Apparent Resistance- Alice Walker´s The Color Purple as supportive of patriarchal American society

Abstract: Ever since it was published in 1982, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple has been celebrated for giving African-American women a voice and for challenging patriarchal structures in society, but it has also been criticised for being stereo-typical in its portrayal of African-American men and women. In this essay I claim that the novel in fact supports patriarchal American society. I discuss this by first looking at the parts of the novel that can be seen as challenging towards patriarchal structures, moving on to a more critical standpoint showing that the resistance towards patriarchal structures in the novel is not at all as strong as it may seem at first.