Walker, Alice 1944–
Alice Walker 1944-
(Full name Alice Malsenior Walker) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, poet, editor, and author of children's books.
For additional information on Walker's career, see Black Literature Criticism, Ed. 1.
INTRODUCTION
One of the most prolific black writers in America and among the most important contemporary American writers, Walker is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple, whose publication in 1982 made her an overnight literary celebrity. In novels, poetry, short stories, and essays, Walker writes about the black woman's struggle for spiritual wholeness and for sexual, political, and racial equality. Her work is an exploration of the individual identity of the black woman and how embracing her identity and bonding with other women affects the health of her community at large. Walker describes this kinship among women as "womanism," as opposed to feminism, and sees herself as a "Womanist"—as someone who appreciates women's culture, emotions, and character. Critics have pointed out that her writings reflect not only this stance, but also, paradoxically, the universality of human experience. Though some critics have faulted Walker's fiction for its unflattering portraits of black men, most applaud her lyrical prose, her sensitive characterizations, and her gift for rendering beauty, grace, and dignity in ordinary people and places.
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Walker was born in 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia, a rural southern town where her father was a sharecropper. When she was eight years old, she was accidentally shot in the eye by her brother, who was playing with a BB gun. Her parents, who could not afford a car, could not take her to a doctor for several days. By that time, her wound was so bad that she lost the use of her right eye. Permanently scarred, she spent most of her childhood withdrawn from others, writing poetry to ease her loneliness and becoming a meticulous observer of human relationships and interaction. The accident also had a lasting impact on her relationship with her father: his inability to obtain proper medical treatment for her colored her relationship with him, and they remained estranged for the rest of his life. In contrast, Walker has noted that she respected her mother's strength and perseverance in the face of poverty, recalling how hard her mother worked in her garden to create beauty in even the shabbiest of conditions. Despite her disadvantaged home life, Walker was an excellent student and in 1961 was awarded a scholarship to Spelman College in Atlanta, where she became involved in the civil rights movement and participated in sit-ins at local business establishments. In 1963 she transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, where she began to work seriously on writing poetry, publishing her first collection, Once (1968), in reaction to a traumatic abortion. Walker shared the poems with one of her teachers, the poet Muriel Rukeyser, whose agent found a publisher for them. After earning her undergraduate degree in 1965, she moved to Mississippi to teach and continue her social activism, and she met and married Melvyn Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights lawyer. The two became the only legally married interracial couple living in Jackson, Mississippi. Since the cou- ple's divorce in 1976, Walker has focused more on her writing and has taught at various colleges and universities. While working in Mississippi, she discovered the writings of Zora Neale Hurston, an author who would have a great influence on Walker's later work. Walker eventually edited a collection of Hurston's fiction called I Love Myself When I'm Laughing … and Then again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive (1979). In addition to poetry, Walker has written short stories, essays, children's books, and several novels, most notably The Color Purple, which received both the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the American Book Award, and was made into an award-winning film in 1985.
MAJOR WORKS
Walker's work consistently reflects her concern with racial, sexual, and political issues—particularly with the black woman's struggle for spiritual survival. Her writings are also infused with the idea of reformation, the sense of hope despite the brutal effects of sexism and racism suffered by her characters. Her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), introduces many of her prevalent themes, particularly the domination of powerless women by equally powerless men. In the narrative, which spans the years between the Depression and the beginnings of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s, Walker chronicled three generations of a black sharecropping family and its patriarch, Grange Copeland, as they struggle with poverty and racism. Another theme in Walker's fiction is the way in which the black woman's attempt to be whole relates to the health of her community. The attempt at wholeness comes from remaining true to herself and fighting against the constraints of society, as in the stories from Walker's 1973 collection In Love and Trouble. In her 1973 poetry collection Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems, Walker turned to the issues of civil and women's rights, maintaining a direct, personal voice in her focus on an individual's struggles on a daily basis to preserve dignity and liberty despite hardship and oppression. Her second novel, Meridian (1976), a tale of perseverance and personal sacrifice set during the 1960s, is generally regarded as one of the best novels about the civil rights movement. Considered autobiographical, Meridian explores conflicts between traditional African American values handed down through slavery and the revolutionary polemic espoused by the Black Power movement.
In her most highly acclaimed novel, The Color Purple, Walker used the form of letters in creating a black woman who is victimized physically and emotionally by her stepfather, who repeatedly rapes her and then takes her children away from her, and by her husband, an older widower who sees her more as a mule than as a wife. The letters are written to God and Celie's sister, Nettie, who escaped a similar life by becoming a missionary in Africa. Celie overcomes her oppression with the intervention of an unlikely ally, her husband's mistress, Shug Avery. Walker's next novel, The Temple of My Familiar (1989) is an ambitious undertaking that records 500,000 years of human history. The novel's central character, Miss Lissie, is a goddess from primeval Africa who has been incarnated hundreds of times throughout history. She befriends Suwelo, a narcissistic university professor whose marriage is threatened by his need to dominate and sexually exploit his wife. Through a series of conversations with Miss Lissie and her friend Hal, Suwelo learns of Miss Lissie's innumerable lives and experiences—from the prehistoric world in which humans and animals lived in harmony under a matriarchal society to slavery in the United States—and regains his capacity to live, nurture, and respect himself and others. In her controversial fifth novel, Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), Walker examined the practice of female genital mutilation in certain African, Asian, and Middle Eastern cultures. The novel focuses on Tashi, a woman who willingly requests the ritual, in part because she is unaware of what the ceremony involves. Since discussion of the ritual is taboo in her culture, Tashi is ignorant of the profound impact the procedure will have on her life. Walker's concerns about the international issue of female genital mutilation prompted her to further explore the subject, both on film and in the book Warrior Marks (1993). Written with film director Pratibha Parmar, Warrior Marks details how the two filmed a documentary on the ritual circumcision of African women. Walker published her sixth novel, By the Light of My Father's Smile, in 1998. Focusing on female sexuality and told in flashback, the novel centers on the Robinsons, a husband-and-wife team of anthropologists. Unable to secure funding for research in Mexico in the 1950s, the husband poses as a minister to study the Mundo, a mixed black and Indian tribe. When the couple's daughter becomes involved with a Mundo boy, the father reacts violently, a response that has repercussions throughout the novel. Walker experiments with points of view in the novel, even recounting the action through the eyes of the recently deceased patriarch of the Robinson clan.
