Alice Walker's Views of Her Work

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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