Alice Walker Influences

People's creative works are many times inspired by their own life experiences. Whether it be from their childhood or their late years of adulthood, the connections between people and their creations are often prominent. In Alice Walker’s novels and poems her hardships and social ideals built up a collection of works that embodied her life. Walker’s parents were both sharecroppers and she faced many obstacles just to get a higher education and become a successful woman. From her part in the civil rights movement to her fight to empower women and find gender equality, Walker’s works have been met with criticisms however are a clear story of her life. Many of Alice Walker’s works were influenced by her mother’s powerful role in her life and
the lengths that she went to help in her success. Walker’s mother worked partly as a maid along with “...sewing all of the family's clothing and linens and doing all the canning and preserves to see them through the winter” (“Alice Walker” 2). Walker saw the women of her mother's generation as the ones who “accomplished what needed to be done” (Constantakis 3). This type of women were the ones portrayed by the female characters in Walker’s works. There was an obvious connection between the role her mother played in her life and the women displayed in the poem Women. In this piece, Walker “honors the domestic work these women did in order to support their daughters” (Constantakis 4). While her mother not only carried the family, she also saved money in order to buy Walker a typewriter, a suitcase and a sewing machine (“Alice Walker” 3). This helped begin Walker’s journey to becoming an educated and successful woman. Woman was a tribute to the hard work that her mother put into her life to help her live a fulfill her potential. Walker had close connections with race issues in America and many of her pieces were influenced by what she experienced and observed.
Walker was brought up by two sharecroppers in the deep south where she experienced “double vision” (Baughman 2) on the discrimination occurring around her. This vision was further explained in her work Our Mother’s Gardens, where she expressed blacks southers were “capable of knowing, with remarkably silent accuracy, the people who make up the larger world that surrounds and suppresses his own” (2). With this the racial situation and jobs her parents held largely influenced the characters in her novels. In her novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, it followed the lives of generations of sharecroppers and made Walker a “skillful recorder of the Southern character” (Callahan 1). Despite this obvious support of African Americans in America, Walker received criticisms for her most famous piece The Color Purple, from groups as prominent as the NAACP for portraying black men in a negative light. In this piece, a young black women is horribly abused by her father and husband both of whom were African American. This made some “denounced the film for racism” (“Alice Walker” 4). However, the book was intended to be a commentary on “a history of oppression and abuse suffered at the hands of the men” (4). Perhaps Walker’s most personal story dealing with racial discrimination came at the height of the civil rights movement, where she fell in love with a white man, and became “first legally married mixed-race couple in Jackson” (2). This was followed with the novel, The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart which depicted a “marriage set in the Deep South during the early years of the civil rights movement” (Baughman 5). Alice Walker’s experience as an African American living in America influenced her works in major ways however, her experiences as a woman had a larger
impact. The focus of the majority of Walker’s works were gender issues being faced not only in the US, but overseas. As a self proclaimed “womanist” writer, Walker had always "appreciate[d] and prefers women's culture” (Baughman 1). As she grew up in a society she believed to be “sexist and racist” (1), many of her characters were depicted as strong black women. In her novel Meridian, which explored the idea of a “young black woman against the backdrop of the politics of the Civil Rights Movement” the main character experiences motherhood while being continually involved in the issues around her. Despite her main focus being that of African American women, some saw her works as going further than race, “She speaks the female experience more powerfully for being able to pursue it across boundaries of race and class” (4). While strong women were an absolute theme throughout Walker’s career, her later works were non-fiction and about women’s issues across the world. After visits to Africa and other third world countries she came out with the book Possessing the Secret of Joy. This shined a light on female mutilation in these countries and after the release of the book she collaborated on film to further spread awareness (“Alice Walker” 4). After this experience she realized in the US “sexuality is the place where life has definitely fallen into the pit for women” (“Alice Walker” 5). Shortly after she came out with the novel, By the Light of My Father's Smile which continued to empower women to “affirm, celebrate, and acknowledge sexuality in [their] daily lives" (5). This idea for the novel came from the fact that “fathers tend to have a difficult time when their daughters enter womanhood” (Baughman 5). Walker’s experience with female issues played a part in almost every single piece she wrote and was the embodiment of her career. Alice Walker’s experience with race, gender and female influence created a career that embodied the powerful African American women. Her works held characters who were intended to empower women through Walker’s personal experiences with these issues. Her childhood and adult years continually impacted her pieces and shaped her into one of the most prominent authors of the 20th and 19th century. Through Walker one can see how important experience is to create moving and productive pieces of literature.