Alice Walker Is One of the Best-Known Writers in the US - Essay Example

Alice Walker Today, Alice Walker is one of the best-known and most highly respected in the US, but in order to better understand her creative work, one is to know the biography of the writer: Walker’s characters and images are inseparable from her own experiences. Alice was born in Eatonton, Georgia, the eighth and last child of Willie Lee and Minnie Lou Grant Walker. Her parents were sharecroppers, and money was not always available as needed. At the tender age of eight, Walker accidentally lost sight of one eye. Walker felt like she was no longer a little girl because of the traumatic experience she had undergone, and she was filled with shame because she thought she was unpleasant to look at. During this seclusion from other kids her age, Walker began to write poems. Hence, her career as a writer began. Despite this tragedy in her life and the feelings of inferiority, Walker received a “rehabilitation scholarship” to attend Spelman College (a college for black women). There she became involved in civil rights demonstrations where she spoke out against the silence of the institution’s curriculum when it came to African-American culture and history. Her involvement in such activities led to her dismissal from the college. So she transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in New York and had the opportunity to travel to Africa as an exchange student. Upon her return, she received her bachelor of arts degree from Sarah Lawrence College, in 1965 Walker moved to Mississippi and became involved in the civil rights movement. She also began teaching and publishing short stories and essays. She married in 1967, but the couple divorced in 1976 (Winchell 23-28). Walkers first book of poetry, “Once”, appeared in 1968 — it includes works written during the early 1960s while she attended Sarah Lawrence College. Some of these pieces relate the confusion, isolation , and suicidal thoughts Walker experienced. During her Senior year she was pregnant and had to deal with the stressful time that followed. “Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems” (1973) was Walker’s second volume of poems, in this she addressed such topics as love, individualism, and revolution. Her recent poems express the ideas of races, gender, environment, love, hate and suffering, the same topics she writes about in her novels (Kramer 144). Her first novel, “The Third Life of Grange Copeland” (1970), started what has become Walkers “trademark themes” of sexuality and life within Black communities: particularly the domination of powerless women by equally powerless men. In this novel, which spans the years between the Depression and the beginnings of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s, Walker showed three generations of a black sharecropping family and explored the effects of poverty and racism on their lives. Because of his sense of failure, Grange Copeland leads his wife to suicide and abandons his children to seek a better life in the North. His traits are passed on to his son, Brownsfield, who in time murders his wife. In the end of the novel, Grange returns to his family a broken yet compassionate man and attempts to make up for all the hurt he has caused in the past with the help of his granddaughter, Ruth. While some people accused Walker of reviving stereotypes about the dysfunctional black family, others praised her use of intensive, descriptive language in creating believable characters (Gates, Appiah 137). Another widely cited work of this period by Alice Walker is “Everyday Use” (1973), which tells the story of Maggie and Dee, two sisters, who were brought up in the same environment, by the same woman, in the same home. However, Maggie is awkward and unattractive, while Dee is confident and attractive. Maggie is content with her simple life, while Dee wants to have fine things. Maggie is nervous and intimidated by Dee, who is bold and selfish. Here, the author is saying that art should be a living, breathing part of the culture it arose from, rather than a frozen timepiece to be observed from a distance. To make this point, she uses the quilts in her story to symbolize art; and what happens to these quilts represents her theory of art. Maggie values the sentiment of the family quilts, while Dee wants to display them as a symbol of her heritage, she sees the quilts as priceless objects to own and display. Going off to college has brought Dee a new awareness of her heritage. She returns wearing ethnic clothing and has changed her name to "Wangero". She explains to her mother and Maggie that changing her name is the way to disassociate herself from "the people who oppress her”. Before she went away to college, the quilts were not good enough for her. Her mother had offered her one of the quilts, but she stated, "They were old-fashioned and out of style" (Everyday Use). The first collection of short stories, “In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Woman”, appeared in 1973 — numerous examples of terrifying sexist violence and abuse in the African American community are shown in these works. The second collection, “You Cant Keep a Good Woman Down: Stories” (1981), again evidences her womanist philosophy (Winchell 33). In the short story "Roselily", Alice Walker tells two stories in one. The most obvious story is the one about the Black American woman Roselily, who stands before the alter, just about to marry a muslim, while she thinks about her past, wonders about the future and is questioning wheter she is making the right choice. The other, hidden story is the story about Black American women in general, their history and their ongoing search for something better. As Roselily is about to marry, about to go to Chicago and start a new life with her husband, she is starting to regret her decision and faces the truth: Just like Black Americans went from the slavery in the cotton fields to paid slavery in the sewing plants, she is now moving to the slavery of Islam. She thinks of his religion and sees "ropes, chains, handcuffs". She thinks of Chicago, her new home, and realizes that "all she knows about the place is Lincoln, the president". President Lincoln abolished the slavery, but that did not free the Black Americans (Prescott 118). After moving to New York, Walker completed “Meridian” (1976), a novel describing the coming of age of several civil rights workers in the 1960s., exploring black and white politics and relations (Kramer 197). In addition to being a novelist and a poet, Walker shows that she is a talented essayist. "In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose" (1983) is perhaps her most famous essay, a deeply personal account of her mothers toil and labor on someone elses farm, from where she would return each day to walk a long distance to the well in order to provide water for her own garden. She gives her mother full credit as showing