1. society

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Chapter – III
Double Marginalisation
Literature, as far as it mirrors the world, reflects the predominant attitude
which frequently values men and masculine pursuits more highly than women and
feminine pursuits. The flattering frequency with which women appear are not as they are,
certainly not as they would define themselves but as conveniences to the resolution of
masculine dilemmas. This chapter focuses on the double marginalisation of black
women in the African American society by their counterparts. In a male-dominated
society women do not develop the symbols and stereotypes with which they are
described. The image of women, as everyone knows it and read about it, was created by
men and fashioned to suit their needs. The function of the male’s gender-linked otherness
is to provide a means of control over a subordinate group and a rationale which justifies
and explains the oppression of those in a lower order. Black women had to suffer from
triple oppression as poor, black and female while their counterparts suffered double
oppression as poor and black.
Quest for identity as a challenging issue of life engaged the minds of great
African American intellectuals. With their creative imagination and American
ingenuity, they closely analyse the theme of the loss and search for identity. They are
aware that the black men have been reduced to conformists by society and that the
tragedy of modern black women is that they fail to recognise their own identity and
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potentiality. The black women have lost their dignity not because they have laid claim
to powers beyond their scope and ability but because they have relegated their rights
and responsibilities.
Maintaining one’s identity simply means being one’s own self. Identity of a
black woman is what discloses to others who she is. It is noticeable that, in Wright’s
novels, the female characters frequently function as vehicles through which the hero’s
problems and difficulties are either increased further or rarely solved. In the case of
Walker, her conception is to project a feminine character of her own land undergoing
serious troubles, caused not only by their white bosses but also by their counterparts
and is established as a major portion of her novels.
Racism in the United States of America has always attempted to destroy the
humanity of the African American people. In this regard, a common misconception is
that African American women were less affected by such racist assault than the
African American man. But, in reality, it was the African American woman who was
the worst affected as she was doubly marginalised, which has been rightly exposed by
M. Beal as double jeopardy in his pamphlet Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and
Female. Beal's essay talks about the misconceptions and troubles which come about
when one tries to analyse the role of a black female in the society. The pamphlet is
specially focused on different aspects of life, and how they pertained to black women
or non-white women, compared to how they pertain to white women and men and
non-white men.
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One particular part of the pamphlet is entitled 'The economic exploitation of
black women'. This section briefly talks about the economics of black women and
how, on an average in 1969, a non-white woman made approximately three times less
than a white man. Frances M. Beal, a black feminist and a peace and justice political
activist, thus exposes the concrete economic condition of both racism and sexism.
In other words, it pays, for some; to uphold such reactionary and divisive ideologies
since the more a group of people is marginalised and discriminated, the easier it is to
exploit their labour, that is, to have a pool of low-waged workers. Beal draws several
conclusions from this. First the divisions created between workers because of the
different pay rates are hindering the advancement of the workers' struggle as a whole
because white workers do not readily question their privileges. Secondly, one has to see
different forms of exploitation as related to one another if one wants to get rid of them
all. Thirdly, the most important of all is that awareness and an end to the superexploitation of black workers and women in particular, should be a priority in the fight
against capitalism. Hence, this pamphlet played an important role in the black rights
movement for women.
African American women are not only physically and economically assaulted
by the white society, but also by the men of their own race. Racist movements in
America targeted African Americans in total and it affected both black men and
women equally. But Beal depicts that certain black men are maintaining that they
have been castrated by society but that black women somehow escaped this persecution
and even contributed to this emasculation. Also, she states that the black woman in
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America can justly be described as a slave of a slave. By reducing the black man in
America to such abject oppression, the black woman had no protector and was used and
is still being used in some cases, as the scapegoat for the evils that this horrendous system
has perpetrated on black men. Her physical image has been maliciously maligned; she
has been sexually molested and abused by the white coloniser; she has suffered the
worst kind of economic exploitation, having been forced to serve as the white woman's
maid and wet nurse for white offspring while her own children were more often than not,
starving and neglected. It is the depth of degradation to be socially manipulated, physically
raped and to be powerless to reverse this syndrome.
African American women continue to face not only widespread poverty, but also
heavy labour burdens. All are aware that despite achievements and progress made,
African American women face major challenges and obstacles. A decade ago, African
American women had reasons to expect changes following a much heralded global
conference that set ambitious targets to transform the lives of women across the
world. African American women are taking stock of progress and asking to what
extent promised reforms have been implemented. They are also examining why
progress has been limited in many countries and are seeking ways to overcome the
obstacles.
A glance at the efforts of black women writers in defining black women offers
an insight into the problems of defining categories based on broad classifications,
either race or gender. The differences, in perception and philosophies at one end and
the contesting site of reality versus codification on women’s issue, disrupts a single
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and unitary reading of black womanhood. Attempting to question about women in a
different space, particularly in the African American space, in the post colonial context,
provides a provocative site for the articulation and discussion on the politics of identity.
Beal criticised the woman’s movement for its limited focus in Double Jeopardy:
To be Black and Female and says: “Any white group that does not have an anti-imperialist
and anti-racist ideology has absolutely nothing in common with the Black woman’s
struggle” (98).
In the United States, an economy moved from slavery to industrialisation
during 1920s, which caused the worst race riots in America and black women were the
worst affected due to double marginalisation. In such a backdrop, gender solidarity
through women bonding became the dire need of the hour. During the 1950s even the
upper middle-class stereotypes of the black women prevalent during the first half of
this century seemed shrouded in silence, for there were few important black women
characters either in the African American or Anglo American novel. On the societal
level, however, various aspects of nineteenth century literary stereotypes continued to
have currency.
Interestingly, Beal brings in the aspects of mass struggle into the women’s question
and problematises a single role model to black women. She says: “We as Black women
have got to deal with the problems that the black masses deal with, for our problems
in reality are one and the same” (98-99). But she undermines her own statement by
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raising the specific problem of black women that separates them from black men. She
deconstructs the category ‘Black Masses’ by her phrase: “The Double Jeopardy: To be
Black and female”.
In the white dominated society the entire community of African American is
racially discriminated. In this case there occurs a second type of discrimination which
can be termed as Double Marginalisation or Double Jeopardy [which could also be
termed as triple marginalisation as they are poor, black and female] which means the
African American women dominated by African American men. Analysing this
particular issue by a male author is also completely different from a female author of the
same society. Taking into account of Wright’s and Walker’s select novels, Wright‘s
creation of African American woman characters gives an idea that the author is not so
serious about the suppressed black female. His male characters do not heed to the
fellow feelings or emotions of their counterparts. Instead they relieve their tension
upon the deprived, black female. Wright’s protagonists develop into rebels who
violently attack the society. On the contrary, being a womanist, Walker’s portrayal of
female characters brings out a picture of what is the true condition of a black woman
in the doubly marginalised society. Walker perceived what Wright overlooked and
likewise Wright deeply lashed out at what Walker disregarded.
Bigger Thomas in Native Son is more typical of Wright’s desperate characters
that are deprived of formal education, dignified labour and a feeling of their own
worth. The few who are educated or have money, like Cross Damon in The Outsider
or Tyree Tucker in The Long Dream do share Bigger’s frustration. Only when whites
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provoke them Wright’s protagonists do have a chance to assert themselves. Violent
rebellion allows the invisible to be seen, the inarticulate to express them. They
express their anger towards their counterparts. Walker's women characters display
strength, endurance and resourcefulness in confronting and overcoming oppression in
their lives. Yet, Walker is frank in depicting the often devastating circumstances of
the twin afflictions of racism and sexism. Walker writes through her feelings and her
concepts of morals that she has grown with. She writes about the black woman's
struggle for spiritual wholeness and sexual, political and racial equality. Walker's
central characters are almost always black women and the themes of sexism and
racism are predominant in her work. However, her impact is felt across both racial
and sexual boundaries.
