Alice Walker
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Alice Walker writes about her own youth and development into a woman and shows how gender roles in childhood are more flexible. in her own case, she was an eight-year-old tomboy, a term that itself is an imposed gender role. In fact, she was herself, acting out the attitudes she had as a child, reflecting her culture, and developing as a person. After an accident occurs to her eye, leaving her unable to see clearly out of it, she yearns for the eye to repair itself so she can be "normal," can achieve a state she calls "beauty." In this case, she is not concerned about the standard of beauty imposed on women by men but rather on simply appearing to be like other people. They are beautiful, and she is not because her eye is different. She grows up, marries, has a daughter, and still worries about her eye and her supposed lack of beauty: I am twenty-seven, and my baby daughter is almost three. Since her birth I have worried about her discovery that her mother's eyes are different from other people's. Will she be embarrassed? (Walker, Same River Twice 51). When her daughter does look at her eye, however, the young child sees a world of pain and experience in that eye. Walker is both a person and a woman, and she learns that she is both because of her experience as a child and a woman and not in spite of it. Walker's best-known work is her novel The Color Purple, in which she writes about people she has known, people who lived in the part of the country where she g
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Though slavery was outlawed at the end of the Civil War, the social reality was that blacks in the South were still considered second-class citizens and were not given the same opportunities as whites. Their movements were also circumscribed to a great extent, and the law was on the side of the whites and not the blacks. The social attitudes that developed during the period of slavery, with one race of people elevated over another, continue in the time of this book. The black characters are living in a different kind of slavery, and this slavery derives from the fact that their opportunities are fewer when compared with the whites in the same community. Black-white tensions are not central in this novel, though they are seen in the attitudes and actions of the Mayor, but racial tensions are a subtext of the events just the same.
When the movie version of the novel was in production, Walker sent a letter to actor Danny Glover, who was playing a role tantamount to Walker's grandfather, who had abused her grandmother for years:
He was . . . never violent, never raised his voice the whole time I lived with them and yet, the effects of this violence I could see plainly in Rachel and in her slavish behavior . . . It was year
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1294
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
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