The Temple of My Familiar
After a huge success of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1983), another novel, The Temple of My Familiar came which was published in 1989. Though the events in the novel were beautifully woven but it did not receive much acclamation. bell hooks praised the novel and called it a “multivocal experiment with postmodern romance and magical realism (hooks)”. The novel is considered a sequel to Walker’s The Color Purple. Alice Walker herself described the novel as “a romance of the last 500,000 years" ( ). The novel emphasizes on examining the questions of death and birth and knowledge attained through regeneration. In this part of the thesis, the analysis of the narrative technique, themes and motifs of the novel will be made. The further sections will focus on tracing the elements of the womanist theory in The Temple of My Familiar. …show more content…
Harold Bloom suggests that the word 'temple' refers to the aim of the novel which is to "build a structure of beliefs" (40). The work, Walker described in her book, Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writers Activism would be less about the relationships of human beings to each other than about the relationship of humans (women, in particular) to animals, who, in the outer world, symbolize woman's inner spirit" (118). The term 'familiar' suggests the animal spirits, and while working on the story, she noticed many animals around her. Though Walker had been born in Christianity but as the time passed and she became spiritually awakened, Walker embraced Spirituality. She saw the Mother-Earth as a home of animals too. She
After a huge success of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1983), another novel, The Temple of My Familiar came which was published in 1989. Though the events in the novel were beautifully woven but it did not receive much acclamation. bell hooks praised the novel and called it a “multivocal experiment with postmodern romance and magical realism (hooks)”. The novel is considered a sequel to Walker’s The Color Purple. Alice Walker herself described the novel as “a romance of the last 500,000 years" ( ). The novel emphasizes on examining the questions of death and birth and knowledge attained through regeneration. In this part of the thesis, the analysis of the narrative technique, themes and motifs of the novel will be made. The further sections will focus on tracing the elements of the womanist theory in The Temple of My Familiar. …show more content…
Harold Bloom suggests that the word 'temple' refers to the aim of the novel which is to "build a structure of beliefs" (40). The work, Walker described in her book, Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writers Activism would be less about the relationships of human beings to each other than about the relationship of humans (women, in particular) to animals, who, in the outer world, symbolize woman's inner spirit" (118). The term 'familiar' suggests the animal spirits, and while working on the story, she noticed many animals around her. Though Walker had been born in Christianity but as the time passed and she became spiritually awakened, Walker embraced Spirituality. She saw the Mother-Earth as a home of animals too. She