Rebirth and Self Discovery in The Color Purple, The Sound and the Fury, Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow Sophie Edwards 12th Grade

Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple, written in 1982, emerged from the appearance of Feminist writers in the 1970s, when specific gender issues were no longer being suppressed by a patriarchal society. This allowed for the growth of personal freedom within the cultural legacy of both the Black community and the Feminist movement. Intellectual consciousness widened along with the drive to assert selfhood; this theme of the establishment of one’s sense of self is present in my second chosen text: The Sound and the Fury written by William Faulkner in 1929. The novel is a representation of an archetypical Southern American family “on the way to dusty death", primarily due to their involvement in the distorted political and social struggle with new trends spreading from the North. The Sound and the Fury is written in three parts; the first of which is told through the eyes of Benjy, a young man handicapped by a psychological illness. In Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow (published 1970), Ted Hughes used the quasi-human figure of Crow to explore the human psyche, and his themes of death and rebirth. The work took on the form of a Shamanic journey to the Underworld, something that Hughes believed integral to folk-mythology. Crow...