Alice Walker's Meridian Essay

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Recommended: Gender roles in 1960

“But Truman did not want a general beside him. He did not want a woman who tried… to claim her own life” (Walker, 112). Alice Walker’s Meridian is a modernist critique of gender in American society during the 1960s and 1970s. Walker uses third person point of view with an emphasis on the thoughts and feelings of Meridian to tell her story. The reader is able to characterize Eddie and Truman through the lens of Meridian’s beliefs and ideas about men, women, and sex. Eddie and Truman appear to the reader as archetypal misogynistic men, who use women for their personal pleasure and gain. The characterization of these integral men in Meridian’s life reflect the struggle to overcome the restrictive ideals for women imposed by the climate of sexual …show more content…

When Eddie impregnated her, Meridian was expected to want and love her baby. She felt this historical pressure and responsibility to want her child due to Black women having their babies stolen from them and forced into slavery. However, Meridian was given the option of pursuing higher education and she seized the opportunity by symbolically releasing the shackles of motherhood imposed on her against her will. Furthermore, her ability to go to college while not finishing high school was a remarkable one. It allowed Meridian to be included in the Civil Rights Movement and gave her back her voice. She was educated and given a cause she could fight for, one she felt strongly about and that mattered to her. Her education gave her the purpose she sought in life. The Civil Rights Movement was something she participated in on her own terms. Even though Truman encouraged her to join the Movement, she stayed because she wanted to and because it mattered to her, even when he left and became distracted. Meridian was born into a life in which she needed to be a virgin, a mother, a wife, and a caretaker; but she built for herself her own legacy in which she became an activist, a leader, and a role

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