A womanist way of speaking: An analysis of language use in Alice Walker's "The Color Purple", Toni Morrison's "Tar Baby" and Gloria Naylor's "The Women of Brewster Place".

Abstract

My dissertation is a linguistic/literary analysis of three contemporary black women's novels: Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Toni Morrison's Tar Baby, and Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place. I focus on these authors' use of language and apply sociolinguistic theory to my analysis. Specifically, I examine the question of a black women's genderlect and the implications of such language for readers and literary critics of black women's novels. I argue that the history of black women in this country, a history framed by racism and sexism, has contributed to the development of a language that reveals black women's consciousness. The language used by the black women characters in the three novels I discuss demonstrates this consciousness and communicates culturally specific meanings to those black women who share the same consciousness. The first chapter explains the purpose and scope of the dissertation. I discuss the historical ignorance of works by black women and the efforts on the part of black feminist critics to develop a womanist orientation. The second chapter provides a historical background on the use of black dialect and speech styles in literature. It analyzes the shift in attitudes toward this dialect during the Black Arts Movement and how it is now being used in black literature. This chapter also discusses the attempts by black women writers to (re)establish a black women's literary tradition. The third chapter analyzes Alice Walker's use of dialect in The Color Purple. The fourth chapter examines the use of inversion in Toni Morrison's Tar Baby. The fifth chapter examines the various voices controlled by social context in The Women of Brewster Place. The final chapter discusses how the black woman, who rarely recognized herself in the faces of Euro-American women literary characters, has become an insider as she reviews literature written about her and in her own language. The signs and symbols she encounters are no longer arbitrary; they are loaded with culturally specific womanist meanings.