Alice Walker Essay, Research Paper

There are many different types of authors in the world of

literature, authors of horror, romance, suspense, and the type that

Alice Walker writes, through personal experiences. Although most

critics categorize her writings as feminist, Walker describes herself

as a “womanist”, she defines this as “a woman who loves other

woman…Appreciates and prefers woman culture, woman’s emotional

flexibility… and woman’s strength… Loves the spirit… Loves

herself, Regardless”. Walker’s thoughts and feelings show through in

her writing of poetry and novels. Alice Walker writes through her

feelings and the morals that she has grown with, she writes about the

black woman’s struggle for spiritual wholeness and sexual, political,

and racial equality.

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, and because I felt I was

unpleasant to look at, filled with shame. I retreated into solitude,

and read stories and began to write poems.” In 1961 Walker won a

scholarship to Spelman College in Atlanta, where she became involved

in the civil rights movement and participated in sit-ins at local

business establishments. She transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in

Bronxville, New York, graduating from there in 1965. She met her

future husband Melvyn Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights attorney, in

Mississippi where she was an activist and teacher. In 1967 Walker and

Leventhal married, becoming the first legally married interracial

couple to reside in Jackson, the state capital, they had one child

together one year after they got married, named Rebecca . They

divorced in 1976. Since then Walker has focused more on her writing

and has taught at various colleges and universities.

Walker is one of the most prolific black women writers in

America. Her work consistently reflects her concern with racial,

sexual, and political issues-particularly with black woman’s struggle

for survival. She explained, “The black woman is one of America’s

greatest heroes?.Not enough credit has been given to the black woman

who has been oppressed beyond recognition.” 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”. The

was the first book I had read by Alice Walker, the novel traces

thirty years in the life of Celie, a poor Southern black woman who is

victimized physically and emotionally by her step-father and husband.

While in her teens, Celie is repeatedly raped by her step-father, who

sells the children. Then she is placed in a loveless marriage to

Albert, who also beats and torments her continuously. She eventually

finds peace with the help of Albert’s mistress, Shug Avery, a blues

signer who gives her the courage to leave her marriage. At the end of

the novel, Celie is reunited with her children and with her long lost

sister Nettie. Walker earned many praises for the novel along with

many criticisms as well. Those who praise the book such as Peter S.

Prescott would agree with him when he said, “an American novel of

permanent importance, that rare sort of book which amounts to a

diversion in the fields of dread”. 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

afflication’ and a ‘far off, miystic land of?miraculous. Walker’s

central characters are almost always black women; the themes of

sexism and racism are predominant in her work, but her impact is felt

across both racial and sexual boundaries.

The first novel written by Alice Walker “The Third Life of Grange

Copeland” (1970), again carries many of her prevalent themes,

particularly the domination of powerless women by equally powerless

men. In this novel, which spans the years between the Depression and

the beginnings of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s,

walker showed three generations of a black sharecropping family and

explored the effects of poverty and racism on their lives. Because of

his sense of failure, Grange Copeland leads his wife to suicide and

abandons his children to seek a better life in the North. His traits

are passed on to his son, Brownsfield, who in time murders his wife.

In the end of the novel, Grange returns to his family a broken yet

compassionate man and attempts to make up for all the hurt he has

caused in the past with the help of his granddaughter, Ruth. While

some people accused Walker of reviving stereotypes about the

dysfunctional black family, others praised her use of intensive,

descriptive language in creating believable characters.

Walker is also considered an accomplished poet. Walkers first

collection, Once: Poems (1968), includes works written during the

early 1960’s while she attended Sarah Lawrence College. Some of these

pieces relate the confusion, isolation , and suicidal thoughts Walker

experienced. For she had learned her Senior year that she was

pregnant and had to deal with the stressful time that followed.

Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems was Walkers second volume of

poems, in this she addressed such topics as love, individualism, and

revolution. When Alice Walker lived in Mississippi and was active in

the civil rights movement and teaching she experienced these such

things. With Walker’s most recent poems she expresses her ideas of

races, gender, environment, love, hate and suffering, the same topics

she writes about in her novels. In addition to her novels, and

poetry, Walker has also published two volumes of short stories, In

Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (1973) and You Can’t Keep a

Good Woman Down: Stories (1981), both of which evidence her womanist

philosophy.

Overall Alice Walker has been a very influential author

throughout the black community, and her audiences are very much

interracial. Although many of the criticisms are controversial on her

view of black men and their abuse toward black women, that depiction

can not be narrowed down to only that, there is much more that is

present in Alice Walkers writing. Her feelings, morals and the

opinions Walker has towards women, sexuality, and racial equality

shine through her works of all literature.