George Stade
WOMANIST FICTION AND
MALE CHARACTERS
Twice I have heard Alice Walker's novel
The Color Purple,
published in 1982, described as "a sacred text," once by a true
believer, once by a village aetheist. Certainly the extra-textual evi–
dence is with the true believer: the novel has been a bestseller, first
in hardcover and now in paperback; it won the Pulitzer Prize and
the National Book Award; many of the reviews were written with a
hushed and unctuous reverence. Dissertations are in the works; so is
a movie. In a collection of essays,
In Search of Our Mother's Garden
(1983), Miss Walker explicitly announces the attractive dogma that
informs her novel. The subtitle of this collection is "Womanist
Prose."
"Womanist," as Miss Walker defines it, describes (among other
things) "a woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsex–
ually. Appreciates and prefers woman's culture, woman's emotional
flexibility (and values tears as natural counterbalance of laughter),
and woman's strength. . . .
Loves
the spirit . . . . Loves herself.
Regardless."
Although Miss Walker, in her words, is "a rather ardent
feminist," her feminism can be distinguished from her womanism, in
theory if not in her practice . Both can be distinguished from
women's liberationism.
Feminism, let us say, is a political program based on the rea–
sonable premise that since women are as good as men in fact, they
should be equal to them under the law. But womanism is based on
invidious comparisons between the sexes; another name for it might
be "female chauvinism." Women's liberation, on the other hand, was
a crisis cult produced (through antithesis) by what we might as well
call the manist sexual ambience of the sixties, which led men to
believe they had a right to sex on demand and which undermined
the woman's traditional right to say no. In America the red stockings
are always blue, or at least purple.
The Color Purple
has its deepest tinges of women's liberation at
its conclusion, with the establishment of a utopian commune presided
over by the heroine and her female lover, although a couple of
womanish men are allowed to hang around, so long as they behave
themselves. But the novel is not feminist - it does not argue the
