Walker’s Womanist Rewriting Of The Philomela Myth In The Color Purple

Abstract:The Color Purple, written by Alice Walker, is a pivotal text in the tradition of literature by black women writers who have taken as their theme a young black woman’s journey from silence to voice. It remains a classic work, reviewed and reread over the decades since its publication. The text has been approached through different perspectives that treat the novel as social history, psychoanalytic case study, love story, fairy tale and so on. This thesis aims to illuminate the novel’s discovery of true female selfhood and identity from the perspective of intertextuality.The thesis starts with the previous researches on the intertextuality between The Color Purple and other western literary works, including the ancient Greek myth of Philomela, as well as Richardson’s Clarissa and Pamela. Based on these earlier endeavors, the study of this paper sets out to explore the womanist rewriting of the Philomela myth in The Color Purple. This thesis mainly focuses on the discussion of the intertextuality between The Color Purple and the Philomela myth;2) Walker’s revisioning of the Philomela Myth in The Color Purple.Chapter One studies the adoption of the Philomela myth in The Color Purple, which consists of three parts:the appropriation of the mythic plot; of the mythic archetype of rape; and of the imageries embodied in the mythic text.Chapter Two illustrates Walker’s rewriting of the Philomela myth in womanist representation and is composed of four parts:the womanist rewriting of the mythic plot in The Color Purple; the womanist communicative process that leads to reconstruction rather than destruction; lesbian love as an alternative of sexual expression to being objectified as an absence in the mythic male plot; as well as maternity and sisterhood presented in The Color Purple.Chapter Three explores Walker’s womanist shifts in narrative strategies, which is composed of three segments:the womanist narrator in The Color Purple; the womanist narrative mode and the alternative methodology of womanist language the conflation of needle and pen.Paradoxically, the myth Walker rejects is the same myth that she has got inspirations from. Walker’s text doesn’t swallow the myth as a whole, but in establishing an interconnection with the Philomela myth, it has entered into dialogue with the previous mythic text of the Philomela myth, utilizing the archetype it assents as powerful, and more importantly, transgressing the plot to suit her ideology of womanism. In reviving Philomela’s voice, The Color Purple praises not Philomela as the victim or Philomela’s resort to violence, rather it praises Philomela’s weaving, the woman artist who in recovering her own voice uncovers not only its power, but its potential to transform violence into peace.