Black women characters that feature in Wright’s Native Son portray the terrible
plight of African American women during the early twentieth century. The act of
Bigger Thomas, in treating his girlfriend, using her to satisfy his needs and disposing
her off without even a second thought speaks about how African American men think
of and value their women. Bigger Thomas considers his girlfriend as an unfaithful being
and does not trust her to keep a secret. His fear, his desperation and circumstances might
have forced him to kill his girlfriend, but the very act itself had stemmed out of his
perception of his girlfriend in particular and African American women in general. His
brutal way of killing her with a brick and throwing her off into an unused well shows his
remorselessness in committing violence towards his own girlfriend and to stretch it
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further, the very act should have risen out of his not considering her even as a human
being. She is a representative of the African American women who suffer unspeakable
acts of violence, physical and sexual abuses perpetrated by the men of her own race.
Bigger’s girlfriend also represents the most unfortunate African American
women who fall victims and lose their lives to the violence of men of her own race.
She is helpless and powerless and is more or less a puppet in the hands of Bigger who
treats her as he wants. There is no place where she could take refuge. There is no one
to protect her from violence and abuse. Being an African American woman, in the
eyes of the dominant powerful white world, she is no more than a virtue less woman.
This is very apparent in the way the African American law and its enforcers treat the
murder of the white woman and that of the black woman.
Women characters portrayed in Native Son are tender, submissive and
helpless. Bigger Thomas’ mother is a woman who is powerless to control her own son.
She is the representative of all those African American women who struggle to raise a
family as single mothers. She struggles to earn for her family. She struggles through all
the exploitations that the white society commits. Throughout the novel, she is
portrayed as a powerless, helpless mother who struggles hard and sweats blood to
earn for her children and struggles to raise a family and keep it together. Bigger’s
sister is portrayed as a gentle frightened girl who dutifully attends her classes and
follows the footsteps of her mother and numerous African American women do, in
order to acquire skills that would make them a cook or a maid. She is a symbol of a
timid, fragile, frightened being who faints at the smallest of threats or even at the
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signs of violence. She is found to go on living a typical life of an African American
female, innocent, dependent and stoic. She also serves as an image that brings out the
helplessness of his brother Bigger, who is first frustrated about his state and then as he
finds no outlet to his anger, vents it on his own mother and his sister.
Further, Wright's female characters in this novel exist not as independent
individuals, but only in relation to the male figures of authority that surround them as
husbands, sons, fathers or boyfriends. In fact, the role of each woman that Wright
presents is meaningless without a male counterpart; the women cannot function on
their own. Their sole purpose in the novel is to further the story, to put Bigger in new
and more dangerous situations by questioning or threatening his male authority. Each
major woman character in the story represents through her personality and actions a
different kind of threat to Bigger's masculine power.
Bigger's mother, who offers him nothing in the way of motherly support,
constantly nags and insults him. Mary Dalton, the idealistic and headstrong young
white girl whose determination to connect with Bigger and make him feel her equal,
gets her killed. Her mother, Mrs. Dalton, is virtually her complete opposite: weak,
frail and helpless. Mrs. Dalton’s one influence on the storyline is her indirect
responsibility for her daughter's murder. And finally it is Bessie, Bigger's overworked,
excitable, alcoholic girlfriend and also second murder victim. In general, she is not
intelligent or strong enough to pose a real threat to his security, but when she
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questions Bigger's authority he is compelled to kill her. Each of these women is
different, but in the end, each plays the same part as the intimidator, the threat to
Bigger and what he wants them to be.
Wright, through The Long Dream, probes into the working of a typical
patriarchal family. The father Tyree is a powerful figure and bears black belt within
the family. The mother is a submissive being who does not arrest herself until after
her husband’s death. Throughout the major part of the novel and during Fish’s most
formative years, the mother figure is portrayed as meek and passive. Fish maintains a
kind of relationship with Gladys, which he maintained with his mother. The comfort
he drew from his mother was sensual in his intensity and it formed the pattern of what
he was to demand later in life from women. When he was a man in distress, he would
have to have them, but his need of them would be limited, localised, focused toward
obtaining release and solace. Fish’s family life, his environment and his peace are
operative in forming his image of women, whose mission is to give her to man in
order to serve his sexual desires.
When Lawd Today, Wright’s next novel, is considered, Lil the heroin is a
perfect specimen of doubly marginalised African American women. Her husband and
the hero of the novel Jake Jackson thinks of her as a fool: “You piss at her back and
say its raining and she would believe it” (15). Thus is the value of a black woman.
He considers her as a constant annoyance, a dead weight tied to his ankle that
regularly brings him back to the real world which is harsh, unfriendly and oppressive,
preventing him from spending his time in a dream world that allows him to forget
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reality and enjoy fantasies. In fact, the very first scene describes how Lil’s act of
switching on the radio disturbs Jake’s sleep and dreams and makes him angry. Lil is
considered by Jake as the only obstacle that prevents him from running away, chasing
his fantasies. Lil, in Jake’s mind, is the chain that ties him to Chicago and to his job at
the post office, which he considers miserable and hopeless. Lil becomes the punching
bag for Jake who takes out his frustrations and his helplessness. She suffers both
verbal and physical abuse thrown upon her with no place to seek refuge, as she is
dependent on him for her survival.
Lil suffers through the constant harassment of her husband’s jealousy. She is
both physically and emotionally harassed by her husband, who suspects her of having
an affair with a milkman.
I ain’t no fool! I heard you talking to that milkman ten minutes on end!
I reckon he can’t hear good, hunh? I reckon it takes ten minutes to tell
him to bring you a bottle of cream hunh? Woman, don’t you try to play
me cheap! (11)
She is accused of infidelity. Jake considers her as unworthy of his struggles to provide
for her. She silently bares the humiliation as he constantly abuses her and accuses her of
being unfaithful. Throughout the novel, in various scenes, Jake treats his wife like a
woman of disrepute in terms of her fidelity and she is found to take all his abuse
stoically and helplessly as she is dependent on him. She is, in every situation, pushed
to the brink and as a desperate ploy, she is forced to threaten him to complain to his
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superiors which might cost him his job. This in turn backfires on her, earning her
more of Jake’s wrath, and gives him enough cause to accuse her of unfaithfulness and
treachery.
Lil also suffers in terms of health due to lack of awareness and medical
advice and treatment. An unsafe unprofessional abortion of an unwanted pregnancy
leaves her suffering from a tumour in her uterus.
I can just see myself giving that damn quack five hundred dollars for
you to get rid of a tumor. What you think I is, the United States’ Mint?
And you got the nerve to tell me I’m the cause of it! How about all the
other niggers you been running around with? (15)
She is left to suffer her ailment because of Jake’s lack of willingness to meet her
medical expenses. Lil represents the condition of African American women during
the early twentieth century. Even in an advanced country like the United States of
America, African American women did not receive proper medical care or
counselling, especially on issues concerning their sexual health. In other words she is
not, in any way, better off than the African women who receive medical attention
from a white doctor.
In spite of her literacy and possessing enough of the basic skills, Lil was very
much unemployable and should have been given a job that would have given her
economic freedom, rather given both Lil and Jake to run their household with much more
ease with both their incomes. On the contrary, Lil is not only found without an
employment, but is found without even the thought of seeking a job. In the novel,
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which is an account of a single day in the lives of Jake Jackson, his four friends and Lil,
Lil is found reading books through the day after her morning chores, much to the
annoyance of Jake Jackson, who compares his hard work of drudgery in the post
office to her leisurely spending of her day immersed in books. Delegation of Lil to the
kitchen and the entire African American women to household chores either of their
own or of the white people’s, should have presented, to the outside world, as being
not much different from those uncivilised, under developed and not so forward
thinking societies. The United States of America, the land of opportunities, has
remained, for all the reasons of racism, as a land of oppression for the African
American woman.
