Motherhood as a Creative Power in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple

Abstract

This study “Motherhood as a creative power in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple” attempts to analyse Alice Walker’s ideas of motherhood by putting mothering in the centre of feminism and tries to understand how it empowers different female characters to release their artistic power in spite of childbearing or childrearing in this patriarchal society. This mother-centred mode of feminism is called matricentric feminism by Andrea O’Reilly. This study is guided by the ideas that the category of mother is distinct from the category of woman in The Color Purple and how these mother characters manage to release their artistic power in spite of problems they face as women and as mothers. Besides, the key concepts such as matricentric feminism, motherhood and artistic power are defined. A new wave of feminism, matricentric feminism to empower women’s and mothers’ rights is discussed in this study. The analysis of the female characters with different backgrounds in The Color Purple will allow us to put mothering in the centre of feminism. The paper concludes that, motherhood is presented in a variety of ways, like empowered mothering, community and othermothering, the relationship between mother and daughter in relation of our foremothers’ motherhood in The Color Purple and this empowers the characters to release their artistic power in spite of problems they face as women and mothers.

Keywords

• motherhood
• feminism
• women
• annelik
• feminizm
• kadın