READING ALICE WALKER’S, "THE COLOR PURPLE" AS A FEMINIST TEXT

Abstract

‘The Color Purple’ is referred to as a potent benchmark of modern American literature. The lives of Afro-American women living in early twentieth-century rural Georgia is depicted in this novel. It’s the first woman-authored, epistolary novel of Afro-American lives. The novel personifies the womanist views of Walker without being deteriorated to a sheer stand for ideological rhetoric/dogma. The transformative power of female rapport and love is presented in the writing. Written in 1982,the novel won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. The censors have frequently targeted and criticized the novel due to its content. Due to the explicitly of the contents, in terms of violence, sometimes it had appeared at number seventeenth on the American Library Association (ALA) list of the most 100 frequently challenged books of from 2000 to 2009. The book was listed as the ''best loved novels'' on the BBC's The Big Read poll of the UK in 2003. The language of novel resulted in ban all over the country due to its explicit content and violence. This paper will throw a light on feminist perspective of novel.

Key words: Modern American literature, epistolary novel, feminism, Feminist literature, Black feminism, African-American literature.