Black Women`s Selfhood in Alice Walker`s Possessing the Secret of Joy

Authors : E. Lâle DEMİRTÜRK

Pages : 33-36

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Publication Date : 1995-10-01

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :Alice Walker examines in her fiction the black women`s search for selfhood through an analysis of the individual`s relationship to the community. In Walker`s novels, the black women`s struggle to claim their selves, in order to change their lives and secure a rightful place within the social network of relationships they themselves constitute, usually absorbs the psychic pain involved in such a struggle and shatters the iron bars of gender which limit self-empowerment. The author herself explains: `I believe in ... a willing acceptance of responsibility for one`s thoughts, behavior and actions, that makes it powerful. The white man`s oppression of me will never excuse my oppression of you, whether you are man, woman, child ... because the self I prize refuses to be owned by him. Or by anyone` The Third Life of Grange Copeland 345 .
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