All the women characters in Lawd Today, like the women in the gambling centre,
the waitress in the coffee shop, are portrayed as beings that are present there for the
appreciation and for the carnal satisfaction of men. All observations made by Jake
Jackson and his four friends do not move beyond the subject of sexual appeal. And, the
horror of it all is that African American woman, after the continuous subjugation to
the sort of treatment that she received from the white society and from the men of her
own race badgered her and made her believe that she is not more than a sexual being
whose primary duty in life is to appeal to the men and serve their carnal needs, begets
children and raises a family with or without the support of the men who do not think
beyond their own needs. The waitress in the coffee shop showing off herself in a wanton
way to Jake Jackson and his friends shows how the American society has not only
reduced the black women to such a state, but it had made her believe that they are not
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worth more than being things that appealed to men. Perhaps, from another angle, it
could be said that many of African American women were forced to use their sexual
appeal as a means to their survival. Thus, Wright’s male characters impose violence
and subjugate their counterparts.
Apart from the violence that engulfs black male sexuality, the denial of black
female desire is another factor that prevents black romantic relations. This combination
of a violent black man and a frigid black woman recurs in the relationship of Jack and
Lil in Lawd Today as well as Bigger and Bessie in Native Son. Lil is not able to
engage in sexual relations after an abortion she is persuaded to have by her husband.
A parallel situation is illustrated by Bigger’s relationship with Bessie.
In The Outsider Cross Damon has a drunken, intense, passionate affair with
Gladys, who can make no demands, but simply cling to him. Abandoned by weak
fathers and raised by strong mothers, most of Wright’s protagonists expect maternal
care as well as sex from their women. Thus, Cross Damon marries Gladys, who has
satisfied him sexually and nursed him through pneumonia. But their marriage ends
when she gives birth and cares her children instead of her husband. At the beginning
of their relationship, he is flattered to discover that she is curious about his notions
and has the good sense to listen quietly to him. He is willing to stay with her as long
as “she made no demands, imposed no conditions, set no limits” (48). Cross enjoys
feeling like a man but not acting like one and he easily slips into the role of spoiled
son.
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Likewise in Native Son Bigger Thomas takes Bessie on the cold floor of an
abandoned slum apartment over the protesting Bessie, Bigger regards her as an object
that he can manipulate for his pleasure and power. “He was enjoying her agony,
seeing and feeling the worth of himself in her bewilderment desperation” (126).
She exists to serve him just as he is expected to serve the white world. Since Bigger
never treats Bessie as a human being, he can crush her when she becomes a burden.
Similarly, in Lawd Today Jake Jackson and his friends adopt the attitudes of the master
race as they describe their sexual conquests and convince themselves that their women
enjoy being beaten and demeaned. Even Tyree Tucker, the respectable family man in
The Long Dream, keeps a mistress, owns a whorehouse imparts his sexual mores to his
son. For instance, when Fishbelly discovers his father having sex with his mistress in
the back of the funeral parlour he compares him to a “sleek, black…locomotive…
crashing past…and hurtling” (27). Later, Trucker takes his son to a whorehouse and
advises him: “A woman’s just a woman and the dumbest thing on earth for a man to
do is to get into trouble about one” (150). In Tyree’s world, “women serve [men],
give…. Pleasure, [and are appreciated as pieces of good] meat” (182). These male
characters had totally ignored their responsibilities towards their counterparts and had
resulted in evading gender solidarity.
Although considerably more gentle than Tyree, Fishbelly resembles his father in
at least one way. He also needs a woman’s helplessness to make him feel manly.
Similarly, Bigger in Native Son simply uses Bessie as a sex object. He may feel
momentarily sorry for her, but he does not express any love or remorse. In The Long
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Dream Gladys becomes both lover and mother, a role Fishbelly’s girlfriend also
fulfills, where she observes that Fishbelly looks just “…like a baby when [he] sleeps”
and reflects that “some woman’s watched every man while he slept” (175). In Native
Son Bessie mothers Bigger Thomas, caressing him, giving him warm milk and
helping him in his escape attempt.
However, such care and consideration generally are not reciprocated. At the
first hint of responsibility, most of Wright’s men panic and their women are left to raise
sons who resent them and who transfer their rebellion to all women. The sons repeat their
fathers’ mistakes. In The Outsider Cross withdraws from Gladys when she has their
first child. An early scene symbolises the relationship between Wright’s men and
women. While his wife endures the pains of childbirth, Cross goes on a drinking
binge which ends with him bringing home a whore. In Lawd Today Jack Jackson
beats his sick wife when she begs him for money to pay the doctor. Like Bigger
Thomas in Native Son, both men justify their actions by convincing themselves that they
have no alternatives. Bigger Thomas justifies killing Bessie because he believes and
assumes that her life will become miserable thereafter in his absence.
In Lawd Today Jake persuades himself that money spent on Lil would
be a waste. Reasoning that his wife will be happier without him, Cross Damon in
The Outsider attempts to drive Gladys crazy so that she will release him. Similarly,
without any qualms, he can abandon his pregnant young mistress. He even considers
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killing his white girlfriend Eva, the one woman he loves, in order to “guard her from
the monstrousness of himself” (301). Though he stops short of murder, he contributes
to Eva’s suicide by confessing his past crimes.
Abused by society, by their lovers and husbands, Wright’s women emerge as
victims who tolerate pain. A bottle of whiskey and Bigger’s warm body binds Bessie to
her unfeeling boyfriend in Native Son. In The Long Dream Emma Tucker meekly
endures Tyree’s promiscuity and bullying for many years until his death in a whorehouse
unlocks her repressed hatred. Cross Daman’s teenage mistress is a passionate child in
The Outsider willing to trust a married man. Similarly, Gladys is so grateful for Cross
Damon’s attention that she forgives him his transgressions. But there is a limit to the
abuses that these women tolerate. Ironically, they turn to white authorities for
protection against black brutality. In self-defence Lil Jackson complains to her
husband’s white supervisors that he has beaten her. Similarly, Gladys Damon asks
Cross’s white boss to withhold his wages for child support. Under such circumstances the
women have no recourse but to defend themselves. After many beatings, Lil finally stabs
Jake. When Cross assaults Gladys for the second time, she obtains a gun and threatens
to shoot him. The rebels transform their good-natured, hard-working, patient women
into embittered shrews.
Through an analysis, Wright’s characterisation of women can be termed prejudiced
and stereotyped. He emphasises certain aspects and characteristics of his female
characters while leaving out features of equal or greater importance. By a study of
several of Wright’s female characters, one can trace that his writings have a sexist
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bias. Most of Wright’s female characters fit into the above stereotypes as they are
frequently described as being childlike, whimpering and stupid. Wright did not attribute
characteristics of a mature human mentality to them. The author investigates how
they relate to the authority of the major male characters and to what extent they are
portrayed in a negative light. Most of Wright’s people are simple, uneducated folk,
tenant farmers, manual labourers and domestics and want some peace and happiness
through some means.
Wright’s fictions crystallises the irresolvable conflicts of black men and
women who are pitted against each other by a racist society. Bigger Thomas,
economically, psychologically and socially emasculated, unleashes his rage against
his mother, his sister and his girlfriend. Love, respect and trust cannot grow in the
bleak slum environment of Native Son. In most of Wright’s fiction, black men who
are forced into a passive role in white society, physically and psychologically exploit
the women who struggle to keep the family together. Lacking positive father figures,
Bigger Thomas, Cross Damon Fishbelly and Jake Jackson remain rebel sons, striking
out at their women in the form of mothers, girlfriends and wives as well as against
white America. Though Bigger’s thoughts describe his attitude towards whites, they
also apply to relations between black men and women. For many of Wright’s men,
sex substitutes love.
Wright’s male characters fail to recognise that their counterparts are also
blacks who equally face racial suppression, and as a result it would be double the
trauma if they do not treat them with humanity. On the other hand, in Walker’s works, it
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could be noted that these suppressed, ignored and many a times unnoticed female
portrayals are profoundly regarded. Black female characters are seriously treated with
great human values. Be it their domestic chores or social activities, Walker makes one
to respect them which their counterparts fail to do. Parallel to this, her male characters
are ineffectively and at times disapprovingly projected which stops the way to the
augment of gender solidarity.
