Zina Emad, Dr. Rajabali Askarzadeh Torghabeh & Dr. Zohre Taebi
Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is one of the most important figures in contemporary literary theory who is also referred to as a feminist Marxist. The writers of this article will benefit from Spivak’s ideas to analyze Walker’s The Color Purple. This novel, is the story of slavery and its disastrous results, shows that slavery severed the African American mother-line by separating families through sale and by robbing them of their subjectivity and history. Walker brought up the questions of what it meant to be a slave, to be abused, to love and to be loved and also to be a mother. The characters cannot lead a peaceful life, cannot be together and cannot love and be loved freely. Celie, the protagonist of the novel, in many occasions is silent and is silenced in the novel. Her silence in front of men who abuse her open new perspectives regarding the antagonism between the endoculture and the exoculture, but also reminds us of Spivak’s subaltern who persists in remaining silent. The results of the study show that in The Color Purple, the dominant ideology is naturally by white dominance, The double colonization which ‘implies living under the negative effects of both patriarchy and colonialism’ is resolved at the end of the novel through listening to the voices from the other side. The woman is subordinated both in the domestic and colonial context. She is a black woman who can only be known as non-male and non-white from the patriarchal point of view.
The above abstract is a part of the article which was accepted at The Third International Conference on Current Issues of Languages, Dialects and Linguistics (WWW.TLLL.IR), 31 January-1February 2019 , Ahwaz.
