Women’s resistance against patriarchal tradition in Royyan Julian’s Tiang Garam and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple

This study comparatively examines the representation of women’s resistance to patriarchal traditions in Royyan Julian’s Tiang Garam (2023) and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982). Although the novels emerge from different sociocultural contexts—rural Madurese society in Indonesia and an African American community in the southern United States—both portray women whose bodies, voices, and life choices are controlled by family, marriage, and communal expectations. Employing a comparative-literature approach and feminist textual analysis, the research examines characterization, narrative voice, setting, conflict, and the symbolic significance of the female body and spatial mobility. The analysis argues that Kana’s stigmatization following infertility and divorce demonstrates how Madurese patriarchal culture associates womanhood with marriage and motherhood. Her decision to leave her community represents a spatial and everyday form of resistance through which she attempts to reconstruct her identity. In contrast, Celie’s resistance develops from silence and submission toward narrative, economic, and personal autonomy. Letter writing, female solidarity, work, and her eventual rejection of marital domination enable her to reclaim her voice and subjectivity. The comparison reveals that resistance does not always take the form of direct rebellion. It may emerge through survival, migration, storytelling, economic independence, and supportive relationships among women.