Literature & Gender Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Literature & Gender - Essay Example Moreover, Abbandonato quarrel that The Color Purple rewrites canonical male texts, but she does not talk about Walker's redrafting of the story of Philomela. Likewise, though critics such as Trudier Harris, Keith Byerman, Wendy Wall, Mae Henderson, and King-Kok Cheung have talk about Celie's attainment of private and public languages, none of these opponents has scrutinized Walker's reconfiguration of linguistic elements of the legend of Philomela. Unlike the original mythic text, as well as the novels of Morrison and Naylor, Walker's text gives Philomela a voice that productively resists the aggressive patriarchal dedication of male will onto a silent female body. Yet Walker does more than just allow Philomela to speak inside the confines of patriarchal dialogue. Furthermore, Walker's novel revises the myth of Philomela by creating a heroine's text that reconfigures the metaphorical state of affairs of sender-receiver-message and articulates Celie's progress away from a survival as a victim in a patriarchal plot toward a linguistic and narratological occurrence as the novelist/subject of her own story. Walker's novel also rewrites the myth during its formation of an option discourse that allows for the appearance of both mannish and female subjectivity --a language of the sewn that remove from the violence of patriarchal power, of patriarchal conversation. No doubt, Celie's skills as a seamstress together get back and refigure the myth of Philomela, for different Philomela's tapestry/text, Celie's sewing functions as an option line of attack of language that moves her away from aggression and persecution and into self-empowerment and prejudice. The novel also intentionally conflates the pen and the needle, thereby deconstructing the binary oppositions among the masculine and the womanly, the spoken and the silenced, the lexical along with the graphic. Moreover, Walker's reconfiguration of the legend of Philomela thus turns over the master dialogue and the master description of patriarchal society. In Walker's hands Philomela's speech turn out to be the gadget for a radical change of the individual as well as a dissident deconstruction of the power structures that undergird together patriarchal language and the patriarchal globe itself. If we analyze then we come to know that the Color Purple is about Celie's life. In the opening of the novel, we find out that Celie was raped by her father. We also learn that Celie's mother is ill and is incapable to take care of the family. Celie is forced to cook and spotless for her family. Celie imagine two children since of her father's incessant raping. She never sees her children and considers that her father killed them. After interpretation this novel, I understand that black women in the late 1800's and early 1900's had a extremely hard life. I had always typecast black woman throughout that time to be similar to Aunt Jemina. I have learned that black woman throughout the 1800's had to be strong and brave just to make it during the day. To stay alive a lifetime they had to look inside themselves to gather the