From whatever vantage point one investigates the work of Alice Walker as a
poet, novelist, short story writer, critic, essayist and apologist for black women, it is
clear that the special identifying mark of her writing is her concern for the lives of
black women. Her main preoccupation has been the souls of black women. While
writing about herself as a writer, Walker has declared herself committed to exploring
the oppressions, the insanities, the loyalties and the triumphs of black women. Walker
has examined the external realities facing these women as well as the internal world
of each woman.
Much of the narrative in Walker's novel is derived from her own personal
experience, growing up in the rural South as an uneducated and abused child. Right
from her earliest writings, Walker described the way that Southern race relations,
particularly the prevailing system of sharecropping, produced a painfully contradictory
relationship between African Americans and the surrounding natural world. In short,
all her writing is to inspire and motivate black women to stand up for their rights.
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When analysing Walker, the apologist and spokeswoman for black women, by
understanding the motivation for her preoccupation with her subject it is obvious that
there is simply a personal identification.
Moreover, her sense of personal identification with black women includes a
sense of sharing in their peculiar oppression. In some length she describes her own
attempts at suicide when she discovered herself pregnant in her last year of college
and at the mercy of everything, especially her own body. Walker spoke of her own
awareness and experiences with brutality and violence in the lives of black women,
many of whom she had known as a girl growing up in Eatonton, Georgia, some in her
own family. The recurrent theme running throughout in much of her work of art is
about women in her belief that black women are the most oppressed people in the
world.
Walker continues for a long time with honoured tradition as a self-determined,
proud, essayist, who believes that only the black woman can speak her voice and tell
her story. Nineteenth century black foremothers were such women. Black women being
doubly marginalised as both black and female, not only question mainstream society, but
they challenge other minority groups like the Afro-Americans on the one hand, the
feminists on the other as well. The term womanist was first coined by Alice Walker.
In 1979 she was invited by Laura Lederer to contribute an introduction to the Third
World Women’s chapter for a book which she was editing. It was here that Walker
introduced the term womanist. In the body of her selection she wrote that a womanist
is a feminist, only more common.
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Anna Julia Cooper an author, educator, speaker and one of the most prominent
African American scholars in the United States history gave her voice to womanist ideas
in the latter part of the nineteenth century stating that no Black man, White woman or
White man can decide for Black women. Cooper lifted up the idea of the undisputed
dignity of Black womanhood. This is but one of numerous instances in which Black
women have historically thought of themselves as beings of inestimable dignity,
despite the systematic dehumanising practices perpetrated against their personhood.
Walker was seeking a means by which black women could name themselves
and their experiences. Historical Resources for Womanist Ethics contends that
Walker saw a way in the term womanist, "to define the diverse ways in which black
women have bonded, sexual or not… seeks a term that is spiritual, concrete, organic
and characteristic not simply applied to describe black women’s womanbonding"
(Karen 292).
Walker’s naming of black women and their experiences and her recognition of
the importance of naming their own experience after their own fashion, is but a
continuation of a long tradition among women of African descent. Walker holds that
women of all races and classes should take the initiative to search out the truth for
themselves. There are shades of difference between the womanist and the feminist. To be
womanist, according to Walker, is to be independent, responsible, in charge and to act as
a grown up. A womanist is sassy. That is, she is determined to be her own womanperson; to be her own mouthpiece and thus to speak her mind. There is clarity in
Walker’s writings about the primacy of black humanity and dignity that must be
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encouraging to every African American. Clearly concerned to help black and other
women of colour to recapture their sense of humanity and dignity and to claim and
name their own experiences, Walker writes just as forcefully, convincingly and
imaginatively about the humanity and dignity of the entire human race.
The term womanist first appeared in Walker's In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens:
Womanist Prose (1983), in which the author attributed the word's origin to the black
folk expression of mothers to female children:
You acting womanish, i.e. like a woman … usually referring to
outrageous, audacious, courageous, or willful behavior. Wanting to
know more and in greater depth than is considered 'good' for one …
[A womanist is also] a woman who loves other women sexually and/or
non-sexually. Appreciates and prefers women's culture … and women's
strength … committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male
and female. Not a separatist … Womanist is to feminist as purple is to
lavender. (11-12)
The introduction of womanism in the feminist lexicon in the early 1980s
marks a historic moment in feminist engagement in the United States. The late 1970s and
the 1980s witnessed an internal insurgency in feminism led by women of colour who
participated in fighting vigorously against sexual politics of the previous decade only
to be confronted by the feminist politics of exclusion a decade later. Excluded from
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and alienated by feminist theorising and thinking, black women insisted that feminism
must account for different subjectivities and locations in its analysis of women, thus
bringing into focus the issue of difference, particularly with regard to race and class.
If feminism were not able to fully account for the experiences of black women, it
would be necessary, then, to find other terminologies that could carry the weight of those
experiences. It is in this regard that Walker's "womanism" intervenes to make an
important contribution. As she noted in the New York Times Magazine in 1984,
I don't choose womanism because it is 'better' than feminism … I
choose it because I prefer the sound, the feel, the fit of it; because I
cherish the spirit of the women (like Sojourner) the word calls to mind
and because I share he old ethnic-American habit of offering society a
new word when the old word it is using fails to describe behavior and
change that only a new word can help it more fully see. (94)
In other words, feminism needed a new word that would capture its complexity
and fullness. Despite Walker's claims to the contrary, she suggests in her definitions
of womanism that the womanist referring to black woman is stronger and superior to
the feminist referring to white woman.
Walker's construction of womanism and the different meanings she invests in
it is an attempt to situate the black woman in history and culture and at the same time
rescue her from the negative and inaccurate stereotypes that mask her in African
American society. First, Walker inscribes the black woman as a knowing and thinking
subject who is always in pursuit of knowledge, wanting to know more and in greater
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depth than is considered good for one, thus interrogating the epistemological
exclusions she endures in intellectual life in general and feminist scholarship in
particular. Second, she highlights the black woman's agency, strength, capability and
independence. Opposed to the gender separatism that bedevils feminism, womanism
presents an alternative for black women by framing their survival in the context of the
survival of their community where the fate of women and that of men are inextricably
linked. Collin observes:
…many black women view feminism as a movement that at best, is
exclusively for women and at worst, dedicated to attacking or
eliminating men …. Womanism seemingly supplies a way for black
women to address gender-oppression without attacking black men. (11)
In 1993, the word womanism with the meanings Alice Walker bestowed on it
was added to The American Heritage Dictionary. The concept has had a profound
influence in the formulation of theories and analytical frameworks in gender studies,
religious studies, black studies and literary studies. Because of the linking of black
women and spirituality in Walker's project, many African American female theologians
have incorporated womanist perspectives in their works. Prominent black womanist
theologians and scholars of religion such as Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, Katie Geneva
Cannon, Delores S. Williams, Emilie Maureen Townes and Marcia Y. Riggs brought
womanist perspectives to bear on their black church, canon formation, social equality,
black women's club movement of the nineteenth century, race, gender, class and
social justice. Thus, the impact of womanism goes beyond the United States to Africa
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where many women scholars and literary critics like Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi,
Tuzyline Jita Allan and Mary Modupe Kolawole, have embraced it as an analytical
tool.