Walker has continued to write in a variety of genres, from fiction to nonfiction and poetry. In 1997's Anything We Love Can Be Saved, she detailed her own political and social struggle, while in the short story collection The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart (2000), she employed fiction to reflect on her own past, including her marriage, the birth of her daughter, and the creative life she built after her divorce. She returned to poetry with her 2003 collection Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth, which was inspired by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Walker's seventh novel, Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart, (2004), recounts the tale of a successful African American novelist, Kate, and her search for new meaning as she approaches the age of sixty. In a long-time relationship with the artist Yolo, Kate decides to voyage down the Colorado River and then down the Amazon, on trips of self-discovery. Yolo meanwhile goes on his own quest, to Hawaii, and to the woman he once loved.
CRITICAL RECEPTION
Walker earned high praise for The Color Purple, especially for her accurate rendering of black folk idioms and her characterization of Celie. Despite this almost unanimous praise for the novel, however, there are several widely debated aspects of Walker's writing as a whole. One such aspect is her portrayal of black male characters as archetypes of black men in modern society. Many reviewers condemn her portrayals of black men as overly negative, pointing to the vile characters in some of her work and to her own comments about black men as evidence of enmity on her part. Other critics assert that the author, in presenting flawed characters, reveals typical shortcomings in the hope that real people burdened with these flaws will recognize themselves in her stories and strive to change. Some reviewers also assert that Walker's work contains positive images of black men that are often ignored by critics. Beyond her portrayal of black men, some reviewers have found fault with Walker's characterization in general, opposing her tendency to refer to characters only with pronouns, thereby encouraging readers to consider the characters exemplary of anyone to whom that pronoun could apply. Finally, much of Walker's work is viewed as political in intent, at times to the detriment of its literary value. This negative assessment has been leveled in particular at The Temple of My Familiar, which has been described as a sociopolitical manifesto rather than a work of art. Considered a minor work at best, The Temple of My Familiar has also been criticized by commentators who took issue with Walker's speculative interpretation of the origins of patriarchal societies and found her discourses on racial and sexual relations pretentious and offensive. In contrast, reviewers praise works such as In Love and Trouble for balancing the art of storytelling with political concerns. Reviewers often laud Walker for her use of the oral storytelling tradition, finding her work most convincing when she employs anecdotal narrative. Critics have also given high praise to the nonfictional Warrior Marks for its exposure of the practice of female genital mutilation. In addition to the critical acclaim Walker has received as a major American novelist, she is also considered an accomplished poet. Though her poetry is occasionally described as overly strident and politicized, it has been praised for the intimate tone that often comes from her use of simple form and diction reminiscent of African American folk parables. Her poetry is admired, too, for its ability to tap into universal truths and emotions common to all people regardless of race or gender, and for its capacity to ennoble and dignify its subjects, who are typically regarded by society as insignificant and useless.
PRINCIPAL WORKS
Once: Poems (poetry) 1968
The Third Life of Grange Copeland (novel) 1970
Five Poems (poetry) 1972
In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (short stories) 1973
Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems (poetry) 1973
Langston Hughes: American Poet (children's biography) 1974; revised edition, 2002
Meridian (novel) 1976
Goodnight, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning (poetry) 1979
I Love Myself When I'm Laughing … and Then again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader [editor] (fiction) 1979
You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down (short stories) 1981
The Color Purple (novel) 1982
In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (essays) 1983
Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful (poetry) 1984
Living by the Word: Selected Writings, 1973-1987 (essays) 1988
To Hell with Dying (children's fiction) 1988
The Temple of My Familiar (novel) 1989
Finding the Green Stone [with Catherine Deeter] (children's fiction) 1991
Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems, 1965-1990 (poetry) 1991
Possessing the Secret of Joy (novel) 1992
Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women [with Pratibha Parmar] (nonfiction) 1993
Alice Walker Banned (nonfiction) 1996
The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult; A Meditation on Life, Spirit, Art, and the Making of the Film The Color Purple, Ten Years Later (essays) 1996
Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's Activism (nonfiction) 1997
By the Light of My Father's Smile (novel) 1998
Dreads: Sacred Rites of the Natural Hair Revolution [with Francesco Mastalia and Alfonse Pagano] (non-fiction) 1999
The Way forward Is with a Broken Heart (short stories) 2000
Sent to Earth: A Message from the Grandmother Spirit: After the Attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (prose and poetry) 2001
Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth: New Poems (poetry) 2003
A Poem Traveled down My Arm: Poems and Drawings (poetry) 2003
Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (novel) 2004
We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting for; Inner Light in a Time of Darkness: Meditations (essays) 2006
Why War Is Never a Good Idea (for children) 2007
CRITICISM
Ikenna Dieke (essay date 1999)
SOURCE: Dieke, Ikenna. "Alice Walker: Poesy and the Earthling Psyche." In The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry, edited by Joanne V. Gabbin, pp. 169-81. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999.
[In the essay that follows, Dieke considers Walker as an "earthling poet" based on her focus on everyday people and situations, her celebration of the relationship between humanity and the natural environment, and her attempts at self-analysis.]
In what has now become one of the most significant books of essays in the rich repertoire of African American criticism, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, Alice Walker enunciates a preoccupation with the artistic imagination that might well be dubbed the earthling subjectivity. Reacting angrily to a reader's disparaging remark that "a farmer's daughter might not be the stuff of which poets are made,"1 Walker insists that the raw material out of which the poet constructs the world of her art must necessarily originate from the common people for whom she clearly writes. "A shack with only a dozen or so books is an unlikely place to discover a young Keats. But it is narrow thinking, indeed, to believe that a Keats is the only kind of poet one would want to grow up to be. One wants to write poetry that is understood by one's people, not by the Queen of England."2
If we put aside the narrow context of this apparent though unintended slight against the English monarch, the expression "Queen of England" should be construed in a much wider sense, as an intentional trope by negation designed, first, to express the idea of art as the inspired response to the ordinary, the commonplace, the experiences of common people, and, second, to highlight the marked difference between this kind of art and that which has as its primary focus the high and mighty in society, the privileged elite. It is a distinction between high mimetic art and that of the low mimetic.3 As Walker sees it, the enduring aspect of art is the artist's extraordinary capacity to hallow the commonplace, to imagine the limitless possibility of the extraordinary in the common run of affairs—in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, to see the miraculous in the ordinary everyday reality.4 This sensibility is displayed at every level of her writing, but most energetically in her poetry. In fact, her poetry, from Once to Revolutionary Petunias, and from Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning to Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, reads like one grand pastoral metaphor of the earthling consciousness, which attempts to redeem through the poetic medium a world thought to be of little worth. It is very much like dining with Keats and being swept away by his doctrine of negative capability—" the abandoning of one's self to a selfless sympathy with common everyday things."5
Walker's poetry, therefore, like the verse of John Greenleaf Whittier, Thomas Gray, Robert Burns, Oliver Goldsmith, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and William Wordsworth, does significantly share in many of the essential motifs of the earthling subjectivity, motifs neatly jelled and goulashed in the unique cadences of the familiar and the commonplace in the experiences of a woman of color in America and beyond. The essential characteristic elements of this earthling subjectivity are expressed through a preoccupation with certain themes and concerns.
