“You better not never tell nobody but God. It’d kill your mammy ”: The Violence of Language in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple

• Authors: Kouadio Germain N’Guessan
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Alice Walker’s The Color Purple dramatizes African American women’s plight through the experience of a black girl, Celie, caught in the turmoil of the patriarchal system of her community. Leaning on the epistolary form and also choosing to address the black woman’s oppression first within the black community itself, the author detaches herself from the mainstream African American literary tradition to create a personal style. One of the characteristic traits of the novel is language as a communicative tool in the characters’ interrelation. In the narrative, this tool is mostly used to oppress the female protagonists, demonstrating thus its violent aspect. But sometimes, even though very rarely in the novel, it helps the oppressed subject to claim a voice. Finally, the epistolary form serves to create more emotion in the readers and consequently produces more reaction in them.

Keywords

EN

Violence; Language; Communication; Subject; Male; Female; Oppression

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Human and Social Studies
• Year: 2015
• Volume: 4
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 72-87

Dates

published

2015-03-01

online

2015-04-10

Contributors

author

Kouadio Germain N’Guessan

• University Félix Houphouët-Boigny, Côte d’Ivoire

References

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• Walker, Walker. The Color Purple. New York: Pocket Book, 1982

Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/hssr-2013-0040