The color purple Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

The color purple - Research Paper ExampleItd refine your mammy (1). What Celie is forbidden to articulate publicly is her repeated rape by the man she believes to be her bewilder this violation of both Celies body and her voice speaks of an underlying socio-linguistic censorship that relegates the female bailiwick to an objectified position, as passive, absent, and silent. In this paradigm the maternal must be sacrificed if the subject is to speak. The relationship between Celie and Alphonso illustrates this phenomenon, as the paternal interdiction relies upon the premise that if Celie speaks, she is forsaking her mammy (1). Celie comes to represent this forced contract between a woman and the impartiality of the Father, where a females body, spirit, and speech are sacrificed in an act of socio-symbolic rape however, as Celies subversive authorship suggests, it is a sacrifice she is unwilling to make. In her article Womens Time, Julia Kristeva speaks of the role language plays i n violating female subjectivity she states, a new generation of women is showing that its major hearty concern has become the socio-symbolic contract as a sacrificial contract, that they are forced to experience this sacrificial contract against their will (Kristeva Womens Time 25). ... e, credit with the sacrificial logic of separation and syntactical sequence at the foundation of language and the social edict leads to the rejection of the symbolic--lived as the rejection of the paternal function and ultimately generating psychoses (Kristeva Womens Time 25). The psychoses that Kristeva identifies can be seen as reflecting neurotic discontent, as a conflict of gender that is realized through linguistic disruption. Kristeva posits two possible strategies to comeback the exclusion and silence experienced by women the first, to attempt to possess the symbolic by adopting the dominant political theory the second, to approach language as a personal affect experienced when facing it as subject and as a woman (Kristeva Womens Time 24). Such an approach suggests a need to pause the code, to shatter language, to find a specific discourse closer to the body and emotions, to the unnamable repressed by the social contract (Kristeva Womens Time 24-25). Kristevas perspective of language posits a revolt against the exclusion of the symbolic contract. In About Chinese Women, Kristeva identifies women as able to give a name to the repressed, as able to reform the body back to a place of significance (Kristeva About Chinese Women 30-35). In this context, the body becomes intertwined with Kristevas imagination of the semiotic, as a sort of expression that exists outside of the symbolic, preceding language while simultaneously be within language, albeit in a repressed form. Semiotic discourse moves beyond the symbolic by opposing structures of exclusion. The mother-child bond becomes the definitive relationship of semiotic discourse, as it exists beyond binary differen ces of gender and sexuality. When viewed in this