Black Women's Selfhood in Alice Walker's Possessing the Secret of Joy

Alice Walker examines in her fiction the black women's search for selfhood through an analysis of the individual's relationship to the community. In Walker's novels, the black women's struggle to claim their selves, in order to change their lives and secure a rightful place within the social network of relationships they themselves constitute, usually absorbs the psychic pain involved in such a struggle and shatters the iron bars of gender which limit self-empowerment. The author herself explains: "I believe in ... a willing acceptance of responsibility for one's thoughts, behavior and actions, that makes it powerful. The white man's oppression of me will never excuse my oppression of you, whether you are man, woman, child ... because the self I prize refuses to be owned by him. Or by anyone" The Third Life of Grange Copeland 345 .