alice walker womanist

Much of Walker's fiction is informed by her Southern background. She was born in Eatonton, Georgia, a rural town where most blacks worked as tenant farmers. At the age eight she was blinded in the right eye when an older brother accidentally shot her with a BB gun, after which she fell into somewhat of a depression. She secluded herself from the other children, and as she explained,

"I no longer felt like the little girl I was. I felt old,

. . .
Walker earned many praises for the novel along with many criticisms as well. ’ They dreamed dreams that no one knew not even countryside crooning lullabies to ghosts, and drawing the mother of Christ in charcoal on courthouse walls (In Search of Mothers’ Gardens, Walker). It “is uniquely suited to Walker’s subject in that it allows an uneducated, black, southern woman to speak for herself. "

This is where her womanist point of view first emerged, in a household where girls were forced to do domestic chores unaided by the brothers. ” (Henderson Critical 68) Additionally, according to Walker,

“to have Celie speak in the language of her oppressors would be to deny her the validity of her existence; to suppress her voice would be to murder her and to attack all those ancestors who spoke as she does. The novel was a great success, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1983, and selling over four million copies in 22 languages.

Those who praise the book such as Peter S.

Walker's insistence on giving black women their due resulted in one of the most widely read novels in America today, Alice's third novel, The Color Purple. ” (1984) Walker herself has defined the term as,

“a woman who loves other woman. "

Walker is one of the most prolific black women writers in America. " This representation of the women during this time in the eighteenth and nineteenth century is so personal and so emotional to her that she devoted much of the rest of her life to writing about it and defending women’s rights. Appreciates and prefers woman culture, woman's emotional flexibility. " Some felt differently about certain points the book made, one being the its negative portraits of black men, people like Darryl Pinckney state,

"Walker's work shows a world divided between the chosen (black women) and the unsaved, the poor miserable critter' (black men), between the 'furnace of affliction' and a 'far off, mystic land of…miraculous. According to David Bradly of the New York Times, “She coined the term ‘womanist’ which she used to describe the Black women’s issues that are at the ear of so much of her work.

Common topics in this essay:
Alice Walker, Color Purple, Overall Walker, Eatonton Georgia, York Times, Pinckney Walker's, Shug Avery, Sarah Lawrence, Robert Powers, Peter Prescott, black women, color purple, alice walker, black woman, black womens, racial sexual, epistolary form,

Approximate Word count = 1129
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

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