First, the imagination that informs the earthling psyche is an imagination that originates from the artist-poet's concern with the affairs of common people. According to J. Bard McNulty, the earthling, or low mimetic, psyche is informed by a certain verisimilitude since the experiences it seeks to construct, or in some cases reconstruct, strike us as being true to life.6 This quasi-populist realism intersects with feminism, or better yet "womanism," in that the focus of its subject now shifts from a concern with dominating powers and wills to an interest in, a sympathy with, the lowly and the commonalty, their hopes and aspirations, their secret dreams and disappointments, their sorrows and moments of incandescent joy, even personal triumphs. Appealing to the common run of people and things is for Walker a measure of power, both in a personal as well as in a political sense.
In "Remember," the first poem in Walker's fourth poetry collection, Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, the poet assumes the persona of one who evokes and honors the memory of an unassuming, humble, almost self-effacing young girl "with dark skin / whose shoes are thin." With characteristic modesty, the girl declares: "I am the girl / with rotted teeth / I am the dark / rotten-toothed girl / with the wounded eye / and the melted ear." Her nobility and dignity come not from class or high birth but rather from her humanness; in other words, her capacity to respond to and satisfy human needs and desires. She is the one on whom we always call to hold our babies, to cook our meals, to sweep our yards, and to wash our clothes. But in spite of her meekness and lowly disposition, or perhaps because of them, she achieves, at least in the eyes of the poet, the highest honor and distinction as the repository of hope for humanity, hope for regenerative healing and wholeness.
In "Ballad of the Brown Girl," the twenty-third poem in her first volume of poetry, Once: Poems, Walker writes about the tragic suicide of an ordinary girl of color. The reason for her suicide is that she lives in a society that does not tolerate interracial love relationships. The poet's sympathy is unquestionably with the girl. In fact, the last lines, a question, are meant to dramatize in bold relief the poet's anger and dismay, dismay at the fact that "here love fails to cross the racial barrier."
"Question—
did ever brown
daughter to black
father a white
baby
take—?"
In the first movement/canto of Revolutionary Petunias, Walker's second poetry volume, the poems "Burial" and "Women" continue this sympathetic interest in the affairs of common people. In "Burial," the occasion is a solemn one, the burial of the poet's father's grandmother, Sis Rachel Walker, alias "Oman." In a tone reminiscent of Thomas Gray's persona in "Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard," the speaker visits the gravesite of her departed immediate forebears and surveys the sense of neglect and desolation brought on by the passage of time. She grieves over the fact that she alone mourns amidst the crumbling tombstones that once "mark[ed] my family's graves." She is particularly distraught because what is supposed to be a final resting place of honor for the dead has now been turned into a place of near disuse and neglect. Where once stood the grieving mourners at the funeral ceremonies for her departed family members, the transhumant cattle now graze with ardent abandon in what has become a weft of weedy pasture. But the poet, despite all that, is still interested in renewing her contact with the dead, mindful of "the old, unalterable roots" that supply a large chunk of the emotional and social matrix that binds her to them.
In "Women," the poet turns historicist and pays homage to a generation of black women, contemporaries of her mother, ordinary women with tireless industry who have achieved extraordinarily. Their raw physical strength, their fortitude and endurance expressed metaphorically as "Headragged Generals / Across mined / Fields / [and] Booby-trapped / Ditches," and their pioneering work in minority education, all are for the poet, decisive terms of personal endearment. The politics of ancestral memory and the passionate intensity of remembering these otherwise ordinary womenfolk are consistent with Walker's avowal to keep the tradition and memory of African American women alive and to let that be a constant source of inner strength and personal wholeness. In In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, Walker writes: "There are countless vanished and forgotten women who are nonetheless eager to speak to her—from Frances Harper and Anne Spencer to Dorothy West—but she must work to find them, to free them from their neglect and the oppression of silence forced upon them because they were black and (also because) they were women."7
In "Did This Happen to Your Mother? Did Your Sister Throw up a Lot?," the first poem in Walker's third volume of poetry, Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning, we have the simple tale of a colored woman forlorn of love. Deserted by a man she thought she loved, she swears that "I love a man who is not worth / my love," and that the same "love has made me sick." Love, that special sense of warm attachment and sympathetic tenderness has become instead one long, woebegone chapter of lies, deception, and cunning. As a result, she feels a gorgelike emptiness inside, an emptiness she compares to the massive depth of the Arizona Grand Canyon.
My hand shakes before this killing.
My stomach sits jumpy in my chest.
My chest is the Grand Canyon
sprawled empty
over the world.
And yet her lovelornness is not hers alone. She shares the same fate with a host of other women, who at one point or another in their chequered lives have had to endure the unsettling disappointments and humiliations of faithless love.
Aside from depicting the ordinary scheme of everyday reality and the people that loom in it, another way in which Walker exemplifies her earthling subjectivity is through the hallowing of the place of nature in the lives of ordinary people. For Walker, the creative mind that perceives nature is an attingent traditional mind that hallows/celebrates the reciprocal dependence of internal and external natural processes. In other words, part of Walker's earthling subjectivity is focused on the sympathetic relationship between her creative intellect and the natural environment. In this relation, the natural environment is not perceived as Other, but instead as an essential part in the expression of one's individuality (in this case the individuality of the poet) as well as one's reciprocal relation to other people, that is, other members of one's community.
The one place where Alice Walker reflects this coordinate and organic perception of nature is in "African Images, Glimpses from a Tiger's Back," one of the longest poems in Once. The poem begins:
Beads around
my neck
Mt. Kenya away
over pineappled hills
Kikuyuland.
