Abstract

This thesis explores the African America racial and sexual polarization as portrayed in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Meridian, Possessing the Secret of Joy and selected stories from In Love and Trouble: Stories about Black Women and You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down. The study argues that both racism and sexism spring from the self’s cupidity to treat the other differently. The study takes a historic journey through which the black American has travelled. During the Civil Rights Movement women actively participated in the fight against segregation. The study explores how Alice Walker satirizes women’s involvement in the Civil Rights Movement through her female characters. In the selected works, Alice Walker uses female characters to bring her point on the twin affliction of the black American. Black American women suffer double domination and oppression; their dual status as women and blacks visibly appears in their relationships with whites and black figures respectively. The thesis further explores the relatedness of sexism and racism and exposes how both arise from the Self Other antagonism. The study adopts three theoretical perspectives in its character analysis. Black feminism and psychoanalysis are the overriding literary theories the paper uses because the study centres on black women’s experience in a racist and sexist environment. Women’s experience in a predominately male controlled society psychologically traumatizes and distorts their self’s perception in society. The two category stratification of women as a class calls for the adoption of Marxist theory in the character analysis of the selected works.

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School	: School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Issued Date	: 2011

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