Walker's womanism has also generated debates and controversies. Prominent
among those who challenge the terminology's appropriateness for framing and
explaining the lives of women of African descent is Clenora Hudson-Weems, who
proposes an alternative terminology 'Africana womanism' that is different from Black
feminism, African feminism and Walker's womanism. Many of the debates and
controversies about womanism focus on the differences and tension between
womanism and black feminism. Patricia Hill Collins offers an excellent critique of
both womanism and black feminism. Hill Collins notes that the debate about whether
to label black women's standpoint womanist or black feminist is indicative of the
diversity among black women. Collins opines:
Walker's definition thus manages to invoke three important yet
contradictory philosophies that frame black social and political thought,
namely, black nationalism via her claims of black women's moral and
epistemological superiority via suffering under racial and gender
oppression, pluralism via cultural integrity provided by the metaphor
of the garden and integration assimilation via her claims that black
women are 'traditionally universalist’. (11)
While weaving the separatism and black moral superiority of the Black Nationalist
philosophy, the pluralism of the black empowerment variant and the interrogation of
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white feminism, womanism seeks to give a voice, a standpoint to black women but
fails to adequately take into account the heterogeneity of women of African descent
with their different histories and realities.
Walker, as a renowned womanist, uses a colour analogy to describe the women of
two movements which became the foundation for women’s rights and equality.
Feminism is often the first and most prominent ideology which concerns about the
women’s rights. Considering the fight for women’s rights from the 1800s through the
Civil Rights Movement of the 50s and 60s to present day, womanism includes an
extension beyond the boundaries of race and class. It integrates the needs of women
who may have faced additional societal biases throughout the evolving history of the
movement. Womanism considers a woman’s culture, family and spirituality. There
are greater and more specific differences to each perspective and a range of views
within them, but overall there remains unity across the ideologies. Women from both
schools of thought have marched together, sat with Presidents and met with policy
makers to fight for women’s rights. All labels aside, at the end of the day, each
school of thought supports equality for women in professional and personal lives.
The definition of womanism was created by the theorist Walker, who defines
a womanist as a black feminist or feminist of colour, an outrageous and audacious
woman who is interested in learning and questioning all things. A womanist is a
responsible woman who loves other women both sexually and non-sexually, a woman
who appreciates and prefers women’s culture, strength and emotional flexibility. The
theory of womanism is committed to the survival and wholeness of all people, both men
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and women. Rather than supporting separatism, womanism promotes universalism. This
particular theory of womanism, since several have been adapted from this basic definition,
created a space for black women and women of colour who found themselves incapable
of identifying with both white feminism and black feminism. The theory of womanism
allowed women of colour space for dialogue and an opportunity for them to name
themselves and their own movement.
Womanism is also a term of wholeness that displays women of all age ranges
and cultures. This was not the case at first since the term was first used by Walker,
meaning Womanism referring to black feminism. This term embodies the whole essence
of a woman’s being and states to the world she is, whom she is, no matter if she is rich or
poor. Many women feel a drawing to this term womanist more than feminist because
of stigmatism to the word. Although Walker states that a womanist is a black feminist
or feminist of colour, she insists that a black feminist as womanist talks back to
feminism brings new demands and different perspectives to feminism and compels
the expansion of feminist horizons in theory and practice. Evans notes:
… these definitions can be used as a framework for interpreting the
works of black women writers. She observes the movement from the
specific racial reference in the first definition to a broaden application
of the term in the second and the somewhat open definition of the term
in the last definition. (12)
The Color Purple the first African American, woman-authored, epistolary novel
embodies Walker's womanist views without being reduced to a mere platform for
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ideological rhetoric. In this novel, Walker's writing reveals the transformative power
of female bonding and female love. It offers frank portrayals of bisexual, lesbian and
heterosexual relationships amidst situations that penetrate the core of female spiritual
and emotional development. What particularly distinguishes Walker in her role as an
apologist and chronicler for black women is her evolutionary treatment of black
women. In other words, she sees the experiences of black women as a series of
movements, from women totally victimised by society and by the men in their lives,
to the growth of developing women whose consciousness allows them to have control
over their lives.
Most important is the rupture and violence that mark the relationship between
black men and women. Although this subject has been raised in the fiction of earlier
American writers, like Zora Neale Hurston, it was largely ignored by most black
writers until the early 1960s. In this point of time, the strappingly felt need for a more
open analysis of black life led a few writers to challenge longstanding black middleclass prohibition against dramatising and thereby exposing anything that might
emphasise damaging racial stereotypes.
Walker had looked at the black women from her point of view and tried to
discover what happened to her as she raised a family under ghetto conditions or as a
day worker in some white women’s kitchen, or as she lived with a man struggling
with his own sense of powerlessness, or as she looked into the mirror and tried to see
beauty in full features and dark skin. Female bonding is the formation of a close
personal relationship between women. It is a term that is used in ethnology, social
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science and in general usage to describe patterns of friendship, attachment and
cooperation in women; or in the case of ethnology, associations between females of
various species. The exact meaning of the term differs across contexts.
Walker emphasises the importance of mother love for the development of a
healthy self. This vision of motherhood and gender solidarity makes woman bonding
possible. Walker holds that female bonding is inevitable for the empowerment of
black women. They consider it a solution for gender oppression. There are several
widely debated aspects of Walker's writing. One such aspect is her portrayal of black
male characters as archetypes of black men in modern society. Many reviewers
condemn her portrayals of black men as unnecessarily negative, pointing to the vile
characters in some of her works and to her own comments about black men as evidence
of enmity on her part. Some critics assert that Walker, in presenting flawed characters,
reveals typical shortcomings in the hope that real people burdened with these flaws
will recognise themselves in her stories and strive to improve. Some reviewers also
assert that Walker's work do contains positive images of black men that are often
ignored by critics. Beyond her portrayal of black men, some reviewers have found fault
with Walker's characterisation in general, opposing her tendency to refer to characters
only with pronouns, thereby encouraging readers to consider the characters exemplary
of anyone to whom that pronoun could apply. Finally, Walker's work is often viewed
as political in intent, at times to the detriment of its literary value.
African American woman have had to deal with being black and female, a
double-edged sword. Meridian highlights the obstructions to inter-racial relationship
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while at the same time underscoring their possibility. This is achieved through
emphasising the strength of female bonding in its vision of a changed human
community, be it a family or any other unit. It is asserted that “the main issue of
women’s friendship is not their personal nature but their needful link to power in the
public realm” (Raymond 252). In The Color Purple, Walker introduces Southern
black female characters who not only faced slavery, but sexism, racism and
oppression. Through a series of letters, mostly addressed to god, by the main
character Celie, one can travel through a span of thirty to forty years in the early
nineteenth century. Throughout the novel, Walker not only describes the injustices
against African Americans, but forces one to become a member of an oppressed race
as one struggles to hear the rhythm and sway of Celie's mind. The Color Purple is an
extraordinary account of a black women's plight as she strives towards acceptance,
freedom and independence. Henderson states:
Yet unlike the sentimentals, Walker’s women in the color purple
transform their lives. In the sentimental novel, the women either expire
or ultimately succumb in form if not in spirit, to patriarchal condition.
The women in Walker’s novel, however reform the essential bases of
the relationships, codes and values of their world and at the same time,
strengthen and extend the bonds of female friendship. (15)
Like many other novels by Walker that are devoted to the mistreatment of
black women in this novel too she motivates black women to stand up for their
rights. Celie in The Color Purple undergoes an inner transformation, from a passive
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battered female to a confident and liberated black woman. The novel opens with an
opening letter where we discover that Celie, the main character, was savagely raped
by her father. Such a bold beginning shows that Celie's life is anything but ordinary.
The sanctity of the family unit, so important to the American way of life, is destroyed.
The shocking details of rape, as Celie writes, are sad but a factual everyday
occurrence.
Celie understands that as a black woman she is seen as worthless and leads a
meaningless existence. There is no other way of life. It is as if all black women are
enslaved to the typical hell of exploitation, bigotry and abuse. The female characters
are moulded with pain and sacrifice. As the novel progresses, the reader gets to
follow Celie as she offered herself to a widower with four children. In spite of being a
father of four children the widower hesitates in taking Celie but after some encouragement
and a cow, he agrees. Walker’s implication here is that women are nothing but cattle
and worthless beings.
