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B.A. Thesis Chapter 1 Feminism and Womanism

devotes herself to the liberation of black women and connects her destiny with all the black women?s. Walker herself illustrates what a womanist should be like and be responsible for. In the first interpretation, Walker marks the womanist from race, i.e. the colored, love of beauty and a respect for strength (Walker 1985, 2379-2382). Walker?s last definition of the womanist may be the most misunderstanding one. “Womanist is to feminist as purple to lavender.” This interpretation contains two meanings. One is that womanism and feminism are not two totally different schools. They have something in common. Both of them, for example, serve for women?s liberation. Anyhow, as lavender is much lighter than purple, feminism has less connotations than womanism. One of the reasons is that the main-stream white feminism usually ignores the existence of black women and other colored women. In the prologue to her book, The Female Imagination, Patricia Meyer Spacks attempts to explain why her book deals solely with white women in the “Anglo-American literary tradition”.She said so because she did not have such experience of Third World female psychology in America. As a white woman, she would rather choose to describe familiar experience which belonged to a familiar culture setting. While Walker?s answer to her explanation is that “yet Spacks never lived in nineteenth-century Yorkshine, so why theorize the Bronts?” (Walker 1983, 372). It is not her experiences that stop her doing so, but it is she herself that does not want to. On an exhibition of

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B.A. Thesis Chapter 1 Feminism and Womanism

women painters at the Brooklyn Museum, there is such a dialogue: “?Are there no black women painters represented here?? one asked a white woman feminist. ?It?s a wormen?s exhibit!? she replied” (Walker 1985, 378). It is apparently that the white feminists are reluctant to regard the black women as “women”, for “women” is the name they call themselves, and themselves alone. “Racism decrees that if they are now women (years ago they were ladies, but fashions change) then black women must, perforce, be something else. (While they were ?ladies,? black women could be ?women,? and so on.)” (Walker 1985, 376).16 No more word is needed to describe the white feminists? ignorance of black women. However, are black women really inferior to white women and should not be called “women”? Let?s listen to Sojourner Truth?s answer:

“Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or ever mud-puddles, or gives me any best places! And ain?t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain?t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man . And ain?t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen them most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother?s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain?t I a woman? ”

Truth?s statement strongly expresses that black women are not only “women”, but even much stronger women than white women. Then how can black women still work with the white women who even do not know

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B.A. Thesis Chapter 1 Feminism and Womanism

their existence? Barbara Smith has also noticed that “black women have known that their lives in some ways incorporated goals that white middle-class women were striving for, but race and class privilege, of

course, reshaped the meaning of those goals profoundly” (1998, 179).

There comes the biggest difference between the goals of feminism and those of womanism. The former is only for the situation of the white middle-class women, and the latter is for all the women in the world, i.e. universalism, as Walker has mentioned in the second interpretation. For a womanist, “when she thought of women moving, she automatically thought of women all over the world” (Walker 1983, 378). It is her own experience that enables her to do so. A colored woman usually suffers double oppression in America. The black women, for example, when facing the white people, suffer racial oppression, both from the white men and women. When coming back to their own homes, they have to sustain the oppression from the black men. “If black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression” (Combahee River Collective 275).

Any theory must be based on reality. Walker not only gives the basic connotations of her womanism, but also writes many works to illustrate it. The Color Purple is one of them. The female figures in the novel suffer greatly from the double oppression mentioned above. However, they do

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B.A. Thesis Chapter 1 Feminism and Womanism

not yield to their destiny. They try hard and finally liberate themselves, and their ways to liberation also formlots of elements of Walker?s womanism.

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B.A. Thesis Chapter 2 Double Oppression on the Black Women in The Color Purple

Chapter 2

Double Oppression on the Black Women in The Color Purple

2.1 As Women: Sexual and Violent Oppression from the Black Men

“They waited for a day when the unknown thing that was in them would be made known .”(Walker 1985, 2375)Black women are a unique group in America. First, they are women，Second, they are black. Their particular identities decide their destiny, i.e. they have to suffer from both sexism and racism. The stories of the black women in The Color Purple best exemplify the sorrowful experiences of thousands of black women.Like a slave auction, Celie was thus passed like a piece of property from one cruel and domineering male into the hands of another. Celie?s wedding day was passed by chasing the oldest boy, who did not accept her as the mother and picked up a stone to hit her head open, and did a lot of other mischiefs. Though Celie was an ideal housekeeper, cooker, labor, good stepmother and wife, she still won no care or love from Mr. Johnson and his children. Celie was even often bullied and humiliated by Mr. Johnson. “He beat me like beat the children.” (Walker 1982, 23). Harpo (the eldest son of Mr. Johnson) asked his daddy why he beat Celie, Mr. Johnson said, “Cause she is my wife”(Walker 1982, 23).

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