Spirituality and self-healing in Alice Walker's The color purple

Abstract

Alice Walker's famous epistolary novel The Color Purple is one of her most widely known literary contributions that highlight many sensitive themes as female oppression, racism and gender roles. This research work is explicitly devoted to the quest of spirituality, religion and the representation God's image in the novel. It focuses on the great role of spirituality in the lives of female characters and in their achievement of self-healing, and declaims walker's very own expression and demonstration of the divine that identifies it as her novel's source of inspiration. Moreover, this study is dedicated to the black females' spiritual survival as it aims to examine a journey from a traditional Christian faith to a general spiritual version of the divine. It also shows to what extent sisterhood and female connection have an impact on Walker's protagonist's self- awakening as she gains her spiritual growth and freedom from the women around her. At the end of the novel, she becomes a liberated soul, a confident, happy and independent woman after getting her new vision of God. All this is shown through using a postmodernist perspective in reference to Lois Tyson's book Critical Theory Today