Gender Relations In Virginie Brac And Myriam Cottias’ Tropiques Amers (2007) And Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982).

Résumé: The aim of this study is to examine the question of gender relations in Virginie Brac and Myriam Cottias’ Tropiques amers (2007) and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982). In the two chapters devoted to each of these literary works, we have borrowed certain theoretical concepts, namely Pierre Bourdieu’s Habitus in his Esquisse d'une Théorie de la Pratique (2000), Alice Walker’s Womanism in her collection of essays “In Search for Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose” (1983) and Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic in his book Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), in order to highlight the way some black women have participated in the maintenance of patriarchy, the struggles of others to achieve gender equality and the success of some in carnivalizing gender roles. For a better understanding of the present dissertation, a historical approach to the two novels has been adopted in order to illustrate the difficult conditions and realities in which black women lived in Martinique during the periods of slavery (eighteenth century) and in South American society during the period of segregation (early twentieth century). In the first chapter, Gender Relations in the Tropiques amers (2007), we have seen how some black women during the period of slavery helped to maintain white patriarchy, how others fought white supremacy, and then how some were able to regain power over the white man by becoming black matriarchs. The second chapter, Gender Relations in The Color Purple (1982), has revealed some of what Black women had to endure from their Black counterparts after their emancipation from white supremacy. This chapter has revealed how some Black women reinforced Black patriarchy by endorsing their gender roles, how others resisted the gender hierarchy within their communities, and how some were able to subvert the gender order and carnivalize it. In conclusion, the comparative study of the two novels has allowed us to see that the two French authors and the American author, albeit from different backgrounds and lives, have similarly portrayed how Black women have experienced the dual oppression of racism and sexism both during slavery and after the emancipation of the Black community

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