The black male in the novel is depicted as cruel, brutal and evil. He lives in a
world where white man dominates and rules. The pressures of being a man of little
worth in such a world seems to be taken out on the black female. Women are the
scapegoats for all their vented frustration. In the course of Celie's search for truth, she
realises that the patriarchal culture she has endured in the South is abusive to all
women. Celie is at the bottom of the social hierarchy in the South because she is poor,
she is black and she is female. Walker communicates that gender oppression
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compounds and complicates racist oppression. As a female, she is abused by her
father and by her husband, for she lives in a social system that does not value a female
expect as a sexual object and a labourer.
When she meets Shug and escapes from Albert, she learns for the first time
that women can be equal to men in power, in knowledge and in matters of love and
finance. When Celie returns to live in Georgia near the end of the novel, she is no
longer weak and be content without depending on anyone but herself. This is the
ultimate lesson of feminism, which Walker calls womanism. The Color Purple is more
than a historical novel about African American women and the heartaches of
discrimination and oppression. It is an inspiration for the oppressed in any society.
Walker conveys the importance of the need to unite. She sees the possibility of
empowerment for the black women if they create a community of sisters that often
can alter the unnatural definitions of women and men. The only way Celie is able to
find her individuality is through the help of a woman in her life. With the
encouragement of this woman, Celie successfully reaches the point in which she too
is strong and self-able.
Shug awakens the brutalised and silence Celie to her own strength and
sexuality through female bonding. With loving songs and tender touches, she exposes
Celie to her own loveliness and potentiality. Moreover, by her gender solidarity she
reveals an “expansive god of encompassing nature, who loves everything that one
loves” (203). And hence Celie, at the end of the novel, as the new emergent woman,
addresses God as “Dear God, Dear stars, Dear trees, Dear sky, Dear people, Dear
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everything” (292). Shug causes this psychological change by becoming the surrogate
parent and child simultaneously. She is the mother who rejected and abandoned Celie,
as well as the children taken away from her. In a moment of passionate commitment,
Shug fulfils all the roles of those who have failed to love the innocent girl, child and
women. Creation for Celie is self-creation. When she examines her life, the fragments
parallel those messed up curtains used in quilting: “I am poor, I’m, black, I may be
ugly and can’t work, a voice say to everything listening. But I’m here” (187). The last
affirmation ‘But I’m here,’ is the thread that joins the rejected pieces of faith together
and transforms those pieces from waste to a valuable self.
The black women’s lives and their consciousness differ from the other Americans.
Hence, the literature of black women forms a kind of separate entity as it evolves from
their special black feminist consciousness. Thus, Shug Avery, the blues singer,
transforms Celie through female bonding. Recognised as one of the leading voices
among black American women writers, Walker’s portrayal of the struggle of black
people throughout history, is praised for her insightful and riveting portraits of black
life, in particular the experiences of black women in a sexist and racist society.
A dominant theme is the power of women coming together. The women see
men as careless and insignificant to their lives. Women in the novel are degraded by
men and generally used as an object of pleasure. The female relationships are friendly
and sisterly and also sexual. Celie and Sofia have a friendly relationship with each
other because Celie was Sofia’s stepmother-in-law and they befriended each other
because the men in their life treated them poorly. Shug Avery had a large amount of
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shallow relationships in her life previous to Celie and Celie had always been in
relationships that were the product of real or implied threats of violence. As such, she had
never fallen in love. After pursuing a relationship with one another they found
happiness in life. Celie and Nettie provide the sisterly relationship in the novel. Nettie
is Celie’s hope and faith for life. They constantly push each other throughout the book
to stay true to God and they believe that they will meet again one day. As Celie moves
forward in religious consciousness, she also journeys through selfhood and the
possibility of wholeness. Her subjective introspection affirms her individual analysis
about herself and her contexts. “If a black woman is able to recognize God in herself,
by herself and is able to love this God, then she can love herself also” (Cliff 11).
Both men and women are stereotypical in believing that men overrule women.
Also, they think that no matter what, their kids will grow up in a racist society. As an
example, Harpo begins to eat and eat for the sole purpose to grow big, like his wife
Sofia. By growing big he thinks he will have an easier time beating Sofia to prove his
manhood. Furthermore, Sofia is convinced because of society’s influence her children
will become cynical of everyone around them, just like her other family is. These
characters have difficulty accepting this condition, yet they see no hope of change in
the future.
Throughout Walker's work the preservation of black culture prevails as
important and her female characters forge important links to maintain continuity in
both personal relationships and communities. Walker is concerned with heritage to
which she is not so much the grand sweep of history or artifacts created as it is the
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relations of people to each other, young to old, parent to child and man to woman.
Walker admires the struggle of black women throughout history to maintain an essential
spirituality and creativity in their lives and their achievements serve as an inspiration to
others. In In Search of Our Mother's Garden she says:
We must fearlessly pull out of ourselves and look at and identify with
our lives the living creativity some of our great-grandmothers were not
allowed to know. I stress 'some' of them because it is well known that
the majority of our great-grandmothers knew, even without 'knowing'
it, the reality of their spirituality, even if they didn't recognize it beyond
what happened in the singing at church and they never had any
intention of giving it up. (92)
The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Walker’s first novel depicts cycles of
male violence in three generations of an impoverished Southern black family [the
Copelands] and displays Walker's interest in social conditions that affect family
relationships, in addition to her recurring theme of the suffering of black women at
the hands of men. The novel revolves around a father [Grange] who abandons his
abused wife and young son [Brownfield] for a more prosperous life in the North and
returns years later to find his son similarly abusing his own family. However, Walker
was also faulted for her portrayal of black men as violent, an aspect which is
frequently criticised in her work.
The female, according to Southern norms, should present herself in image of
passivity, chastity and demure beauty and should receive from men the rewards of
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security, comfort and respect, rewards that neither Margaret nor Mem Copeland can
exhibit. Like his father, Brownfield at first dreams of going North, but even these
dreams finally die. Imprisoned in his life, he, like Grange, begins to see his wife as a
trap and gives her the blame for this failure. Both Grange and Brownfield know by
themselves that Margaret and Mem are not to blame for the waste in all of their lives.
But since they cannot get near the true cause of their poverty, their wives are
accessible targets upon whom they can vent their frustration.
Again, the bits and pieces are slightly different, but the pattern remains the
same. By knowing that it would be madness, Grange and Brownfield never minds to bite
the hands that feed them. It would be madness too to believe that they could defeat the
sharecropping system. Knowing what their society denies, the Copeland males try to free
themselves first by working hard. When this fails, they blame themselves for their
impotence, their inability to fulfill the masculine urge to power. Finally, they use
whatever power they feel they have, primarily their power over their women, in a
destructive way. Their masculine urge is blocked and therefore turns in on itself. So,
Grange abandons his family and goes North where he learns the harshness of
invisibility; whereas, Brownfield attacks the only vulnerable person available to him,
his lovely wife.
The lives of their wives also follow a similar pattern. Both Grange and
Brownfield marry sweet, virgin women who had had a girlhood brimming with hope.
Margaret and Mem at first believed that through love, kindness fortitude and orderliness,
they can create and maintain a good home with their husbands. The wives are
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programmed to be demure and pretty, to plant flowers and be chaste. If they do these
things well, they believe they will receive their just rewards. Because they believe in the
definition of a woman dictated by society, neither Margaret nor Mem is emotionally
prepared to understand, far less cope with, their reality. So, when the rewards do not
materialise, when in fact they are abused and blamed by their men for their failure,
the wives believe that they have not done their part well.
Depressed by their condition, Margaret and Grange fight as if to preserve some
part of the feeling of being alive. Crushed by the deadly labour of her days and the
neglect of her husband, the kind and submissive Margaret becomes a wild woman
looking frivolous. She blames herself, without knowing what she can do, for everything,
especially for not being able to deliver her husband from his lot in life. So when Grange
leaves her, Margaret accepts the responsibility for his failure and the pain of her loss.
She was curled up in a lonely sort of way, away from her child, as if she had spent the
last moment on her knees.
Mem’s response to her husband’s abuse is not quite the same as Margaret’s.
