Dehumanization and Healing: Female Empowerment in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple

Abstract

First published in 1982, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple is a story set in early 20th-century America, with its entrapment of African American life by racial segregation and gender-based oppression. In the novel, identified by Celie’s letters, the intersection with Jim Crow laws and the struggles for civil rights (Giddings, 1984; Collins, 2000) are many real historical facts. Walker’s work, then, encompasses the themes of racial dehumanization, female empowerment, and the long-term effects of trauma. More subtly, it sings of Celie’s journey from oppression to empowerment and how black women resist inhumanity at systemic levels (Crenshaw, 1991; Collins, 2000), especially through solidarity with women.