A Trilogy Of Black Women’s Growth:A Womanist Reading Of Alice Walker’s Short Stories

Alice Walker (1944-) is well-known as an outstanding contemporary Afro-American novelist, poet, essayist, literary critics and influential woman writer in American literature. While mentioning Alice Walker, many people may recognize her for the representative work The Color Purple (1982), an exploration of womanism, for which she has won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award in1983.Although less renowned than her novels, Alice Walker’s short stories, which are interweaved with novels in time sequence, are integral to her accomplishments. Her three short story collections, praised for the honesty and depth of feeling include In Love and Trouble:Stories of Black Women (1973), You Can’t Keep A Good Woman Down (1981), and the autobiographical book of stories The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart (2000). These short stories reflect Walker’s concern for black women and their journey to growth. Walker’s women in these stories are witnessed in three-phase development:women in love and trouble, being abused by both sexism and racism in the first phase, women who can not be kept down, being awakened to fight and emancipation in the second phase, and women finding the secret to happiness, being free, independent and grown in the third phase. With the creation of vivid women images, Walker records their surviving reality, their tears, rebel and laughters. Her stories are noted for poetic language, emotional intensity, epic themes and rich images. Along with her other literary achievements, Walker’s short stories make a significant contribution to American letters and African American literature.In Walker’s essay collections In Search of Our Mothers’Gardens:Womanist Prose, she creates a new coined term—"womanism" rather than the term "feminism", which advocates the equality in race and sex; and more importantly, it is intended to end the oppression of all women, no matter what color of skin they have and, what’s more, pursue coexistence in harmony and survival of wholeness in all humans. Womanism symbolizes Walker’s maturation of black female consciousness. As a black woman writer, Walker, in her works, writes on issues of racial and sexual discriminations and class oppression. She specially shows her concern and reflection about the destiny of the black women, the African-American culture and their communities. Most of her works represents her celebration of black women who have had the wherewithal to discover inside themselves from which to draw strength, and have thus fulfilled growth, as Walker herself has done. Her literary creation is closely connected with the social environment, family background and her life experience. On one hand, the American Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Liberation Movement and the Black Feminist Criticism make contributions to the awakening of her black female consciousness; on the other hand, the experience of growing in a poor and violent family and her interracial marriage give her a clear understanding of the existential state of the black women. All these social backgrounds later fuel Walker’s most moving stories and passionate insights.Study on Walker’s works appears in a great deal, yet the foreign and domestic scholarship on her three short story collections has seldom been made. Based on the above research achievements and limitations, this thesis makes a tentative reading of Walker’s short story collections from the womanism perspective to make up for the gap. This thesis intends to further the research on Alice Walker and help readers to better understand her womanist concept.The whole thesis is divided into five parts:Chapter One is a brief introduction to Alice Walker and her theoretical perspective——womanism. Alice Walker creates the term "womanism" to show her firm fight against sexism and racism and express her ideal to women’s emancipation, freedom and growth. Then a general review of critical views on Walker’s short stories both at home and abroad is provided. Based on this literature review, it stresses the significance of the study and central argument of the thesis.Chapter two, three and four are the body parts of the thesis to demonstrate the development of Walker’s womanism in the analysis of her three short story collections respectively.Chapter Two studies Walker’s first short story collection In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women. By analyzing stories on the victims of both racism and sexism, Walker denounces the injustice imposed on black women in the patriarchal society dominated by the whites and reveals their pain and struggling.Chapter Three studies her second short story collection You Can’t Keep A Good Woman Down. Through illustrating stories of the defender of the black culture and fighter for self-identity, Walker demonstrates the invincible power in those black women for fighting and emancipation.Chapter Four studies her third short story collection, the autobiographical book The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart. With the analysis of stories on black women’s freedom in choosing happiness and love, and their journey to growth, Walker advocates that black women are entitled with freedom in pursuing happiness and love, and they can finally find the path to growth.In the last chapter, the thesis comes to a conclusion based upon the foregoing chapters that with a full and profound examination of Alice Walker’s short stories spanning27years, the author finds out her three short story collections actually constitute a trilogy of black women’s growth:from pain of struggling to fighting for emancipation and to growth of wholeness and freedom, which in fact reflects the development of Walker’s womanist thought.