Letter-Writing as Voice of Women in Doris Lessing’s the Golden Notebook and Alice Walker’s the Color Purple

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Epistolarity or letter-writing as a literary form in fiction is a powerful genre for women writers interested in using novel to examine modern society critically and present a world better than the one they have had. Since letter-writing reveals the thinking processes of the characters, it has the potential of making the letter a means of expressing their own voices. In feminist works language and the adequacy of language come under careful scrutiny. There have been novels that use letter-writing to focus on the reconstruction of the self, especially women-self. Two of such works are Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962) and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982). This article argues that D. Lessing and Alice Walker, despite their different national identities, had the aim of exposing almost everything, especially the status, emotions, sexuality and role, of women in their societies through the above mentioned narration technique in their works. And it is claimed that they contributed particularly to women’s rights movement as intellectual women novelists to the full extent of their power.

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Epistolary , Women , Woman , self , Alice Walker , Doris Lessing , Reconstruction

Journal Of Graduate School Of Social Sciences

298

Journal Of Graduate School Of Social Sciences