On Female Self-Discovery Of Alice Walker And Toni Morrison

Alice Walker and Toni Morrison are among the most outstanding Afro-American female writers in Contemporary American Literature. Their works have been popular since 1960 s, showing deep concerns for the American black females’ suffering lives and experiences. Their writings are deeply rooted in the reality of the black females searching for self-worth and identity in a white-and-male dominant society. Scholars mainly studied their works from the perspectives of literary criticism, writing features and contemporary Western literary theories, achieved great successes particularly from the angle of feminism. However, few scholars put the two writers together or carried out a comparative research on their writings. Although some essays glanced at the positive attitudes toward black female self-discovery, they lacked depth on the analysis of the two writers’ different strategies on this theme.This dissertation is an attempt to analyze the different strategies the two authors present to achieve self-discovery of black females after undergoing the most painful encounters through a comparative study of their respective novels—The Color Purple and The Bluest Eye.The body of the dissertation mainly focuses on the contrast between the two protagonists in respective novels. Both are the poor black females who suffer and endure a lot of inhumanities oppressed on them, but end up with completely different destinies in the end of the respective novels. The author will center on analyzing the different strategies for self-discovery of black females in the two novels. The quest for survival wholeness of self-construction is underscored in The Color Purple, while The Bluest Eye presents the necessity and significance of deconstructing internalized sexism and internalized racism barriers to avoid self-destruction.Alice Walker’s protagonist Celie, from a vulnerable and ugly black girl to an independent woman of value, achieves self-redemption and regains her self-identity.Walker emphasizes self-construction of the black women. The connotation ofself-construction indicates the quest for survival wholeness, including four aspects: the rebellious self based on revolting against the mainstream of social values which biases against black women; the intellectual self based on fighting for women’s rights; the communal self based on sisterhood and the whole self based on inheriting the black cultural and historical heritages. Therefore, Walker’s characters discover themselves in the fullest sense by going into these four aspects, and project into a brighter future.Toni Morrison’s protagonist Pecola is certainly a failure of self-discovery. She blindly internalized the white world’s values of beauty, and perceived her black skin as ugliness. She prayed every night for blue eyes, believing that by granting the blue eyes,her gloomy life would be magically changed. In addition, the loss of maternal love and misguidance of the mass media prompted to accelerate her self-hatred till final self-destruction. The Bluest Eye shows that if the blacks continue to depend upon white judgments for their self-image, then they will have no sense of self-awareness and inevitably destroy themselves. And if they continue to deny their own natural gifts to become acceptable to white standards, the blacks merely accelerate their self-destruction process.Walker and Morrison have presented different strategies to achieve the same goal in their respective novels. The former emphasizes the constructive self-discovery of the black females at the individual level; while the latter stresses the significance of deconstructing the internalized sexism and internalized racism of the blacks at the collective level. Their perspectives in their novel writing are representatives of many American women writers’ solutions to the problem of black female’s self-discovery.