Women·Nature·Harmony: An Interpretation Of The Color Purple From The Ecofeminist Perspective

Alice Walker,contemporary African-American black female writer, is a shining star in the black literary fields. As a black feminist, Alice Walker never stops speaking for the victims of racism and patriarchalism: women, children, animals and nature, and devotes herself to the fights for the equal rights of all. Thus, most of her works concentrate on such issues as the dilemma of black people, the muted group of black women, ecology or colonism.The Color Purple is an important work in Afro-American literature and American literature. In the novel, Walker depicts the black women's hard life in the patriarchal society and expresses her love and sympathy for the earth and nature which share equal misery with the black women. Walker, by placing human beings and nature on the same moral par, strongly suggests an ecocentric world view that one thing leads to another thing. Clearly, Walker takes an ecofeminist stance.This thesis is a tentative study of the ecofeminist awareness that Alice Walker presents through the description of the male's twin domination over women and nature. It consists of five parts, with three chapters coming between the introduction and the conclusion.Chapter One provides a theoretical framework based on which the thesis develops, that is, ecofeminism, which advocates that men's domination of women and nature occurs concurrently.Chapter Two probes into the interconnection between women and nature. Alice Walker moulds a number of women characters in the novel, all of whom have the capability to communicate with nature and love nature. This chapter is further divided into two parts, with the first part demonstrating the oneness between women and nature and the second analyzing the oppression men inflict on women and nature. In the first part, an analogy is made between women and three things in nature, that is, tree, animal and land, to manifest the affinity between women and nature while in the second part women and nature are presented as the victims of the male-dominated society: women suffering men's rape, and nature encountering men's exploitation. Through the portrayal of sufferings of black women and nature, Alice Walker poignantly criticizes the patriarchalism and male Chauvinism, and at the same time shows her great concern for the oppressed parties.Chapter Three explores the prospects of harmony in the world. Walker delineates a beautiful world where human beings and nature coexist in harmony. Women's self-recognation, men's appreciation of women and nature, the new image of God and the pantheist idea pervading in the novel all manifest the harmony Walker has longed for. Eventually, the world would turn into a promising land in which mutual dependence exists everywhere.The thesis is expected to shed fresh light on the research of the novel and evoke more people's environmnental awareness. From the ecofeminist approach, it can be concluded that Walker has consciously engrossed in what ecofeminists are doing now: to criticize the anthropocentrism which results in the twin domination of women and nature, to reconstruct a harmonious world, and to celebrate the harmonious relationship between human beings and nature.