The proximity of Mt. Kenya and the pineappled hills to Kikuyu land is hardly fortuitous. It speaks to, as well as amplifies, the interfusion of nature in the lives of the people of Kenya. The poet is acutely aware of how closely human life here is integrated with physical nature. The pineappled hills, which appear as interlacing arches that weave the lives and destinies of the people, suggest that the people, autochthonous to the Kikuyu land, are farmers whose contact with the earth is fixed, almost like an ineluctable fate or inexorable necessity. The poet says:
A book of poems
Mt. Kenya's
Bluish peaks
"Wangari!"
My new name.
She here suggests that from nature the woman artist draws everything, even herself. Consequently, the poetry that she composes is, like nature itself, ultimately concerned with the generative forces of being. For Walker this affinity between benign nature and artistic self situates and defines the matrix of her ecofeminist sensibility. We will return to this point a little later.
Meanwhile, the imposing majesty of Mt. Kenya, strewn across the elongated ridge of "pineappled hills," parallels the graceful charm, the virid brilliance of the "beads around my neck," offering the visiting poet to East Africa a conception of beauty as well as the language in which to express it. Besides, in an esemplastic imagination akin to Wordsworth's in "Tintern Abbey" and The Prelude, the conflation of "a book of poems" and the "bluish peaks" of Mt. Kenya suggests that nature is a creative force to which the human mind (but especially that of the earthling poet) is "exquisitely fitted."8 It points up the manner in which nature goes about its kind of imaginative creation. According to McNulty, "The process is the ‘express resemblance’ of the process of imagination in the human mind."9
Furthermore, the act of taking on a new name suggests that nature provides the fundamental essence of the process of naming built into the consciousness of the indigenous people. The formal endowment of the praise/ heroic epithet "Wangari" upon the visiting poet, apparently by the august assembly of the elders, and the cotangent and correlative processes of naming in the Kikuyu and Leopard clans underscore the unique ontological signification of nature in the thinking of traditional Africans, a thinking that Ernst Cassirer has described as "the myth-making consciousness."10 This mythmaking consciousness further demonstrates how traditional peoples like the Kikuyus assign names that bear the tutelary influence of primogenitor/ancestor, and how the unique dimensions of clan psychology, which manifest in a variety of formal ritual inductions or initiation rites, all relate to the unique primitivization of nature.
The poet is so delighted, so enthralled by the majestic blossom, almost enchanting comeliness of the East African topography, the distant peaks and virid vistas spread before her very eyes, that she cannot help but catalogue its manifold beauty with a flurry of images. Walker's poetic intelligence is able to transform the grandeur of the manifold objects of sense into an expression of an indissoluble unity of universal poetic thought. This expression reminds us of Plato, for whom "the world of Nature … is the expression of an all-dissolving Unity of which the prevailing features are truth and beauty."11
With a technique akin to cinematography, the poet-visitor takes the reader on a guided panoramic tour of the East African landforms. First, the poet, from the relative security and comfort of her safari, peers at "a green copse" and "a shy gazelle" and an elephant bulldozing her way through the shifting rents of the morning mists. Next she looks out on "the clear Nile" inside of which "a fat crocodile / scratches his belly and yawns." Then the tropical evergreen woodland of the African rain forest comes clearly into view, lush with red orchids and the spinning cobra. From here, under the overarching blue sky, the poet sails gently on "a placid lake" in "a small boat," then through another "silent lake" along "bone strewn banks / Luminous / In the sun." Earlier the poet had stroked the water buffalo and the two ears of the mammoth hippopotamus with his hand, seen a leopard zap effortlessly through the branches of trees, a giraffe "munching his dinner," while off yonder on a high rise are Uganda mountains with their black soil and white snow, "and in the valley / Zebra."
There is hardly any doubt from the foregoing that our earthling poet on an exhilarating African safari reserves a deep appreciation and a respect for nature, its kaleidoscope of sights and sounds and colors, as well as the intense emotions they stir. The uniqueness of the verdant culture of an East African landscape is a source of incandescent joy for the poet. The safari itself amounts to a kind of initiatory rite. Besides, the topography, especially the verdure of the rain forest, reflects the culture of the indigenous people who occupy it and eke a livelihood out of it. All of that now unfolds before the traveling poet's eye in endless undulations of varying greens, all blending in a delightful, stark harmony of form and texture and color and atmosphere.
In "Torture," the thirty-eighth poem in Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, nature takes on the function of the healer, the regenerative anodyne, serving to assuage the pain and trauma of life, to soothe, to calm and comfort in a moment of grief or seemingly irreparable loss.
When they torture your mother
plant a tree
When they torture your father
plant a tree
When they torture your brother
and your sister
plant a tree
When they assassinate
your leaders
and lovers
plant a tree
When they torture you
too bad
to talk
plant a tree.
The juxtaposition of dissimilar acts of torturing and soothing, of damage and reparation, in the process of self-renewal intensifies the healing and restorative power of nature. The poet ends her injunction with these words:
When they begin to torture
the trees
and cut down the forest
they have made
start another.