She begins to deteriorate; she loses the school speech and the plump beauty that
Brownfield had coveted. Her mildness became stupor; then her stupor became horror,
desolation and at last hatred. In most of the situations she cannot act because she does
not believe or understand what is happening to her. Mem’s determination to have a house
and Brownfield’s fear of her growing strength is clearly pictured in Part Five. All through
his life Brownfield had to respect the white boss’s power and the castrating mode is the
form that his power usually takes. Mem finally resorts to his mode of behaviour in
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order to get her husband to act for his own benefit. She has no choice. If she does not
challenge Brownfield’s definition of masculinity, she and her children will not survive. She
must use her own skills, even if Brownfield feels diminished by them, or her entire family
will be destroyed. To save her children, Mem must become aggressive rather than
passive; she must be willing to create security and comfort for herself rather than have it
delivered to her and she must be willing to do it alone, without a man. As Brownfield’s
definition of himself as a man does not change, he moves forward to kill her with the
gun with which she first proclaimed her recent independence. Tormented by his
inability to change, he cannot allow her to. Mem dies violently as did Margaret, a
generation before.
Irigaray opines:
… a male defined culture seeks to define woman, on the one hand, in
terms of want; she is “a void” and “empty receptacle”. Yet, conversely,
it perceives her simultaneously as possessing “potency” for evil which
makes her a positive threat. (165-166)
According to Walker, so many black women, like Margaret and Mem, have
been crushed and utterly destroyed precisely because they are black and because they
are women. Margaret and Mem are examples of Walker’s first group of black women,
the most abused of the abused. It is important to note that these women are destroyed
when they begin to gather strength or to rebel.
Walker, in her The Temple of My Familiar, devotes far more attention to her
male characters, as they constitute fifty percent of the main characters. Although each
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of the male characters still has to learn something and is not quite perfect as a person
yet, their portrayal is strikingly less harsh than that of Mr.Albert in The Color Purple,
which was criticised extensively for putting forward a very negative view of men.
Yet, as she herself indicates, Mr.Albert embodies Walker’s belief that people can develop
positively, a view that is present even more explicit in The Temple of My Familiar.
However, it should not be a surprise that the one character who reaches the status of
wholeness from the beginning of the novel and consequently serves as a guide is
Lissie, a woman.
In the same subtle way, some passages in the novel suggest that, without saying,
men are evil; women are one step ahead in the development towards wholeness. First of
all, throughout the centuries, it is women who have had a special relationship “with
animals and with her children that deeply satisfied [them]. It was of this that man was
jealous” (201). Secondly, “the women alone had familiars. In the men’s group, or
tribe, there was no such thing.” (361) with the having of a familiar being the symbol
of wholeness as it implies a close connection to animal and nature, this again suggests
that women were more whole than men from the beginning of history. Obviously, this
novel deals with sexism and the gender issue in several ways. Firstly, all the female
protagonists are or have been victims of sexism. The most obvious example probably
is Carlotta, who tries to please men by behaving as a “female impersonator” (386).
Yet, Fanny as well is perfectly aware of the impact of sexism, which to her is inextricably
linked with her position as a coloured woman.
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The novel implicitly, yet effectively, criticises some of the most important
aspects of current sexist or patriarchal society [e.g. religion, marriage, government and
academy] by numerous references to matriarchal systems. Such ancient matriarchies are
opposed to the present day institutions that Fanny describes as “unnatural bodies,
male-supremacist private clubs” (274). The present situation is traced back to the point
where everything goes wrong. Whereas, up to that moment men and women lived in
separate tribes, visiting each other regularly, living in perfect harmony with each other,
themselves and the nature and animals surrounding them, at a certain moment men
and women merge. While merging, the men asserted themselves, alone, as the
familiars of women. They moved in with their dogs, which they ordered to chase
them. This was a time of trauma for women and other animals alike.
Not only the animals suffer, both men and women do as well. The men took it
on themselves to say what should and should not be done by all, which meant they
lost the freedom of their long, undisturbed, contemplative days in the men’s camp.
The women, in compliance with the men’s bossiness, because they became emotionally
dependent on the individual man by whom man’s law decreed and they have all their
children, lost their wildness, that quality of homey ease on the earth that they shared
with the rest of the animals. Ever since that moment, men and women have allowed
for a patriarchal system to develop, in which women were treated badly. Even black
men, who should have learned from their own oppression by white people, are guilty
of this.
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The factors that help Celie, the protagonist in The Color Purple, probably the
most famous victim of racism and sexism at once in literature, to throw off the yoke
of her double oppression are also present in The Temple of My Familiar. First of all,
women, in order to be fully appreciated as women, should explore themselves in every
possible way, which means sexually too. They have to come to terms with their own
sexuality, to know and appreciate their own body, before they will be able to enjoy a
sexual relationship with a man. In The Temple of My Familiar, sex is referred to in two
ways. On the one hand, there is unfulfilling sex, for example, the sex Suwelo forces
both Fanny and Carlotta to have with him and in which he projects his male-oriented
fantasies. He even tries to force Fanny to wear sexy lingerie and tells Lissie and Hal
how “[s]he felt terrible. She cried and said she felt degraded” (281). It should not have
been a surprise when Fanny later confesses to him that she has never experienced an
orgasm with him. On the other hand, there is the type of sex that is possible only if
both, the woman and the man value the woman for being a woman. It is the sex that
Arveyda and Fanny have at the end of the novel. But, for this to happen, Fanny has to
come to terms with her sexuality herself. Just like Shug made Celie aware of these
factors, Fanny is helped as well:
Fanny thinks of the years during which her sexuality was dead to her.
How once she began to understand man’s oppression of women and to
let herself feel it in her own life, she ceased to be aroused by men.
By Suwelo in particular, addicted as he was to pornography. And then,
the women in her consciousness -raising group had taught her how to
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masturbate. Suddenly she’d found herself free. Sexually free, for the
first time in her life. At the same time, she was learning to meditate and
was throwing off the last clinging vestiges of organized religion. She was
soon meditating and masturbating and finding herself dissolved into
the cosmic All. Delicious. (389)
Walker explored similar terrain in her acclaimed novel Meridian, in which she
recounts the personal evolution of a young black woman against the backdrop of the
politics of the Civil Rights Movement. Structurally complex, the novel raises questions of
motherhood for the politically aware female and the implications for the individual
committed to revolution. In this novel, Walker projects African American men’s view
of black women as donkeys and sexual beasts, and also additionally links indigenous
animistic spiritualisation of nature, with civil rights activism against Southern racial
segregation. Meridian fights to reject the social geography of racial segregation that
impoverishes her people, particularly the black mothers who are driven to desperate
straits trying to care for children seen as worthless by the larger society.
Within the social landscape of Meridian, black women experience a similar
dispossession of their own bodies. As a girl and as a young woman, Meridian is
bombarded with the sexual advances of men such as her boyfriends, the funeral
parlour employees, the Saxon college doctor and the retired professor, all of whom
offer her food and favours in return for sexual grappling. Meridian views sex as an
unequal exchange in which males gain pleasure and women gain a small degree of
economic and social security. Meridian unintentionally discovers that heterosexual
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119
relations in her society also lead inexorably to pregnancy, further undermining
women’s already limited self-determination when they assume the overwhelming
responsibilities of motherhood within a society that scorns black children.
