Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Bones, Frogs, And Killers: The Corporeal Oppression Of Women In The Patriarchal, Christian South, Shawna F. Felkins

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Both Alice Walker and Dorothy Allison create female protagonists who face corporeal oppression in their works The Color Purple and Bastard out of Carolina, respectively. It these protagonist’s feminine gender that allows the men in their lives to control them. Connecting these two authors and validating there assertions of the power of patriarchy to oppress women through the physical body, is author Lillian Smith and her work Killers of the Dream. There is a connecting thread running through these works that explains the reign of patriarchal oppression in the South: Christianity. Women, especially those in the Christian culture of the …