Promoting a return to traditional black sexual morality and cultural values in selected novels by Alice Walker

Abstract: Twentieth-century African American female literature saw the publication of novels by female authors who struggled to restore African sexual morality and cultural values through their black characters. Walker’s publication of The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), The Color Purple (1982) and Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) fits into this perspective of struggle. However, these three novels along with their author have been viciously criticized and condemned by some black critics because, for them, black characters’ representation by the author in the said works is (sexually) immoral and leads to the denigration of Blacks and their cultures. Questioning these condemnations and criticisms against Walker and her three works, this essay aims at showing that the author goes through Blacks’ portrayals to promote the revival of traditional black cultural values and sexual morality, in the face of their decline in the contemporary black world, for the sake of Blacks’ well-being. Through the lenses of postcolonial and Rosenblatt’s reader-response theories, this essay reveals that, through black characterization, the novelist deprecates and criticizes the decline of sexual abstinence or restraint, solidarity, humanism and honesty in modern black world in order to call for their restoration. Keywords: Walker, decline, restoration, black values