Meridian recounts the blighting pain of the poor black mothers whose lives are
a debilitating attempt to raise their children in a society that devalues and actively
destroys black life and in which women are most often handed entire responsibility for
reproduction and sustenance of children. In the precarious struggle to raise children
within the harsh conditions of Southern segregation, the mother’s well-being is often
sacrificed in order to secure the existence of her children. Meridian comes to understand
that this painfully perverse maternity is a historical legacy of the system of American
slavery in which African American women were treated as breeders who owned
neither themselves nor their children. Meridian comments upon the contradictory
relation of slave mothers to their children as,
They would not have belonged to her but to the white person who
‘owned’ them all. Meridian knew that enslaved women had been made
miserably by the sale of their children that they had laid down their
lives, gladly, for their children that the daughters of these enslaved
women had thought their greatest blessing from ‘Freedom’ was that it
meant they could keep their own children. (91)
Meridian realises that, having suffered the dissolution of kinship ties under slavery
and having made terrible sacrifices in order to maintain families, black women have,
of necessity, defined their lives around the continuing struggle to preserve their children
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amidst a hostile white society. Meridian is awestruck by the mothers’ resistive
determination, yet she also realises that black women continue to face unbearable
contradiction, because the contradictions of motherhood have often required them
both figuratively and literally to lay down their own lives in an often vain attempt to
save their children from overt and covert racial violence. Yet most of the women in
the novel view their sufferings as inevitable and inescapable, natural rather than
historically conditioned. Meridian’s mother too voices typical resignation. Meridian
contests the oppressive terms of race and gender that have projected black women as
the mules of the world. Many of her acts of protest and service are undertaken on
behalf of suffering black women, such as the pregnant street waif Wild Child, the rural
women whom Meridian encourages to register to vote, the dying women whose family
she feeds and the thirteen year old girl incarcerated for murdering her baby whom
Meridian visits in prison. Davis opines: "In spite of her painful private experiences
Meridian is born anew into a pluralistic cultural self, a “we” that is and must be selfless and without ordinary prerequisites for personal identity" (49).
Walker’s Meridian, proceeds naturally from The Third Life of Grange Copeland
and focuses mainly on the black woman’s struggle. Walker uses the image of black
children and black mothers, of nature and music and of the relationship between the
body and the spirit in every chapter. Meridian feels that her mother is truly great
because she had persisted in bringing the children, the husband and the family to a
point beyond where she in her mother’s place, her grandmother’s place, her great
grandmother’s place, would have stopped. Through Meridian’s experiences, Walker
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examines one of the society’s major contradictions about black women. As society
places motherhood on a pedestal, in reality, it rejects individual mothers as human
beings with needs and desires. True for all mothers, this double edged dilemma is
heightened for black women because society does not value their children. As they
are praised for being mothers, they are also damned as baby machines that spew out
their products indiscriminately upon the society.
While Walker's works speak strongly of the experiences of black women,
critics have commented that the messages of her books transcend both race and gender.
She speaks the female experience more powerfully for being able to pursue it across
boundaries of race and class. The similarities in the marginalising experiences of people
with disabilities, African Americans and women have been pointed out. The two types of
socio-cultural manifestations of marginalisation have been linked to an internalised belief
in the superiority of one group over another. Women of a darker skin colour have a
double experience of marginalisation on account of race and gender; they live and
work with Westerners. Racism and capitalism have trampled the potential of black
people in this country and thwarted their self-determination. Walker’s works depicts
not only the confrontational psychology which sways the dynamics of black
relationships but also the emerging consciousness of black women which lead them to
question prevailing cultural assumptions about themselves. Conflict between the
sexes, male aggression and lack of cohesiveness within the family and the community
undermine the civilisation itself. A study of Walker’s work must include both the
personal, psychological nuances of black women’s identity as well as the positive
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122
or problematic aspects of relations between the sexes. “…You cannot very well do a
hatchet job on Black men without also doing a hatchet job on Black Women”
(Gayle 213).
Initially, the physical characteristics of those of African descent were used to fit
blacks into the lowest niche in the capitalist hierarchy and that of maintenance. Therefore,
black women and men of today do not encourage division by extending physical
characteristics to serve as a criterion for a social hierarchy. If the potential of the
black woman is seen mainly as a supportive role for the black man, then the black
woman becomes an object to be utilised by another human being. Her potential
stagnates and she cannot begin to think in terms of self-determination for herself and
all black people. A woman who stays at home, caring for children and the house,
often leads an extremely sterile existence. She must lead her entire life as a satellite to
her mate. He goes out into society and brings back a little piece of the world for her. His
interests and his understanding of the world become her own and she cannot develop
herself as an individual, having been reduced to only a biological function.
Furthermore, it is idle dreaming to think of black women simply caring for
their homes and children like the middle class white model. Most black women have to
work to help house, feed and clothe their families. Black women make up a substantial
percentage of the black working force and this is true for the poorest black family as
well as the so called middle class family. Those who are exerting their manhood by
telling black women to step back into a domestic, submissive role are assuming a
counter-revolutionary position.
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Through this analysis, it is clear that the double suppression and discrimination
of black women is brought out more sensually by Alice Walker than by Richard
Wright. Although an author creates objective works it is indispensable for anyone to
be out of self completely. The self and the personal experiences play a vital role in
imaginary works too. This is obvious in the works of both these authors. Richard
Wright’s protagonists in most of his novels express the emotions of African American
men in a pluralistic society and meanwhile forget that their counterparts are also
human beings with fellow feelings and emotions. As they are differentiated by the
white society, they need to boss over someone and ventilate their pressure, which
could obviously be done to their women who will and should tolerate it. Naturally, the
women at home suffer in the name of a wife, mother, sister or daughter.
In the case of Alice Walker’s protagonists, especially black women, are well
threaded as the unknown odds of the society. While Richard Wright’s female
portrayals are given no equal importance when compared to their counterparts. For
example Bessie or Lil, they are to play a role for fulfilling the needs of their men.
Whereas Alice Walker’s Shug Avery, being a female completely understands the
nature of Celie and shows a new path which becomes a revolution in the life of Celie.
Here, the betterment is brought out by a woman for a woman. Male and female
authors’ ways of dealing with the doubly marginalised black woman in their works
can be thus reviewed from different perspectives.
To sum up, African American women have been physically, sexually and
economically exploited and abused by the oppressive white society as well as by the
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124
men of their own society. Both Wright and Walker have brought out this terrible
plight of the African American women in their works. The former reflexively but the
latter intentionally have projected the same. Wright’s women characters represent the
troubles of the African American women during the early half of the nineteenth
century, before the Civil Rights Movement and Walker’s women characters represent
the African American women during and after the Movement. Women characters of
both Wright and Walker suffer the abuse of both white and black oppression.
Violence and sexual abuse victimise them.
Wright’s female characters are looked down by his male characters as foolish,
unfaithful and troublesome. They consider their women as one of the causes for their
miserable condition. His male characters use their women as punching bags to take
out their frustrations against white oppression. They think that women make them
helpless and powerless. They find African American women, a convenient target to
vent out their anger. Whatever may be the reasons, it is the African American woman
who suffers violence and abuse in the hands of her own man, besides having to
endure the racial oppression that does not differentiate women from men.
Both Richard Wright and Alice Walker have competitively succeeded in their
representation of African American culture, traditional set up and most importantly
their communities loss of identity in the white society. But they differ in their attitude
towards black women. Through Wright’s works it could be understood that he clearly
pictured the feelings and emotions of a black man towards their discrimination, which
seems to be the major issue and might be his experience. To him, racial discrimination
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ends with the issues of white society dominating black, particularly black male. Less
importance is given to his female characters and sometimes it is nil. In the case of
Alice Walker much importance is given to her female characters. Her male characters
are at times pictured negatively. The reason for this negative portrayal could be easily
traced out from her personal experience and by seeing the condition of common
women around her in her society. For the need of a solution, it is of no use in arguing
about the strengths and weaknesses of a man or a woman. It is the time for everyone
to erase the gender discrimination and to work with a join venture for the uplift of the
family and the society, which could not be found in both the authors. Gender
solidarity blossoms only when men and women understand each other and perhaps
believe that both are dependent on each other with a sense of sacrifice.
The forthcoming chapter would be a focus on the post colonial techniques adopted
by Richard Wright and Alice Walker in projecting their characters through their
works. It also will focus on the male and female perspectives of African American
culture, tradition and the central theme of double oppression in these select novels and
will analyse how they have utilised certain techniques for a deep understanding of the
characters and growth of the plot.
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