摘 要

艾丽斯·沃克的成长时期恰逢民权运动和妇女解放运动蓬勃发展的时代。在这两场运动的影响下，许多黑人女作家打破沉默，开始在她们的作品中揭露黑人女性的不幸经历和创伤。 爱丽丝•沃克就是其中之一。她不仅是当代美国文坛杰出的黑人女作家，提出了著名的女性主义理论，而且她也致力于运用创作对这一理论进行阐释。她认为不同肤色的人种就像不同颜色的花，各种颜色的花朵竞相开放，就像所有种族的人和谐共存。沃克在她的文学创作中提出并发展了这一理论，特别是在前期的文学创作中，她一直致力于描绘黑人女性的生活状况，生动地描绘黑人女性的生活场景，揭露种族主义和性别歧视对她们心理和身体所造成的创伤及其所导致的身份认同危机。

然而，在许多黑人女性文学作品中，黑人和白人，男人和女人往往表现为对立面，表现为一方压制另一方，或一方服从另一方，体现边缘与中心，弱小与强大的对抗。 而这种对抗似乎很难调和。然而，沃克主张“女性主义”不同于传统的“女权主义”，并不意味着鲁莽抵制权力，也不是试图寻求边缘角色和主流角色之间的转换从而得以打破旧有权力的平衡。相反，她更渴望寻求一种有利于达到平衡的力量，实现不同种族，不同性别之间的真正和谐共生，这正是她的作品中所集中体现的女性主义思想核心。

关键词：爱丽丝•沃克；创伤；身份认同；女性主义

Abstract

Alice Walker lives in the times when the two movements - the Civil Rights Movement and the Women's Liberation Movement are booming. Under the influence of these two movements, many black female writers broke their silence and published works by revealing their own traumatic experiences as black women. So did Alice walker. She is an outstanding black woman writer of modern American literature. She coined the famous notion of womanism and developed the theory in her works in detail. She believes that the skin color of human beings is just the same as that of flowers. A multifarious natural environment indicates compatibility and sustainability of all species. Likewise, a harmonious world also consists of people of different races living in a balanced manner. Walker has developed and expunded the womanist theory in her own writing, especially in her early works. She has always devoted herself to depicting the living conditions of black women with graphic and vivid scenes of black women being maltreated. Hence, she used her works to expose the devastating effects of racism and sexism, psychologically and physically. Furthermore, she reveals the trauma and the entailed identity crisis caused by racism and sexism.

In conventional black and feminist literature, blacks and whites, men and women often appear as opposites, manifesting a contradiction with one side suppressing the other, or one party submitting to the other. This contradiction embodies the confrontation between the marginal and the center, the weak and the powerful. Nevertheless, this confrontation seems difficult to reconcile. However, Walker advocates that, different from traditional feminist movements, womanism does not mean recklessly resistance or rejection, nor does it imply an attempt to break the balance of the existing power in order to seek conversions between marginal and mainstream roles. On the contrary, she is more enthusiastic to seek a force that is conducive to achieving a new balance and realizing a truly harmonious symbiosis among different races and different genders. The idea of Womanism in that sense is precisely what Alice Walker manages to convey in her writings.

Key Words: Alice Walker; trauma; identity; womanism

Contents

1 Introduction 1

1.1 Literature Review 1

1.1.1 A review of studies abroad 1

1.1.2 A review of domestic studies 2

1.2 Alice Walker as A Womanist 3

1.3 Motivation, objection, Structure 4

2 Preliminaries 5

2.1 Womanist Vs Feminist 5

2.2 Trauma, Identity, and Solutions 7

3 Trauma and Identity Crisis of The Color Purple 9

3.1 Trauma of the Childhood 9

3.1.1 Rejection of Father and Self-Denial 9

3.1.2 Examples in The Color Purple 10

3.2 Trauma in Young Adulthood 10

3.2.1 Examples in The Color Purple 10

3.2.2 Feminist and Rejection of Male 11

4 Development of Womanism 11

4.1 Defense Mechanism against Trauma 11

4.2 Womanism as Walker Maturing 12

5 Conclusion 13

References 14

Acknowledgement 16

A Trauma Study of the Womanism in Alice Walker’s Works

1 Introduction

Literature Review

Abroad Review

The feminist movement that rose in the 1970s brought unprecedented attention to black female writers. Alice Walker was one of them. Her literary creation won the attention of many experts. Some people praised her without reservation, and of course there were others. Some people questioned it. In a word, people began to show great enthusiasm for her and her works. Especially after she published the masterpiece The Color Purple in 1982, people paid more and more attention to Alice Walker.

Foreign scholars' study on her mainly include biographies, research collections, and research monographs. Among biographical works, the most representative one is Evelyn C. White's Alice Walker: A Life (New York:W.W. Norton, 2004). It introduces Walker's life experience and literary creation to the world, provides readers with rich and detailed information for understanding Alice Walker's works, and also provides an important reference for researchers to conduct in-depth research. The famous American literary critic Professor Bloom, Harold edits the book Alice Walker (New York: Chelsea House, 1989). This research album contains some important researches on the works of Alice Walker, including the discussion of the causal relationship between the black family structure and its members, the interpretation of the self-esteem of black women in Walker's works, and the discussion of women's aesthetics and black women's aesthetics created by Walker. The perspective is novel and enlightening. In addition, Gates, Henry Louis, Jr, and others edited Alice Walker’s Womanism:Perspectives Past and Present (New York: Amistad, 1993), which contains information about Alice Walker's book reviews and 16 outstanding academic papers, with their rich content and novel insights, reflect the new progress of Alice Walker's research. Based on previous research, Dieke Ikenna. edits The Collection of Alice Walker’s Reviews (Westport: Greenwood Press. 1999) which gathers the new achievements of the contemporary Alice Walker studies. The research perspective is more diverse, and the relationship between the characters in The Color Purple, Alice Walker's poetry creation, masculinity, and metaphor of quilt is discussed in depth. Newer research findings have been obtained, expanding the space for Alice Walker's comprehensive research. In the monograph of Western scholars who study Alice Walker, there are two monographs that must be mentioned: Alice Walker (New York: Twayne, 1992) published by Winchell Donna Haisty and Alice Walker (Avenue New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999) published by Lauret Maria. The monographs focus more on the exploration of Alice Walker’s major works in a broad social context and unique life experiences, and study the influence of the author’s experience, character, ambition and social environment on the work.

Domestic Review

Domestic research on Alice Walker started late. Since the early 1980s, only a brief introduction has been made. Just as Dong Dingshan said, Walker’s reputation in the literary world was not very high at that time (Dong, 1986:136). However, after The Colo Purple won the award, domestic scholars gradually became interested in her research. At present, domestic scholars mostly study Alice Walker's womanism and its expressions, and her thought of womanism are applied to writing practice, infiltrating into the themes and writing techniques of the works. Therefore, most people tend to study her themes and writing techniques, and there is not much research on the characters depicted in Alice Walker’s works. In particular, the study of black female images in her works involves even less. In fact, this is exactly the problem that Alice Walker's creations need to pay attention to. In addition, domestic scholars studied Walker's creative work from the perspective of feminism, not only rarely starting from the unique creative psychology and special experience of black women, but also often neglecting the experience of black women in Alice Walker's writing. This feature is inseparable from race and class, not to mention the affirmation of Alice Walker's creation from the height of nationality and culture. In short, domestic research on Alice Walker is still in its infancy, lacks systematic research, and there are many problems that need to be studied and explored.

To sum up, the current domestic research on Alice Walker includes the following aspects: