The Color Purple Research Paper

We can say that gender decides the position of people all over the world. And moreover to this if the gender is female and that to colored; it becomes much more difficult to live in any community. They have to tolerate violence and racist behaviors of both white men and women. In addition to this, a colored women not only struggle against racist society, but also she suffers at the hand of black men. After 1970s, African American literature emerged as one of the important part of American Literature. Most of the African American writers of 20th century dealt with the experiences of the Blacks. Both, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker have focused on suffer and struggle of blacks in the United States, they emphasized that to be a black woman is

She is raped and impregnated by a man whom she believes is her father. Subsequently, she is taken to an unfamiliar place by her father and is married to a man she calls in her letters Mr._ until the very end of the novel. Mr. _ treats Celia with both contempt and brutality: when Harpo, his son, asks him why he beats Celia, he responds- “cause she my wife, plus, she stubborn. All women good for”. Harpo will attempt to repeat this relationship when he marries Sophia, but with ironic results. Through Celia’s experiences of oppression by the male dominated society, and also through her sexual abuse by her father and husband we can get a picture of the prevailing society. Explaining the situation of the Black worker in the racist America, Ellen Willis asserts that a time when the American society is guided by the norms of ‘whiteness’ and ‘maleness’ white women have to fight for their feminism, black men for their blackness but black women have to fight their battle on two fronts because ‘the black women suffers both racial and sexual invisibility’ (Voice Literary supplement: 1-19). Alice Walker goes beyond the protest novels of Richard Wrights, James Baldwin, Chester Himes and others to assert the ethnicity of her black characters. Most of them are plain, ignorant black women oppressed by a system beyond their comprehension. The