"A View from 'Elsewhere' ": Subversive Sexuality and the Rewriting of the Heroine's Story in The Color Purple
By telling the story of the "invisible woman"-a character traditionally silenced and effaced in fiction-The Color Purple challenges patriarchal constructions of femininity and female desire and makes representation itself a compelling issue. Initially, the great twentieth-century cultural...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Cambridge University Press
1991
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| In: |
PMLA
Year: 1991, Volume: 106, Issue: 5, Pages: 1106-1115 |
| Further subjects: | B
Girard, René (1923-2015)
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| Online Access: |
Volltext (kostenfrei) Volltext (kostenfrei) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | By telling the story of the "invisible woman"-a character traditionally silenced and effaced in fiction-The Color Purple challenges patriarchal constructions of femininity and female desire and makes representation itself a compelling issue. Initially, the great twentieth-century cultural narratives of sexuality and socialization, Freud's oedipal theory and Lévi-Strauss's theory of kinship systems and the exchange of women, are played out in the drama of Celie's life. But this differently crafted, quilted novel is also differently sexual; it replots the heroine's text within an alternative framework of desire and disrupts the symbolic order with its carnivalesque celebration of polymorphously perverse pleasure. |
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| ISSN: | 1938-1530 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Modern Language Association of America, PMLA
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.2307/462683 |