Научная статья на тему 'FEMALE QUEST IN THE NOVEL OF THE THIRD LIFE OF GRANGE COPELAND OF ALICE WALKER'

FEMALE QUEST IN THE NOVEL OF THE THIRD LIFE OF GRANGE COPELAND OF ALICE WALKER Текст научной статьи по специальности «Языкознание и литературоведение»

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Ключевые слова
Discrimination / black women / oppression / women’s strategies / civil rights / equality / humanity / black community.

Аннотация научной статьи по языкознанию и литературоведению, автор научной работы — Jamola Yuldashbayevna Narimanova

The purpose of this article is to provide basic information about the life of Alice Walker and her contributions to American literature. In addition, the article gives the main information about The Third Life of Grange Copeland novel and discusses how the main works can be useful and helpful to readers. Alice Walker undoubtedly occupies a prominent place in the envy of African-American literature. It reflects the struggles and journeys of African American men and women an effort to strengthen and liberate the entire black race. She is associated with the “survival” of his people, who have been discriminated against, humiliated and humiliated by the white American majority. Walker focuses on black women’s survival strategies in a racist white society and a patriarchal black society. Her personal experiences and observations as a black woman are repeated in her works and her characters. In his skills, Walker deftly demonstrates that being a black woman is twice as difficult as just being a woman or a black man.

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Текст научной работы на тему «FEMALE QUEST IN THE NOVEL OF THE THIRD LIFE OF GRANGE COPELAND OF ALICE WALKER»

FEMALE QUEST IN THE NOVEL OF THE THIRD LIFE OF GRANGE

COPELAND OF ALICE WALKER

Jamola Yuldashbayevna Narimanova

Teacher at Uzbekistan state World Languages University

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is to provide basic information about the life of Alice Walker and her contributions to American literature. In addition, the article gives the main information about The Third Life of Grange Copeland novel and discusses how the main works can be useful and helpful to readers. Alice Walker undoubtedly occupies a prominent place in the envy of African-American literature. It reflects the struggles and journeys of African American men and women an effort to strengthen and liberate the entire black race. She is associated with the "survival" of his people, who have been discriminated against, humiliated and humiliated by the white American majority. Walker focuses on black women's survival strategies in a racist white society and a patriarchal black society. Her personal experiences and observations as a black woman are repeated in her works and her characters. In his skills, Walker deftly demonstrates that being a black woman is twice as difficult as just being a woman or a black man.

Keywords: Discrimination, black women, oppression, women's strategies, civil rights, equality, humanity, black community.

Walker's novels are about the journey of black women to integrity. Female characters grow as they move from positions of weakness to positions of relative strength. The protagonists 'understanding of the past is so important to their personal change now and that they can change in the future, Walker emphasized, and thought to achieve integrity [1-5]. Walker's masculine characters achieve psychological health and integrity only if they are able to recognize women's pain and their role in it. Her works are composed of individuals striving for self-expression, leading to self-empowerment. In her personal life, Walker went from an eight-year-old girl with a scar on his right eye to a young teenager who had an early abortion, sat with suicidal thoughts, and then came to life as an active participant in life. The civil rights movement and marriage to a white Jew, the search for originality in her mother's gardens, the expansion of his worldview, his attitude toward women, and her personal growth as a poet and as a writer who talks about the woman who appeared in him [6-12].

The Third Life of Grange Copeland is a novel about racial and gender oppression in the South in the period from the 1920s to the 1960s, a discourse which, in Christian's words, "exposes the pattern of terror over a span of sixty years in the lives of one black

family of sharecroppers". Poverty, violence, sexual abuse, misery and despair are the constituents of this pattern. Alice Walker analyses its socio-psychological roots and shows the self-perpetuating repetition of self-destruction in the lives of the sharecroppers [13-18]. But she also shows how this pattern can be altered, as Klaus Ensslen suggests: Half a century of family history is the narrative material used by the novel to dramatize essential changes in the conditions of black people in the rural South 6f the United States, beginning in total economic and psychological dependence towards a certain measure of self-awareness as the ground for new self-concepts and the social roles or life-plans based on them. Given Walker's subsequent focus on female quest, and her preoccupation with black women, it is interesting that her first novel privileges a male quest, with the female quest in the novel a latent rather than a realised one. Grange Copeland embarks on a quest. The women in the novel do not. Why not? Brownfield, his son, embarks on a quest but is stopped short by his own failings. Why does he fail while Grange, at least in some limited sense, succeeds? Ruth, his granddaughter, is presented as having a quest-inpotential.

