The Color Purple: Reflections on The Second Sex and Gender Issues

Abstract

In this paper, we shall look at Alice Walker’s The Color Purple in the light of Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and analyse Celie’s transformation from the ‘Other’ in De Beauvoir’s terms to ‘Self’ in the course of the novel and how she grows up to speak for herself from being apparently silent under the oppression of her step-father and then her husband. We shall however question as to whether her ‘voicelessness’ can be considered equivalent to silence as she never stops from recording her experiences and emotions in her diary which is also a mode of expression. We shall also compare and contrast Celie, Shug, Sofia and Nettie in the light of The Second Sex. We shall also evaluate how Alice Walker has portrayed Celie’s liberation from the domination of the men through the lesbian relationship between Shug Avery and try and briefly observe Walker’s representation of the ‘Black Lesbian’. Simone de Beauvoir has talked how women have been considered below man for centuries but we shall question in the light of the novel that how can we differentiate between the two genders and can that with which we are born in between the two legs- a phallus or a vagina be the sole criteria to determine who we are, what we should do, what we should wear and how we should behave or in other words can the phallus or the vagina only define our gender?