The Color Purple Patriarchy

A patriarchal society is a male dominated representation of the world, where men are in authority, typically displayed through power, superiority and strength of the male characters. Females tend to be portrayed as weak, submissive and often attractive. This is a socially and culturally constructed system.

Both The Wasp Factory and The Color Purple conforms to some degree to this presentation of the patriarchal society, although in The Wasp Factory Frank hardly has contact with females. His main experience of women is through the media, ‘Women, I know from watching hundreds… of films and television programs... they get raped, or their loved ones die, and they go to pieces, go crazy and commit suicide or just pine away until they die’. He considers

Within the novel there are many characters that resist the typical gender constructions given to them, Sofia, Harpo, Shug Avery and finally, towards the end of the novel, the narrator, Celie, all display traits that are possessed by the other gender. Shug Avery bends the gender roles by enforcing sexual pleasure. Whereas most of the female characters in the novel desire compassion when having intercourse, she wants sex for the physical experience much like the typical male. ‘It sort of like you know what, she say, grinning and rubbing high up on my thigh. Shug! I say. Oh, she say. God love all them feelings.’ The enjoyment of sex is described in a convincing way that god will accept these feelings irrespective of the sin they are committing. Sofia demonstrates a more masculine gender construction; regardless of being a woman she cannot be controlled, ‘He say, I tell her one thing, she do another. Never do what I say. Always backtalk.’. Harpo wants to be able to control his wife however through her ‘backtalk’ and violence towards him, ‘She reach down and grab a piece of stove wood and whack him cross the eyes.’, he cannot and is therefore seen as weak and insecure about his masculinity as a result of his father’s watchful eye. Her violence is the main basis in which she is considered more masculine, as she is overthrowing male authority and the dominance males have over females in

Walker has presented the female first person narrative with an illiterate voice which would have been considered as normal for when the book was set, 1910-1940 rural Georgia, a most oppressive time and place for African Americans . ‘The first time I got big Pa took me out of school. He never care that I love it…. you too dumb to keep going to school.’ Her lack of education presents the reader with typical views of women; The narrator is obliged to marry, then produce and nurture the children, while the educated men supports the family financially. The way that Celie speaks adds to the sounds fragmented, ‘She ain’t got no friends’, this is due her lack of English grammar which develops throughout the course of the