ABSTRACT
In art, literature and music women have been allocated subsidiary roles as wives, mothers, sisters and daughters within the institution of the family or as lovers outside it. Much Anglo-American feminist literary criticism centres on women writers and not only studies the great women writers but also endeavours to recover writing by women, who were often popular in their time, but whose work has not been included in the literary canon. Whereas Anglo-American feminist literary theory has been author-centred, French feminist criticism is centred on the text and has been greatly influenced by psychoanalysis and deconstruction. French feminists argue that Western culture is phallocentric; it places man at the centre as a unified being and defines those who are not male as other. The Color Purple is a useful text for feminist criticism because its form makes it impossible to talk convincingly about it in terms of characters and plot.
