Gender violence and Alice Walker's novel The Colour Purple, Toni Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye

This thesis is explains and analyzes gender violence in two novels, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (1970), and Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982). Specifically, the treatment of violence, rape, incest and gender identity in the novels are examined in order to highlight. The trauma suffered by black women and girls in both novels, highlighting how the color of their skin becomes an undesirable identity for the protagonists Pecola and Celie. The primarily goal of the thesis is the analyses of slavery, sexual abuse, and racism, illustrating how since being forcibly taken to America, black people agonized both psychologically and physically over their place in the world and in America. The thesis will also make clear that the brutal treatment of black women was not single sided: that only white people perpetrated this brutality. Instead, the thesis builds on ideas about black male aggression against black women, an internalized system of brutality, which hugely affected black women's lives. The thesis is divided into five chapters inclusive of introduction and conclusion. The first chapter is divided into three sections, each introducing a specific subject. The first section deals with the suffering of black women at hands of both white and black men. The second section highlights violence in The Bluest Eye and The Color Purple. The third section deals with the long reaching impact of slavery in both novels. The second chapter explains the historical background of slavery in The United States of America, while analyzing racism and its impact on the lives of African-Americans and concluding with the genesis of the Civil Rights Movement. Chapter three deals with how black males use physical, sexual, and psychological violence towards black females; which explains the cause of protagonist's mental breakdowns. Chapter four highlights the strategies used by black women which lead to the emancipation of the novels' protagonist from black men's use of physical, sexual, and psychological violence to limit both their power and their sense of self-esteem. The final chapter is the conclusion that reestablished the connections between the history of African-Americans and the literature written about their experience.