Female Consciousness in Alice Walker’s the Color Purple

Abstract: African American literature has been predominantly a male-preserve in the task of narrating the experience of slavery and its relics of denigration before the advent of reactionary literature by black female writers. Studies on female-authored African American literary works have concentrated on responding to male-authored representations of the tensions of racism, internal crisis of man-woman relationships and the challenges of empowering the black female character. This paper focuses on the exploration of assertive female characters through a concerted consciousness-awakening among African American women within a cycle of oppression. This study, therefore, investigates the narrative thrust of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple against the back drop of the Civil Rights era on female character portrayal. The study adopts Alice Walker’s womanist theory which accounts for the construction of black women consciousness and advocates for a more integrative societal structure. A close reading of the novel, The Color Purple (1982) reveals that Alice Walker’s narrative keeps within the womanist tradition and exemplifies the Civil Rights era while situating the novel within specific historical, socio-political, economic, gendered and literary context