But what are the possibilities for her quest? To what extent are they adumbrated in this novel? To what extent are they left ambiguous? The novel, depicting as it does a male quest, provides a touchstone for discussing the female quests as they appear in the next two novels [19-23]. What differences between the female and the male quests can be discerned here? How can they be linked to the particular social circumstances and milieu of the novels? In what ways and why does the male quest appear not to be able to provide, for Walker, a paradigm for a real transformation of society, as, for example, the quests in Meridian and The Color Purole do? In exploring these questions, I select aspects of Grange Copeland's quest for detailed analysis. At the same time, I examine it with relation to the other two ''quests" in the novel (Ruth's and Brownfield's), trying to show how and why Grange's quest "fails" or rather, does not fully succeed, both in its own terms and as compared to the other two [24-28]. In addition, I hope to demonstrate the significance of Grange's quest for the future, as represented by Ruth.

Grange Copeland's Quest Before scrutinising the trajectory of Grange Copeland's quest in the novel, it will be useful to glance at its form. On a structural level, the development of the quest motif in Grange Copeland is cyclical, as it is within the other two novels (and over all three). The patterns of repetition and variation which colour the quest motif in the novels are (to differing effects) intrinsic to a formal patterning which has been described by critics, and later by Walker herself, as a "quilt" pattern. This reflects Walker's own affirmation of, and interest in, the artistic and cultural heritage of black women, quilting having been one of the few genres of folk art available to black women in the South.

(Walker's essay "In Search of Our Mother's Gardens" deals with this heritage.) Quilts made by Southern black women, influenced by African textile aesthetics, were

characterized by asymmetrical repetition of form, off-beat placement of pieces, variable colour schemes, and controlled sense of rhythmic movement. Christian observes that Alice Walker's works are quilts bits and pieces of used material rescued from oblivion for everyday use. She takes seemingly ragged edges and arranges them into works of functional though terrifying beauty. She shows how Walker uses this pattern to make particular points: It is as if Walker consciously selects all the nasty bits and pieces about black people that they as well as white people believe. Then she examines each bit, lucidly arranges the pieces so we might see the savage nibblings of everyday oppression at the rouls of black Southerners. In Grange Copeland, this "quilt" structure is evident in the succinct, episodic, at times not-chronological chapters of varied length, which cyclically juxtapose scene, incident, character, and in which flashback is used. Similarities and contrasts are simultaneously evoked, in, for example, the situations, behaviour, and relationships of different characters such as Brownfield and Grange, or Margaret, Mem and Josie. This structure colours the quest motif in Grange Copeland. Although the title of the novel, with its explicit metaphor of rebirth (Third Life), suggests that the quest is limited to the title character, there are, as I have already indicated, other quests in the novel. These quests, or elements thereof, are structured into the novel in looping cycles which interrupt one another, or are interrupted by other "pieces" of the text which do not specifically relate to quest [29-31]. The beginning or "separation" phase of Grange's quest (the only completed quest in the novel) is scarcely marked, before Grange's son Brownfield's quest begins, clearly and ominously signposted by «a thousand birds wildly singing good luck". Yet Brownfield's quest is doomed to total failure, as he sticks, in a quagmire of his own making, at the Dew Drop Inn, servicing Josie and Lorene. Grange returns, apparently changed (he now shows remorse for his earlier behaviour and tries to make amends to Brownfield), but the description of the "initiation" phase of his quest his time in the North--is narrated in the novel iong after the phase of "return." And although Grange. Copeland's quest conforms broadly to Campbell's pattern, attention is paid mainly to the second and third phases. The "initiation" phase in Harlem is privileged with one of the longest sections in the novel; the incident with the white woman is described at length and in great detail. The last phase, Grange's "third" life, which is his "return," is picked up again in the last third of the novel and is a discursive description of Grange's relationship with his granddaughter Ruth, which looks towards Ruth's future.

These quests function in the novel to explicate one another, either through contrast or extension, and thus highlight the process of social change dramatised by the novel. The analysis of the social and psychological factors which differentiate them provides the underlying theme of the novel and the socio-political projects which it points towards. Walker describes the conditions which result in the destructiveness of

Grange (in his first life) and Brownfield's behavior [32-35]. The narrative suggests that the outcome of Grange's quest provides a more constructive

response to these circumstances than the passive "blaming" of whites that is an unchanging feature of Brownfield's character. This outcome is the assumption of personal responsibility for one's own life and an attitude of overt resistance to the political structures of a racist society, as opposed to the acceptance of a cultural identity imposed by the ruling class in which is inscribed the role of victim.

In conclusion, Walker's novels end with the rescue of the heroes. Each key character carries out recovery in a unique way, taking into account differences in circumstances and social environment. Alice Walker, as an activist and writer, seeks to create an understanding between the organization through her work. Although she is an African-American woman, she knows the suffering of the entire black community. She tries to remember the past so that humanity realizes its mistake and creates equality between them.

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