Alice Walker: Pioneer of Womanism in African-American Literature

African-American Literary Tradition and Alice Walker's Rise

African-American culture, as American society characterizes it today, contains significant elements that enrich the character of African-American communities. In the realm of the arts, African-Americans have excelled, producing works that uniquely speak to the African-American experience while remaining universally crafted for people to appreciate and understand the history of one of the most prominent groups in the United States. African-Americans have excelled in the performing arts, music, visual arts, and literature — a tradition that gained particular momentum with the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance in the early twentieth century.

Alice Walker, following this great tradition of African-American literature, has been considered one of the women writers — and particularly African-American writers — who fought to break the barrier dividing African-Americans from other races, and women from men, in a dominantly white American and patriarchal society.

Walker rose to widespread prominence during the 1980s following the publication of her novel The Color Purple. Prior to that landmark work, Walker had already established herself as a staunch contributor to African-American literature, composing poems and writing prose about the lives of African-Americans as reflected in their vivid history. However, owing to the extraordinary themes and powerful characterization of Celie — the novel's main character — in The Color Purple, Walker became one of America's most prolific African-American women writers.

Themes and Issues in The Color Purple

What makes Walker successful in portraying the lives of African-American women? As reflected in The Color Purple, Walker sought to confront the primary issues and problems that African-American women — and women in general — experienced during her time. These include racial discrimination both by the dominant white American society and within African-American communities; gender conflict between males and females, particularly in struggles for power and dominance; the repression of women through poverty; and the challenges of coping with physical and emotional abuse, self-discovery, and lesbianism.

By centering these intersecting concerns within a single narrative, Walker gave voice to experiences that had largely been excluded from mainstream American literary culture. The Color Purple thus functioned not only as a work of fiction but as a social document illuminating the layered oppression faced by Black women in the American South.

Walker's Writing Style and Critical Reception

These themes are vividly illustrated throughout Walker's distinctive writing style. Some of Walker's critics have labeled her an "undeveloped" writer on the grounds that she had yet to achieve the superior stylistic refinement considered a prerequisite for novelists who have attained popular status. Despite this characterization, the themes and character portrayals in The Color Purple are widely regarded as "supreme" because of their effectiveness and substance in driving the novel's development.

As critic Robert Towers wrote in "Good Men Are Hard to Find" (1982): "…inadequacies which might tell heavily against another novel seem relatively insignificant in view of the one great challenge which Alice Walker has triumphantly met… I find it impossible to imagine Celie apart from her language; through it, not only a memorable and infinitely touching character but a whole submerged world is vividly called into being. Miss Walker knows how to avoid the excesses of literal transcription while remaining faithful to the spirit and rhythms of Black English" (Bloom, 1994:201).