Resistance against Marginalization of Afro-American Women in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple

Abstract

The present research endeavors to explore how the Afro-American female characters in Alice Walker's, novel, The Color Purple break the boundaries of traditional male or female roles. Typically, it focuses on the struggles of African-American women against the exploitation both by the whites and black men. The main objective of this paper is to analyze the black women’s tragic experiences in a racist society and their struggle for survival and wholeness. The female characters have masculine traits such as activeness, boldness, and physical strength. Sofia’s strength and Shug’s sexual assertiveness and Harpo’s insecurity are major examples of such disparity between the characters’ gender and the traits he or she displays. To analyze how subversion of gender roles sometimes causes problems, the tool taken for the research methodology is feminism or feminist framework. The working hypothesis is to demonstrate how Walker wishes to emphasize that gender and sexuality are not as simple as people believe. Walker subverts and defies the traditional ways in which people understand women to be women and men to be men. She fights against the way black women are receiving two layers of discrimination; one discrimination is for being black and the other for being woman. Walker meticulously sketches the black female characters strong enough to lead their lives. The novelty of the research lies in subverting the orthodox gender roles based on color and sex, and redefining the role of Afro-American women of any color and society.