her what it means to be an artist of dedication and showing a tough conviction that life without beauty is unbearable (In Search of Our Mothers Gardens). In 1984 she started her own publishing company, Wild Trees Press. In 1983 Walker received the Pulitzer Prize for “The Color Purple” (1982), perhaps her most famous work — it was even adapted into a film by Steven Spielberg in 1985 (Winchell 42). Walker herself said: “Race is just the first question on a long list. This is hard for just about everybody to accept; we’ve been trying to answer it for so long.” She explained, "The black woman is one of Americas greatest heroes….Not enough credit has been given to the black woman who has been oppressed beyond recognition." Walker has her own understanding of “feminism”, which she calls “womanism” at the beginning of “In Search of Our Mothers Gardens” (Kramer 192). Written in epistolary form, the novel depicts the growing up and self-realization of an African American woman between 1909 and 1947 in a town in Georgia. During this time, the black people were oppressed by white people. They were abused and taken advantage of. The black male in the novel is depicted as cruel, brutal and evil. He lives in a world where white man rules. Women are the scapegoats for all their vented frustration. The novel opens with an opening letter where we discover that Celie, the main character, was savagely raped by her father. Such a bold beginning lets us know that Celies life is anything but ordinary. The sanctity of the family unit, so important to the American way of life, is destroyed. The shocking details of rape as Celie writes, are sad but a factual everyday occurrence. Celie understands that as a black woman she is seen as worthless, having a meaningless existence. The female characters are molded from pain and sacrifice. As the novel progresses, the reader gets to follow Celie as she is offered to a widower with four children (Mr. ______). The widower hesitates in getting Cellie, but after some encouragement agrees. Implication here is that women are nothing but cattle and worthless. When she meets Shug Avery (in fact, she was an old lover of Celies husband. She had been brought back to Mr.____s house because she was sick and Celie was to look after her.) and escapes from Mr. ______, she learns that women can be equal to men — in power, in knowledge, and in matters of love and finance. When Celie returns to live in Georgia near the end of the novel, she is no longer weak and submissive; instead, she has become a competent, self-assured female who knows she can be content without depending on anyone but herself. This is the ultimate lesson of "womanism". A key role in the book seems to be a sense of recognition to Celie. She gains proper and fine respect from others due to her courage and standing up for herself. The book, is a good example on how over the years women have been making remarkable strides towards achieving success, recognition and equality. Celie opens her eyes and starts her own business of making pants, that she established living in Shugs house (The Color Purple). One way that the barrier was destroyed was through Walkers depiction of an imperfect black person. Before this novel, if a white person wrote about a less than perfect black person than it was considered racist. Now that a black person is writing about other blacks that are foretaking in acts that are, in their eyes, immoral and corrupt, the subject is brought into a new light. These actions are discussed out in the open, and the idea that all people have their own "flaws" (Gates, Appiah 159). Her later works include “The Temple of My Familiar” (1989), “Possessing the Secret of Joy” (1992) (in this novel Walker treats child abuse with a different inflection and in a different cultural setting), and “By the Light of My Fathers Smile” (1998), “The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart” (2000) Walker also wrote juvenile fiction and critical essays on such women writers as Flannery OConnor and Zora Neale Hurston (Winchell 77). The novel “Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart” was published in 2004, and it is not very typical of Walker’s style. The main character here is Kate, a well-published author, who married many times, who has lived a life rich with explorations of the natural world and the human soul. Now, at fifty-seven, she leaves her lover, Yolo, to embark on a new excursion, one that begins on the Colorado River, proceeds through the past, and flows, inexorably, into the future. As Yolo begins his own parallel voyage, Kate encounters celibates and lovers, shamans and snakes, memories of family disaster and marital discord, and emerges at a place where nothing remains but love (Alice Walker Page). Walker refuses to ignore the tangle of personal and political themes and has produced several novels and collections of short stories, numerous volumes of poetry and essays. Overall Alice Walker has been a very influential author throughout the black community, but her audiences are very much interracial. Although many of the criticisms are controversial on her view of black men and their abuse toward black women, that depiction can not be narrowed down to only that, there is much more that is present in Alice Walker’s writing. She is one of the most brilliant representatives of African American literature of all the periods and epochs. Her feelings, morals and the opinions Walker has towards women, sexuality, and racial equality shine through her works of all literature (Gates, Appiah 128). Apart from the Pulitzer Prize among her other numerous awards are the Lillian Smith Award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rosenthal Award from the National Institute of Arts & Letters, a nomination for the National Book Award, and the Townsend Prize (Winchell 11). Alice Walker continues to be a voice for the marginalized. She is outspoken about womens rights, was very involved in the anti-apartheid movement, and, of course, civil rights. Works cited. 1. Alice Walker Page. Retrieved April, 10, 2005, from . 2. Gates, H. L. Jr. and Appiah, K. A., eds. Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad Press, 1993. 3. Kramer, B. People To Know: Alice Walker Author of the Color Purple. Springfield, NJ: Enslow Publishers Inc., 1995. 4. Prescott, P. S. A long road to liberation. Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jean C. Steve. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1984. 5. Walker, A. Everyday Use. — An Introduction to Reading and Writing 5th ed. Eds. Edgar V. Roberts and Henry E. Jacobs. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 1998. 6. Walker, A. In Search of Our Mothers Gardens: Womanist Prose. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984. 7. Walker, A. The Color Purple. California: Pocket Books, 1982. 8. Winchell, D. H. Alice Walker. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992. Read More