In Love and Trouble- A Book of Women with Triple Burden

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Mandy Yu

Dr. Christie        

English 1220

6 May 2005

In Love and Trouble- A Book of Women with Triple Burden

      Stories from In Love and Trouble, like other Alice Walker’s works, are the portrayal of black women. I would interpret the term “black women” as women who have gone through all sorts of hardship and struggles, but not all women in the world or only those with black skin. I strongly argue that Walker’s characters are better represented as women who suffer the way African American women do, than as women with black skin. I will justify my argument by referring to specific examples from two short stories in the book, namely Roselily and Everyday Use.

      The characters in In Love and Trouble are not represented by all women because not all women carry as many burdens as the characters in the book. One group of women excluded is the white. As Clenora points out African-American women suffer from “a tripartite form of oppression- racism, classism, and sexism” (192). All black women in the book have to bear the triple burden. Living in a white-dominant society, they are oppressed by the white. Their race also leads to their poverty. Being in a male-dominant society, they are abused by their husbands who are themselves abused by the white. “These women [are] simply defeated in one way or another by the external circumstances of their lives” (Washington 89-90).

In Roselily, Roselily is also a victim of the triple burden. Although there is no direct description of how she is oppressed by the white, it is implied: “She can imagine God, a small black boy [my emphasis], timidly pulling the preacher’s coattail” (4). In Roseliliy’s imagination, God has black skin, which is a sharp contrast to the traditional white God image in the Western world. The black God image shows her questioning on why there are different races, which implies her sufferings as a result of her black skin. Her race also brings about her poverty. She is so poor that she has no choice, but gives away his fourth child to his father. What is worse, her life is so hard that she marries herself off to a man to whom she is not attached. The reason she marries him is that she is “impatient to be done with sewing” and “with doing everything for three children, alone” (7).Roselily knows clearly she will no longer be herself after the marriage: “She thinks she loves the effort he will make to redo her into what he truly wants” (8). She has no choice but transforms herself to the kind of woman her husband wants. She has to wear robes and veil although “her body itches to be free of satin and voile, organdie and lily of the valley” (6). Washington suggests “the very robe and veil she is wearing are emblems of servitude that she yearns to be free of” (92). She has to have babies for her husband although she is “not comforted” (7) with the idea. The sentence “They [babies] are inevitable” (7) even implies she has no choice but has babies. Every decision she makes is forced by her difficult conditions, rather than by her own will. Driven by her extreme poverty and her burdens, she has lost her own self totally.

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Like Roselily, Maggie suffers from the triple burden as a black woman. She undervalues herself and suffers from low self-esteem owing to her “psychological scars” (Weston 154): “Maggie will be nervous until after her sister goes: she will stand hopelessly in corners, homely and ashamed of the burn scars down her arms and legs, eying her sister with a mixture of envy and awe” (47). She never notices her own worth of her cultural inheritance and her ability to quilt.

 White women never belong to the same world of Walker’s characters. They do not suffer the same way Roselily and ...

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