World of Philosophy

Author(s): Christopher Key Chapple, Intaj Malek, Dilip Charan, Sunanda Shastri, Prashant Dave
Publisher: Shanti Prakashan

Page 443

them. She was saving up feelings for some man she had never seen. She had an inside and an outside and suddenly she knew how not to mix them (Hurston 113).
Black women as actual live human-beings with a hoard of feelings were presented way back in 1937, but this portrayal was conveniently lost by both the White and Black literary traditions. It was upon the later Black women writers like Alice Walker to bring out the magnificence of such hidden gems.
In recent times writers like Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou have given us true picture of the life of the Black women. Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye is truly worthy of the Nobel Prize for literature as it does not only break the Beauty Myth but also expresses the anguish of the Black women in their own homes. Alice Walker is one writer who has successfully depicted the Black women in her works. All her works beginning for Third Life of Grange Copeland to her last fiction titled Now is the Time to Open Your
Heart
chronicles the various stages of growth of the Black women during the last four decades. Walker's The Color Purple gives us the picture of the Black women living the rural areas. Celie is representative of all those women who have not been able to express their horrors at being made to face atrocities at the hands of their own men. Hurston's and Walker's protagonists have been able to survive because they have fallen back on the shared knowledge of their female predecessors. Emma J. Waters Dawson writes:
Yet, in both novels the black female protagonist's principal source of strength appears to be the knowledge, gained through experience, that suf fering seems the maternal legacy of the African-American woman, and that survival is effective revenge for the pain (Dawson 70).
The Black male writers have not been able to see the power of their women folks so they have missed out in depicting it in their works. Just as Blacks have been invisible to the Whites in the same way Black women have been invisible for the Black men. Black female writers had to first prove that they existed and then they could talk about their lives. Alice Walker's Womanist theory was also a part of this effort, wherein she not only gave the Black-Feminist theory but also traced the long-lost creative tradition of the Black American women. Black women created literature that brought them out of their homes and put them up for the contemplation of the entire world. Mary Washington writes:
Their literature is about black women; it takes the trouble to record the thoughts, words, feelings, and deeds of black women, experiences that make the realities of being black in America look very different from what men have written. There are no women in this tradition hibernating in dark
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