFR)
Volume 2, Issue 2, October 2014
14th Edition, Page No: 326-331
political and economic exploitation. Women who belong to the weaker sections of society such as
Dalits, Adivasi’s etc. face double exploitation, double inequality and double injustice. Theirs is a
double jeopardy. They face degradation and even dehumanisation. Gender is at the base of their
marginality. They face domestic violence too. Husbands and wives are unequal partners in family
life. One of the best creations of man is the relations or relationship: mother, father, sister, son,
daughter, husband, wife and in-laws. This gives some protection to women Otherwise; women would
have been victims of male lust. And yet they suffer a lot at the hands of men. They move under the
dark phallic shadow of man’s lust. Feminism deals with all these problems. We often talk about
women’s empowerment. Their empowerment can be achieved only through education, employment
and equality.
4 The Possibility Of Change And Progression
Her early poems, novel and short stories deal with themes familiar to readers: rape, violence,
isolation, troubled relationships, multi-generational perspectives sexism and racism. Alice Walker’s
works typically focus on the struggles of African Americans particular women and their struggle
against a racist, sexist and violent society. Her works deal not only with the problems of black
women, but also with the possibility of change and progression, even though it is a slow process. The
history of black women in the United States began with the forced migration of millions of African
women from the interiors of the west coast of Africa. They were transported as human cargo across
the Atlantic Ocean to plantations in the West Indies. The enslaved Africans were then sold to
European colonies. The story of female slavery of Black Women and their evolution is in some way
similar to the story of phoenix. They story of female slavery of Black. Women and their evolution is
in some way similar to the story of phoenix. They faced misery and suffering and yet were successful
In redefining themselves. The African American women as a group proved resilient enough to
triumph against the trauma.
During the sixties there was a perceptible change in the attitude of writers on account of the
cultural renaissance. For a long time, many blacks deliberately attempted to forget their painful past
or leave it to the deliberations of the white writers. But, after the cultural upheaval African –
American literary traditions took a new direction. Writers started making conscious attempts to go to
the roots and re-link the present with the past. This radical change in the attitude of the writers in the
late sixties manifested especially in the works of Alice Walker.
Alice Walker prefers to call herself a ‘womanist’ because ‘womanism’, in her opinion,
expresses women’s concerns better than ‘feminism’. It appreciates “women’s culture, women’s
emotional flexibility and women’s strength”. (In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, xi.) As a
womanist she is certainly concerned with the liberation of all woman kinds from the psychology of
oppression. But as an African-American woman writer she is more “committed to exploring the
oppressions, the insanities, the loyalties, and the triumphs of black women. (John O’ Brien, Interviews
with Black Writers, 192). This is made clear when, in an interview with John-O’ Brien, she
unequivocally expresses. “I am preoccupied with the spiritual survival, the survival of whole of my
people. But beyond that, I am committed to exploring the oppressions, the insanities, the loyalties and
the triumphs of black women” (Ibid).
As sources of oppression of blacks, racism and sexism are allied and have a parallel existence. They
are mutually interdependent and hence they arise from the same set of circumstances. Gloria Wade
explains this interesting phenomenon through the imagery of circles.
“There are three major circles of reality in American society, which reflect degrees of power
and powerlessness. There is a large circle in which white people, most of them men, experience
Kumar. E, Dr. R. Mummatchi: In Equality, Dominant culture, Feminism, Victimization in Alice
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ISSN (Online): 2347-1697
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Volume 2, Issue 2, October 2014
14th Edition, Page No: 326-331
influence and power. Far away from it there is a smaller circle, a narrow space, in which black
people, regardless of sex, experience uncertainty, exploitation and powerlessness. Hidden in this
second circle is a third, a small, dark enclosure in which black women experience pain, isolation, and
vulnerability. These are the distinguishing marks of black womanhood in white America. (No
Crystal Stair: Visions of Race and sex in Black woman’s Fiction,” 3-4)
Thus began the oppressive story of racism in America. It brought with it pain, sorrow, bloodshed,
death and, above all, the negation of an entire race. The African-American race was ghettoized,
persecuted and viciously outlawed from all avenues of decency, hope, progress and livelihood.
Racism, as a life-threatening, non-nurturing force, exists even today, thus becoming the forum for all
types of discussion.
5 Racial Violence, Exploitation & Women’s Disgrace in American Culture
Racism, as a man-made phenomenon, may be defined according to Herndon as “all of the
learned behavior and learned emotions on the part of a group of people towards another group whose
physical characteristics are dissimilar to the former group; behaviour and emotions that compel one
group to treat the other on the basis of its physical characteristics alone as if it did not belong to the
human race” (Hernton, Calvin. sex and Racism in America 175) The basic myth of racism, in other
words, is that white skin brings with it cultural superiority that the white are more intelligent and more
virtuous than the black by the mere fact of being white. On the psychological level, whiteness is
automatically equated with beauty and culture and blackness with ugliness and slavery.
