Exploration of Counterculture in Alice Walker's The Color Purple

Abstract

The Color Purple by an activist American Alice Walker has been the milestone in the field of the novels of protest. It radically comes up with the deconstruction and endeavoring towards the new structures in the traditional discourses and power operations within the American society. Depicting the lives and their constraints caused by the various discourses in rural Georgia in 1930s, the novel comes up with the sense of counterculture. Using the socially marginalized and mistreated female character Celie as her mouthpiece, Walker motivates female of the society for the journey from innocence to awareness of identity of the female and underscores the need of female unity and envisions the world of independent women who could challenge the patriarchal domination anytime. The novel deconstruct the role of the husband of the society, deconstruct the masculine notion of god as represented in the Bible and undermines the heterosexuality by the males think women their possession.