Feminism In Alice Walker's Meridian

Alice Walker’s Meridian is a historical novel covering much of the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-to-late twentieth century, and although much of the novel is focused on societal conditions regarding race relations, Walker also explores sexual relations in place at the time. Sexual politics play a key role in setting the foundation of Walker’s argument, and is staged through her use of characterization, especially with regards to Meridian and Truman. These characterizations also shape an implied argument about gender that women are incompetent and weaker than men (mentally, physically, and emotionally), and should therefore be subordinate to them, as well as implications about racial dynamics during the time period covered in the novel.
Meridian, as the protagonist of the novel, is described in the beginning as being …show more content…
Once again Walker uses Meridian and her struggle as a way to bridge this gap between sexual politics and racial dynamics in order to show how the two influence and contribute to each other. Meridian is an African American woman during this period which means that she is not only facing gender discrimination but that she is also facing racial discrimination along with a discrimination coming from within her own race due to her gender. This results in her struggling to find her place in the civil rights movement, and ultimately having to abandon it altogether in order to discover who she was as a person and as a woman. The fact that Walker is able to mesh the two arguments together in such a seamless way can also somewhat be attributed to the irony of the situation. Everything that the men and women were fighting against in the civil rights movement with regards to white treatment of African Americans—inalienable rights, justice, and equality—is very similar to the way that these same men treated women, and yet the men did nothing to fight