Here Walker's ecofeminist convictions ring loud and clear. The speaker is enjoining us to feel the life of the Other, the natural ambience. She is enjoining us to feel a compassion for nature of which the tree and the forest are but synecdoches. According to Judith Plant in Healing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism, "This compassion … is the essence of a new paradigm," of the moral necessity of grieving for the loss of our sisters and brothers who are the forests. "Our pain," continues Plant, "for the death of the forests is simply, and most fundamentally, compassion for the senseless destruction of life."12
The truth that the poet brings with her injunction is that we are part of this earth, and this fact must predispose us to see "how relations with each other are reflected in our relations with the natural world." Here Walker's message, like that of the ecofeminist spiritualists, becomes "a praxis of hope," the hope "that like the forests we destroy, or the rivers we tame, we are Nature."13 In her prose work Living by the Word, Walker notes how, when she was residing in the northern hills of California, she had witnessed almost with helplessness the daily horror of the loggers' trucks (she calls them "hearses") as they felled the trees and carried, in her words, "the battered bodies of the old sisters and brothers." She also relates another incident at a national park during which she gazed at some gnarled, diseased old trees. "What the trees tell her," writes Winchell, "is that when it comes to human beings, trees do not discriminate; all people must share the guilt for the destruction being done to the planet and all its life forms." Again, Walker writes in Living by the Word : "Our thoughts must be on how to restore to the Earth its dignity as a living being; how to stop raping and plundering it as a matter of course. We must begin to develop the consciousness that everything has equal rights because existence itself is equal. In other words, we are all here: trees, people, snakes, alike."14
In fact, planting a tree, from the perspective of the poem "Torture," has become for the speaker, in the words of Joanna Macy, "awakening to the ecological self," in which "conventional, customary notions of self and self-interest are being shed like an old skin or confining shell."15 And the person doing the planting itself has come into a new covenant that transcends separateness and fragmentation. By planting another tree or starting another forest, the planter is no longer just trying to secure it from mindless deforestation; rather, she herself has become a part of the forest protecting herself. She has become that part of nature recently emerged into human thinking.16 The transition from the grisly scenarios of mindless sadists and assassins to the interdependent plane of regenerative nature is analogous to what Hazel Henderson has described as the shift in consciousness from "phenotype" to "genotype." Henderson writes: "We may be emerging from the ‘age of the phenotype,’ of separated ego awareness, which has now become amplified into untenable forms of dualism…. The emerging view is rebalancing toward concern for the genotype, protection of species and gene pools … and the new intergenerational risks being transferred to our progeny, about which economics says little."17
A third and final way in which Walker engages her earthling imagination is by a systematic attempt to understand her own personality, a kind of personalist idealism, beyond axiological or moral categories. She does that by asserting her own thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and valuations. The attempt also involves the unique interplay of character, ego, and circumstance vis-à-vis the workings of the artistic intelligence evincible within the processes of imaginative creation. In her essay, "The Black Woman Artist as Wayward," Barbara Christian suggests that what distinguishes Walker's poetry from her prose is that the former is a graph of Alice Walker's self. She writes: "In her poetry, Walker the wayward child challenges us to accept her as she is. Perhaps it is the stripping of bark from herself that enables us to feel that sound of the genuine in her scrutiny of easy positions advocated by progressive blacks and women."18
There are many poems in which Walker shows this interest in self and self-analysis. Six of them especially stand out as the most eloquent expression of the trinity of feeling, condition, and character of the poet's self. Each of them, by sheer eloquence of voice and candor, reveals an aspect of the poet's personality predominant at a given time and under certain definable conditions. That personality often is a unique mark of an individual who has grown, fashioned as it were by the processes of self-fertilization/self-pollination beyond easy categories of self-abasement or social adaption.
For Walker the graph of self that Christian speaks about is the ideology of the experience of the self as the essential arbiter of reality. That ideology celebrates autonomy as a fundamental individual right that must not be violated or vitiated by a sentimental or even the most pious appeal to collective experience. It is the ideology of self that Professor Mihaly Csikszentmilhalyi has described as "‘the autotelic self’—a self that has self-contained goals."19 It is a self that fiercely asserts and guards the validity and integrity of her own experience, a validity and integrity that requires no other validation, morally, socially, or culturally. The epitome of this self is revealed most trenchantly in Walker's "On Stripping Bark from Myself," one of the most significant poems in Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning.
The sheer audacity of voice with which this self announces her presence on this earth is unmistakable. The announcement, which sounds almost bellicose, comes down like a peel of thunder. It is as if out of the nebulous depths of social conformism and conditioned selves a new self emerges to claim her place in the world. The speaker says:
I find my own
small person
a standing self
against the world
an equality of wills
I finally understand.
But the audacity is somewhat weaned within the rhetoric of the underdog, which is intended not so much to elicit sympathy as it is to warn a world that is accustomed to taking advantage of small people that this time there is and must be a new deal. And the new deal, which in metaphorically coextensive terms subserves the agonistic mythos of David and Goliath, is a bold vision of the world as a level playing field where small people and big people, rich people and poor people, the advantaged and disadvantaged, live each in their own space as they see fit without any of them ever assuming for one moment that what is good and right for one is necessarily good and right for another. It is an intensely relativistic world in which one's responses need not be the responses of others dictated by society or political correctness, but instead responses shared with others dictated solely by the individual's defined needs and desires. In this regard, the self becomes the critical medium through which collective responses and sentiments are distilled or crystallized.
Thus, the self swears direly,
No. I am finished with living
for what my mother believes
for what my brother and father defend
for what my lover elevates
for what my sister, blushing, denies or rushes
to embrace.
Here she is warning that often what is passed off as the collective outlook of traditional phallocentric culture from which all reality must receive its legitimating authority is no longer tenable. Back in the days when women were "expected to keep silent about / their close escapes" and felt content living the lie that society's conditioning and customary sanctions had imposed on them, that silence might have appeared perfectly normal. Back in the days when women could not see themselves outside of the assigned roles and normative constructs in society, and others could not see them independently of these roles and constructs, the kind of deviation and subversion of "the common will" contemplated by the Walker self here might have seemed too indefinable, even dangerous. Other poems in which Walker explores the assertive will of the self include, but are not limited to, "So We've Come at Last to Freud" and "Mornings / of an Impossible Love" (Once ); "Sunday School, Circa 1950," "Will," "Rage," "Beyond What," and "Reassurance" (Revolutionary Petunias ); and "On Stripping Bark from Myself" and "Early Losses: A Requiem" (Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning ). In each of these poems, the capacity and freedom to launch a "ruthless" pursuit of one's inwardness is systematically vocalized. In other words, Walker's intent is to find her own personal turf, and ultimately, this turf is in accord with the thoughts of Hermann Hesse in Demian: "Each man had only one genuine vocation—to find the way to himself. He might end up as a poet or madman, as prophet or criminal—that was not his affair, ultimately it was of no concern. His task was to discover his own destiny—not an arbitrary one—and live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideas of the masses, conformity and fear of one's own inwardness."20
In closing, I want to return to the remark with which I began this essay, namely, Walker's angry response to the "white Northerner." It is not so much that John Keats was opposed to the earthling subjectivity. As a matter of fact, Keats, through his aesthetic doctrine of negative capability, not only preached about it but in fact practiced it in his poetry. It is not so much that Keats was white, and Alice Walker black. Instead it is that Walker was making a point about the immanent necessities of poetic thought: the contingent particularity of earthly experience that some people like the white northerner would rather ignore or relegate to the back yard. But Walker through her poetry reminds us of the ineluctability of poetic art as the immanent act of the mind and the relation of that mind to experience. What people mistakenly call transcendence with which they identify certain writings and writers is nothing but an epistemic category of a continuum involving a relationship with objects in the actual world and the transcendental universal forms or ideas of which they are embodiments.
