Awakening Of The Black Angel

Alice Walker is regarded as one of the most important black woman writers in the contemporary American literature, and many of her works are rooted from her native region—Gerogia. Her works show the miserable condition of the black women's lives and their struggle for equality and"wholeness".The long epistolary novel The Color Purple is her representative works to show her special black feminism ideas. The term"womanist"first appeared in Alice 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". She has her own unique ideas about the feminism and established the special theory—womanism. According to Walker , this new theory is different from other femisim theories and it is committed to the survival and wholeness of the entire people, male and femle, the womanist is not a separatist. She unifies the anti-sexism, racism and class discrimination, she suggests the establishment of sisterhood, the unity of the femal and male. This theory has enriched the meaning and struggle pattern of the feminism, and it also provides a completely new viewpoint of the feminist movement and literary criticism.This thesis focuses on the analysis of Walker's womanism in order to illustrate how the protagonist gets rid of the oppression from the black male and re-establishes a harmonious relationship between the black men and women.