Deconstructive Interpretation Of The Color Purple

As one of the most famous and influential African-American writers, Alice Walker (1944- ) has created a number of profound and popular works. Her creative genius earns her"a wholly representative writer of and for our current era"(Bloom, Modern Critical Views 1). Her works centers on issues such as the effects of racial and sexual oppression, black victimization, and the difficulties African-Americans face in trying to achieve as a sense of identity in the White centered society.The Color Purple, the masterpiece of Walker, was published in 1982 and earned Walker the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and National Book Award. The story follows an uneducated black woman during thirty years of life, through her suffering and attempts to find love and identity in her life. The novel depicts the sexual subjugation and violence graphically that many black women endured during the 20th century; as a result, it has been banned multiple times. Until 1985, the film adaptation was directed by the famous director Steven Spielberg, making the novel well-known all over the world. The novel has been studied by scholars and critics home and abroad from various perspectives, at abroad, the novel has been widely read and amply researched ever after its birth, but a deconstructive reading has not been systematically done so far. At home, the study from the deconstructive perspective is comparatively insufficient, so the deconstructive reading of The Color Purple is waiting to be amplified.Illuminated by the studies available at home and abroad, this thesis will take Walker's novel The Color Purple as its research object and concentrates on hierarchical determinants in her works, where determinants like race, gender, and religion are overlapped and interacted. The writer of the thesis will explore how Derridean deconstructive ideas reflect in Walk's writing.The thesis will divide into three parts. First part, the introduction, proposes to offer a literary review of The Color Purple, and provides the reason and purpose of deconstructive study. Faced with a modern cultural crisis and the possibility of dissolution of black cultural characters, Walker attempts to deconstruct white logocentrism, to pursue a cultural plurality and to reconstruct African-American identity in a world of difference.Chapter One is entitled"The Deconstructive Perspective". This chapter briefly introduces the development of Derridean deconstruction, and the main focus of his theory, then analyzes the relation between this theory and Walker's womanism. Chapter Two,"Deconstruction in Writing Strategy", concentrates on the writing strategies used in The Color Purple. For the ease of analysis, this chapter intends to explore the deconstructive significance from three sections: the black woman writing, epistolary novel and the black vernacular advocated by Walker. Chapter Three,"Deconstruction in Writing Theme", aims to explore deconstructive effects in the theme of the novel. The research will be conducted from three perspectives: subversion of the gender hierarchy, subversion of the monotheistic religion and collective black community advocated by Walker.The conclusion of the thesis will summarize the major points of Walker's deconstructive writing and conclude the significance of the optimistic ending in The Color Purple. Readers will see more clearly how language subverts the existing logocentrism implicit in the Western culture and literature.