Thus the earthling psyche can be appropriately defined as the act of the artistic mind that celebrates immanent reality, a consciousness of the pursuits and interests of earthly life, including the consciousness of essences captured in the objective, as well as those elements such as emotions, sentiments, thoughts, and sensations that constitute a person's unique individuality and identity. It embodies a somewhat primitivist theologic view of reality in which the earth itself is conceived as the primal source of numinous being. Its characteristic elements include, but are not limited to, a concern for the commonplace in the affairs of common people, an impassioned celebration of nature, an exploration of the self, and, sometimes, an engagement in a kind of mild, verbal satirical wit.21
Notes
1. Walker identifies this reader as "a white Northerner." As the daughter of indigent sharecropper parents from rural Eatonton, Georgia, Walker is naturally offended by the reader's reckless insensitivity and elitist pose. See Winchell, 15.
2. Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens.
3. For a note on the differences between the two, see McNulty, 104-5, 127. I would like to take the opportunity to acknowledge my indebtedness to McNulty's discussion of the low mimetic era in English and American literature. His discussion alone is the main inspiration for my theory of the earthling imagination.
4. Qtd. in McNulty, 114-15.
5. Ibid., 109.
6. Ibid., 108.
7. Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, 36.
8. For a fuller discussion of the technique employed by low mimetic poets such as Wordsworth to explain the creative essence of nature, see McNulty, esp. 111-14, 118-25.
9. Ibid., 112.
10. Qtd. in Obiechina, 82.
11. Bryan, 2-3.
12. Plant, 1.
13. Griffin, 10.
14. Qtd. in Winchell, Alice Walker, 112.
15. Macy, 201.
16. Macy characterizes the understanding of the significance of this relationship as an "ecological sense of selfhood" (202). She also recalls, in particular, a walk through the jungle of eastern Australia: "One day, under the vine-strung jungle trees of eastern Australia, I was walking with my friend John Seed, director of the Rainforest Information Center. I asked him how he managed to overcome despair and sustain the struggle against the mammoth lumber interests. He said, ‘I try to remember that it's not me, John Seed, trying to protect the rainforest. Rather I am part of the rainforest protecting myself. I am that part of the rainforest recently emerged into human thinking’" (202).
17. Qtd. in Macy, 210.
18. Christian, 53.
19. Csikszentmilhalyi, 207.
20. Qtd. in Miller, 112.
21. Some of the poems in which Walker displays her satirical wit include: "First They Said," "Listen," "We Alone," "Killers," "Songless," "A Few Sirens," "SM," "Attentiveness," and "The Diamonds on Liz's Bosom" (Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful); "Sunday School, Circa 1950" (Revolutionary Petunias); "Janie Crawford" (Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning); and "On Being Asked to Leave a Place of Honor for One of Comfort …" (Once).
Works Cited
Bloom, Harold, ed. Alice Walker. New York: Chelsea House, 1989.
Bryan, J. Ingram. The Interpretation of Nature in English Poetry. Tokyo: Folcroft, 1972.
Christian, Barbara. "The Black Woman Artist as Wayward." In Bloom, 39-58.
Csikszentmilhalyi, Mihaly. "The Autotelic Self." In Reading Critically, Writing Well. 3d ed. Ed. Rise B. Axelrod and Charles R. Cooper. New York: St. Martin's, 1993. 207-10.
Griffin, Susan. "Split Culture." In Plant, 7-17.
Macy, Joanna. "Awakening to the Ecological Self." In Plant, 201-11.
McNulty, J. Bard. Modes of Literature. Boston: Houghton, 1977.
Miller, James E. Word, Self, Reality: The Rhetoric of Imagination. New York: Dodd, 1974.
Obiechina, Emmanuel. Culture, Tradition and Society in the West African Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.
Plant, Judith, ed. Healing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism. Philadelphia: New Society, 1989.
Walker, Alice. Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning. New York: Dial, 1979.
———. Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems 1965-1990 Complete. New York: Harcourt, 1983.
———. In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens. San Diego: Harcourt, 1983.
———. Once: Poems. New York: Harcourt, 1968.
———. Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems. New York: Harcourt, 1973.
Winchell, Donna. Alice Walker. New York: Twayne, 1992.
Robyn R. Warhol (essay date May 2001)
SOURCE: Warhol, Robyn R. "How Narration Produces Gender: Femininity as Affect and Effect in Alice Walker's The Color Purple." Narrative 9, no. 2 (May 2001): 182-87.
[In this essay, Warhol examines the narrative strategies Walker employed in The Color Purple in order to emo-tionally move her readers, focusing in particular on the novelist's reliance on the first-person voice of the oppressed (Celie) and Walker's use of the epistolary form.]
Having a good cry is a feminine thing to do. In British and American mainstream culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, weeping openly and emotionally—whether for grief, anger, frustration, sympathy, relief, joy, triumph, or gratitude—is an activity associated with girls and women, considered appropriate to their female frames and feminine feelings. Men cry, too, of course: if they are gay men, their tears are understood as part of the penchant they are supposed to share with feminine women for "making a spectacle" of their feelings;1 if they are straight, they must be perceived as shedding "manly tears" or run the risk of compromising their masculinity. To have a good cry, though, is to indulge in one of the perquisites of this culture's version of femininity, whether the person doing the crying is male or female.
In this essay I will focus on the narrative strategies that produce the good cry in narrative fiction, using as my illustrative example Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982), an unabashedly sentimental novel, notorious for making readers cry. For me and for many of my students and fellow readers over the past fifteen years, the last letter in Walker's epistolary novel functions to invoke a "good cry" that is identical to the impact of the classics of the feminine "good-cry" genre, from the climactic moments of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, to the end of It's a Wonderful Life.2 I will argue that the source of the novel's affective impact is not individual readers' personal (or somehow essentially "feminine") ability to identify with the characters but, rather, the novel's narrative technique, particularly the ways it uses focalization and address to underscore the novel's affirmation of what contemporary U.S. culture understands as feminine mythologies. My larger point is that readers' femininity does not preexist our repeated and habitual encounters with gendered cultural artifacts; rather, gender gets produced and reproduced through countless cultural patterns, including narrative strategies associated with texts that are marked within a given culture as "masculine" (such as adventure stories) or "feminine" (such as good-cry novels like The Color Purple ). Narratology provides a useful vocabulary for describing the ways this works.
