Sofia "the Amazon" and her Role as a Symbol of Resistance Anonymous 12th Grade

A novel of a heroic quest for selfhood against an imposed silence, The Color Purple revolves around the American cultural understanding of feminine and racial mythologies: preconceived notions that Walker goes on to subvert and reconstruct. It is within this framework that Sofia - the “amazon”- emerges, in the words of Lauren Berlant, as the “voice of sexual and racial resentment” in the face of whom femininity and masculinity, oppressed and oppressor, resistance and erasure meet. Placed against a backdrop of interracial and intra -racial conflicts, Sofia’s story is added to the oral tradition of the novel, and resonates within both the literary and real-life black American community.

From her first appearance in the novel, Sofia’s presentation rejects traditional heteronormative paradigms; gender becomes a socially imposed categorization, rather than the result of inherent biological characteristics. Indicative of this is the predominantly masculine, soldier-like diction associated with Sofia: she is “solid” as in “if she sit down on something, it be mash”, “her arms got muscles”. When Harpo and Sofia march “hand in hand like going to war with Sophia in front”, her physical position introduces her dominant role in the...