Racism started in America when white masters of the land brought the first Africa in chains
and used their labour to enrich their coffers. As a result, black people soon ceased to exist as human
beings in the white world. In an illuminating study of the origin of racism in the United States, Joel
Kovel says that the white master “first reduced the human self of his black slave to a body and then
the body to a thing; he dehumanized his slave, made him quantifiable, and thereby absorbed him into
a rising world market of productive exchange. (White Racism: A psychohistory, 18)
The other side of the coin tells of the disgrace the black woman suffered at the hands of her own man.
Despite all sympathy for his abused wife, the black man gradually developed a kind of aversion to
her. He also began to see her as a loose woman who preferred extramarital adventures to marital
permanence. The stigma attached to the black woman by her white slaver ironically received the
black man’s sanction. He felt sexually neglected and took his woman to be his enemy. The white
man’s clever manipulation of the social situation thus escaped black man’s attention. On the other
hand, one discovers the latter’s helplessness. Being a slave himself, he was absolutely powerless to
question the scheme of things. Either way, “the black woman was deprived of the strong black man
on whom she could rely for protection. (Lerner Gerda, Black Women in White America, xxiii) So, her
awful predicament continued.
But then, the alternate voices of the oppressed are not those of race and gender alone. Class
exploitation is, perhaps, the greatest source of oppression of blacks in white America. After the Civil
War, during which blacks were liberated, there was some improvement in the condition of their lives.
But the First World War again hit them hard as it precipitated a global crisis. The Great Depression
posed further threats to the African – American population. As a matter of fact, to millions of
common people in America, irrespective of race, nothing seemed as urgent as survival in a world of
unemployment and economic collapse. Yet, blacks were worst affected as racial discrimination
reached its apex.
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Even if it is true that the class struggle has not been a major theme in the history of the
African-American freedom movement, we cannot possibly negate the class issue. Nor can we agree
with critics like Wade Gayles who see class “not as urgent as race and sex in black women’s reality
for class oppression cuts across racial and sexual lines and is, therefore, not unique to black women.
(Gloria Wade Gayles, No Crystal Stair, 7)
The Color Purple for many has come to symbolize male ill-treatment at its worst. The black,
male characters in this novel are extremely poor peasants. In the cruel treatment of their women, they
mirror the inhuman lifestyle of their former white masters and overseers. Ironically, they subject their
women to the same abuse, cruelty and insensitive neglect as were suffered in slavery days by their
female ancestors at the hands of powerful white masters and overseers. Barksdale comments: “Sexual
conflict in The Color Purple is thus stark and drear and rooted in the traditions and practices of
slavery with its emphasis on male prerogatives and patriarchal control. (Richard Berksdale,
“Castration Symbolism in Recent Black American Fiction,” CLAJ 29.4,409)
Walker’s novel The Temple of My Familiar (1989) shows how one of the main characters, Miss
Lissie, can recall all of her many past lives. In her recalling of these several lives, we come to know
that cruel treatment of females has not only been a matter of blacks today. We come to know rather
that since ancient times, in many cultures including and especially the Mediterranean culture, females
were suppressed and tortured. Lissie remembers one of her lives when she was lucky enough to
marry a man of her own choice. Because she was born without hymen and there were no bloodstained sheets to show the villagers that their marriage had been consummated, she was publicly
denounced and insulted. She was forced into prostitution as a punishment for people suspected that
she had already lost her virginity through sexual contact before marriage. Later, she dies of infection
and exposure at the young age of eighteen. This incident reveals both the folly and the ignorance of
males in ancient times.
6 Conclusion
Thus there are two important strands in Walker’s fiction under the formally organizing image of the
shadow the first being racial violence and the second being black experience. Both are interrelated in
the sense that they are part and harcel of American life whether white or black. The former originates
in the whites and the latter has its roots in the blacks. And both can be cured or removed only by the
sources then selves in a reformist tendency to be adapted by the individuals of races concerned as the
learn from their mistakes and try to reform themselves for a better America.
References
[1]
[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]
Alder, Alfred. Understanding Human Nature. Trans. Walter. B.Wolfe London: Allen, 1974. Print.
Alice Walker. Interviews with Black Writers. John Obrien, New York: Live right, 1973. Print.
Bradley, David. “Novelist Alice Walker Telling the black woman’s Story”. New York
Times Magazine, 8 Jan 1984.
Bronfen, Elisabeth and Misha Kavka. Feminist Consequences: Theory for the New Century. New
York: Columbia up, 2001. Print.
[6] Brown, Sterling. The negro in American Fiction. New York: Atheneum, 1937. Print.
[7] Barnes, Hazel.E.trans. Being and Notheingness. Methuen & co. Ltd., 1957.
[8] Bell, Bernard, W. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Armherst: Ui of Massachusetts, 1987
[9] Berlant, Lauren. ‘Race, Gender and Nation in The Color Purple”. Gates and Appiah, 1989.
[10] Butler, Robert James. “Alice Walker’s Vision of the South in The Third Life Of Grange Copeland”
African – American Review 27, 1993.
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