A Gynocritical Study of The Color Purple by Alice Walker: A corpus-based Analysis of Adjectives

Abstract

From the beginning of the scholarly work on the women, most of the research have been carried out by opposite gender. Therefore, there have been limited work done to see how a woman portrays another woman in her writings. Moreover, there have been limited research conducted utilizing corpus tools for the analysis of gynocriticism. Thus, the present research aims to examine The Color Purple by Alice Walker by employing the corpus-based approach to investigate the representation of female character by the author in the novel. The positive or negative portrayal of women by the author in the novel was investigated through author’s usage of adjectives. Showalter's (2009) Theory of Gynocriticsim was used as a theoretical framework for the current research. Further, corpus-based methodology was employed to analyze how Alice Walker has portrayed the female character in her novel through the use of adjectives. An in-depth analysis has shown that Alice Walker has depicted woman as a helpless and sidelined being who can be turned as a resilient after suffering from frightful circumstances. The current research also opens new gates for the researchers to analyze the text from Gynocriticial perspective along with corpus techniques. Keywords: Adjectives; Corpus-based analysis; Gynocriticsim; The Color Purple; Woman