Sentimental narrative discourse requires a particular handling of "internal focalization," narratology's term for narrative discourse conveying the perceptions (vision, thoughts, feelings, etc.) not of the narrator but of a character, regardless of whether the discourse is in the narrator's or the character's voice. Scenes in sentimental novels tend to be focalized either through victims or triumphant figures who have formerly been represented as oppressed. This focalization invites the reader to participate emotionally from the subject-position of the oppressed, in the diegetic good times and the bad. Sentimental novels can use embedded first-person narratives to achieve this effect. More often, the "omniscient" (or in more properly narratological terms, "heterodiegetic") narrative focus simply shifts to the perspective of the sufferer, rendering the scene as he or she sees it. As Philip Fisher has pointed out, the focalization in sentimental narrative sometimes comes through sympathetic intermediary figures who are not, themselves, directly oppressed—such as Eva in Uncle Tom—but it is seldom if ever granted to those who oppress the protagonists in the fictional world. This careful limiting of the narrative point of view to those who suffer and triumph after tribulation can effect a powerful pull on the sensations of a susceptible, cooperative reader, regardless of the reader's historical orientation to the text (readers experiencing the novel twenty or a hundred years after its writing can have emotional reactions equal to those of the text's first readers).3 In sentimental novels, moreover, the "good cry" is much more often evoked by scenes of triumph than by scenes of sadness.
Attention to the role narrative focalization plays in the affective dynamics of reading is important, as it presents a challenge to the idea that readers sympathize with suffering characters when they can "identify" with them. Michael Steig's remarkable reader-response study, Stories of Reading (1989), for example, attributes Steig's own crying over Charles Dickens's Bleak House to identification with the characters. Steig reports, "I still find my eyes filling with tears at the same old points. I have felt in the past that I must have some residue of sentimentality in my soul, and have been annoyed that Dickens manipulates me into that reaction, but that is probably unfair" (70). Steig finds the "coy" narrator, Esther Summerson, consistently irritating, "and yet at the same time I must be identifying with her strongly, on the evidence of the way my tears so easily flow" (70). Emphasizing the intrinsically personal psychology of such identification, Steig remarks, "To get at the reasons for this will require some digging into my past" (70). Of course, a model of identification like Steig's puts the crying reader in a position of enjoying pleasures that are both individualistic and masochistic. If we think about the feminine reader's tears as, in part, a consequence of the text's technical arrangement of perspective, rather than as a reflection of the reader's consciously or subconsciously feeling that the miserable or triumphant sufferer is "just like me," however, audiences' participation in sentimentalism becomes more positively performative, less revealing of some presumed hidden truth about the readers' "real feelings."
Epistolary fiction (the form of The Color Purple ), with its shifts in narrative voice and in temporal perspective, brings the affective mechanics of focalization into especially vivid relief. As the letter-writer relates each segment of the story, she has access only to her own consciousness (like any conventionally realist first-person narrator, she cannot read other characters' minds, but can only report their actions and expressions, both verbal and physical). Her perspective is even more strictly limited, however, than that of the intradiegetic narrators of novels that are not epistolary, in that she only knows as much about the story as she can know at the time of composing the letter: she has not yet "lived" beyond the moment at which she is writing, and hence cannot foreshadow, in her narration, what is to happen after that moment.4
Since Samuel Richardson's Pamela, epistolary novelists have made the most of this technique's ability to build suspense and to heighten the affective impact of fictional narratives. Like Pamela, Celie does not know, in moments when she is writing in fear and anger, that her tribulations will end happily; unlike Jane Eyre, for example, she does not tell her story with the double consciousness (and the inevitably ironic distance between the "I" who speaks and the "I" who experiences) that comes from life-long retrospection.5 Of course, epistolary narratives are usually written retrospectively, but the retrospection is in pieces, arranged serially as it were, rather than spanning the length of the diegetic time represented within the narrative. Hence, the telos in epistolary fiction is distinct from that of nonepistolary narrative, in that the epistolary narrator can reflect no sense of his or her final outcome in the narration, even if the author has used other means to establish foreshadows. The effect, for the willing or cooperative reader of the sentimental epistolary novel, is a heightened physical experience of reading that can be readily enlisted in the service of the good cry. The actual reader is "in the moment" with the epistolary narrator; the potential for detachment that is available to the authorial audience of retrospective or otherwise distanced narration is not available in epistolary form.
Critics commenting on The Color Purple take it for granted that this novel inspires readerly tears with moments of intensely rendered grief (as when the adolescent Celie mourns the two babies that were born to her and then brutally taken away; or when she is separated from Nettie, seemingly forever; or when she encounters the beautifully Amazonian Sophia, physically and emotionally diminished by her time in jail). But for me, the biggest cry comes at the novel's end, with a burst of joy peculiarly foregrounded by the focalizing effect of the epistolary form. The first fifty letters in the novel are addressed by Celie to "Dear God." Up to that point, the narrative form more closely resembles a diary than an epistolary fiction; the letters to God are a chronicle of Celie's isolation, inspired by her supposed-father's injunction against her reporting his repeated, incestuous rapes: "You better not never tell nobody but God" (11). At the novel's formal turning point, the diary form gets interrupted by eight of the letters Nettie has written to Celie from Africa, hidden until this point by Celie's abusive husband, Albert. Celie's rage against Albert and against that rapist who, she learns from Nettie's letters, was not in fact her own father, leads her to conclude that God "must be [a]sleep" (163). At this point, with a third of the novel still to go, Celie changes her address from "Dear God" to "Dear Nettie," and though Nettie's subsequent letters are not answers to the letters Celie addresses to her, the remainder of the text takes the form of a correspondence (although it is undelivered and undeliverable) between the two sisters.
As commentators have observed, Nettie's letters serve the thematic purpose of broadening The Color Purple 's geographical and political horizons to include Africa and to connect that continent to Celie's little corner of the American South. The interpolation of Nettie's letters also serves a narrative function, though, as the letters provide Celie with an embodied narratee. Nettie's existence as narratee becomes the textual sign of Celie's relief from isolation, her coming into community as she comes out into her lesbian sexuality with Shug. When Celie grumbles to Shug about her religious disillusionment, Shug offers Celie an alternative view of God: "I believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you've found It…. She say, My first step from the old white man [image of God] was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people" (178).
