Gender Roles In The Color Purple, Woman Hollering Creek

In the literary works, The Color Purple, Woman Hollering Creek, and Seventeen Syllables, the characters of Nettie, Cleófilas, and Mrs. Hayashi experience similar impediments via patriarchal dominance in their cultures that limit their ability to move outside restrictive gender roles. In The Color Purple, Nettie, an educated black woman from the south, who travels to Africa to become a missionary, highlights the sexual oppression that links African Americans and the African Olinka. The two worlds share a legacy of white patriarchal domination over black bodies, which in turn impose further devaluation of black female bodies as sexual objects for male pleasure and control. In Woman Hollering Creek, Cleófilas endures the potency of her Latino