Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple:A comparative analysis

• Main Author: 伍麗怡
• Other Authors: 何文敬
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2016
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/36854450707169355798

碩士 === 逢甲大學 === 外國語文學系 === 104 === Toni Morrison, a Nobel Laureate, and Alice Walker, a Pulitzer Prize winner, are leading Afro-American female writers. Their literary works often involve issues on race, class and gender. This thesis compares and analyzes two novels, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and The Color Purple by Alice Walker as they are able to reveal the oppressed lives of African-Americans. Though written by two different authors, the literature showed significant similarities. My aim is to identify and explain these similarities and to discuss the common themes of sexism and racism, I also explore why the two authors used different approaches to represent their narratives of oppression. Such differences are explained with the authors’ real life experience and their viewpoints on the racist and sexist oppressions. It is concluded that racial and sexual oppressions are interlocking problems resulting from the leftover attitudes of slavery. The novels shared similarities because the authors were writing about the same historical background when slavery was abolished and discrimination was most severe in the Southern United States. Both Pecola’s tragic story in The Bluest Eye and Celie’s tragic-comic story in The Color Purple highlight the traumatic effects of racial and sexual oppressions, through which Morrison and Walker encourage black females to give recognition to their black identity.