Women?s Quest for Self-Identity in Alice Walker?s The Color Purple

Abstract

Traditionally, women?s lives have been organized and manipulated by patriarchy in all ages, all cultures, all countries by establishing values, norms, roles, genderperceptions, and idealism that prescribes unfitmeans, methods and routes to achieve the so called wholeness? women. It is uniformly believed that motherhood and wifehood are the dual crowns of womanhood and man has defined it in unequivocal terms. What patriarchy demands of woman is very different from what women demand of women. Initially women writer realizing that they must narrate their stories or would do it incorrectly, were interested in determining and posturizing the life?s of women as they have been living, as they live and as they are led to imagine themselves but now they seem to be concentrating on how can live afresh.Toni Morrison in Beloved and Alice Walker in The Color Purple design the life style of their protagonist as initially fragmented, disorganized buteventually whole and organized.Different and significant and apparently insignificant situations are created to establish the process of self- encounter that finally brings the metamorphosis. The analysis of the entire novel is interesting.