As Celie renders it in a letter to Nettie, this scene's initial significance is in its romantic dimension, since it brings Celie closer to Shug. The Celie who relates this conversation cannot know how its vocabulary will return in the novel's last letter, or how the words' significance will shift, and so she cannot foreshadow its significance. The susceptible reader will be taken unawares, in the novel's final pages, by the scene's reprise.
Because the epistolary form focalizes the narrative through Celie's present state of feeling in each of her letters, the sudden happy ending does indeed carry heavy affective clout. But what makes me cry in Celie's last letter is not only—and, indeed, not primarily—the "happy-ending" events. I remain aware that these events, especially in combination, are so implausible as to be almost laughable. They include (1) the unexpected return of Nettie, who has been reunited in Africa with Celie's two lost children and has now brought them back, with their adoptive father (Nettie's own new husband) to live with Celie again; (2) the mother-and-child reunion that accompanies the sister's return; and (3) Celie's own new-found good fortune in having a place to welcome them to, having inherited the home her birth-father has left to her, thus solidifying the financial independence she has begun to establish with her pants-making business. No, it is not the situation itself that is the main source of the good cry for me. Instead, the main source is in the confluence of the narrative discourse with the novel's passionate endorsement of mythologies central to femininity (mythologies about sisters, mothers, children, and financial self-sufficiency, for instance), in the address of Celie's last letter. After having addressed fourteen consecutive letters to "Dear Nettie," Celie starts her last letter with a completely new beginning: "Dear God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples. Dear Everything. Dear God. Thank you for bringing my sister Nettie and our children home" (249). That passage gets me every time; for me, no other good-cry moment can surpass it. The way Celie's voice crosses the diegetic boundary, to include me in her address ("dear peoples. Dear Everything") and, in so doing, to assert my inclusion in Celie's newly minted concept of God; the way her address brings into being a moment of pure community embracing not just Nettie, as the previous letters had done, but all the characters and even me; the unmixed joy and triumph of the moment of ecstatic enunciation always make me cry. And that is why I'd call it a "feminine narrative," as it enforces and reinforces the physical experience of an emotion the culture marks as specifically feminine. The "femininity" of the text is not linked to the "femaleness" of the author or characters, nor to the sex of the presumed readers' bodies: it is a narrative effect.
To those who ask, "What's ‘good’ about ‘the good cry’?" I respond (only somewhat self-consciously) that the ideals of sentimental culture—the affirmation of community, the persistence of hopefulness and of willingness, the belief that everyone matters, the sense that life has a purpose that can be traced to the links of affection between and among persons—are good ideals. Sentimentalism has a bad reputation, among general readers and critics alike; it is no coincidence that Steig, for one, reports resenting Dickens's "manipulation" of his tears. To be sure, sentimentalism is often exploited in order to promote agendas far less progressive than Walker's or even Dickens's. If manipulators of public sentiment unscrupulously deploy the narrative techniques of the sentimental tradition in the service of nationalism, capitalism, and commercialism, however, that does not drain the techniques themselves (or their potential affective impact upon actual audiences) of value. Becoming more conscious of how those techniques achieve their effects does not render readers immune to them, but it can offer us the opportunity to affirm "feelings" that constitute what is worth preserving from traditional feminine culture.
Notes
1. I am thinking of the links Joseph Litvak draws between spectacle, spectacular emotions, and homosexuality in Caught in the Act.
2. For an introduction to what I mean by the "good-cry genre," see my essay, "As You Stand, So You Feel and Are." That argument, and the general point I am making in the present essay, are elaborated in my book forthcoming from Ohio State University Press, Having a Good Cry.
3. See Sicherman for a rich account of Victorian-American feminine readers' reactions to reading sentimental fiction.
4. To be sure, the author of an epistolary narrative may foreshadow future diegetic events by including verbal details or patterns in the storyline that will recur, even though the narrator does not, at the moment of narration, realize that they will.
5. For more details on the retrospective impact of first-person narration, see my article entitled "Double Gender, Double Genre."
Works Cited
Fisher, Philip. Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987.
Litvak, Joseph. Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992.
Sicherman, Barbara. "Sense and Sensibility: A Case Study of Women's Reading in Late-Victorian America." In Reading in America: Literature and Social History, edited by Cathy N. Davidson, 201-25. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1989.
Steig, Michael. Stories of Reading: Subjectivity and Literary Understanding. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1989.
Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982.
Warhol, Robyn R. "‘As You Stand, So You Feel and Are’: The Crying Body and the 19th-century Text." In Tattoo, Torture, Mutilation, and Adornment: The De-Naturalization of the Body in Culture and Text, edited by Fran Mascia-Lees and Patricia Sharpe, 100-25. Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1992.
———. "Double Gender, Double Genre in Jane Eyre and Villette." Studies in English Literature 36 (Fall 1996): 857-75.
———. Having a Good Cry. Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, forthcoming.
Pirjo Ahokas (essay date 2003)
SOURCE: Ahokas, Pirjo. "Hybridized Black Female Identity in Alice Walker's Meridian." In America Today: Highways and Labyrinths, edited by Gigliola Nocera, pp. 481-88. Siracusa, Italy: Grafia' Editrice, 2003.
[In the essay below, Ahokas contends that, "through a complex process of signification, Walker's novel [Meridian] not only suggests a more fluid, hybrid black identity but also charts a shift to the recognition of the heterogeneity of black identities."]
For many contemporary theoreticians, the border—present whenever two or more cultures edge each other (Anzaldúa ix)—has come to symbolize a promise or possibility of identity hybridization. As far as black cultural identity is concerned, this view questions the innocent notion of the essential black subject that characterized the identity construction and identity politics of black American cultural nationalism during the 1960s and early 1970s. It is true that the new essential black subject was a timely response to racism and marginalization (Hall 27, 28), and it managed to challenge the harmful, old stereotypes of black identity. Constructed exclusively around the dynamics of racial difference and put in the place of the so called "bad old essential white subject," it nevertheless suffered from many limitations as a strategy of black politics (Hall 28). Alice Walker's novel Meridian (1976) is regarded as one of the key novels about the Civil Rights movement and the new black militant front. I find the book very intriguing for the reason that, on the one hand, it is linked with black American nationalism, but, on the other hand, it also launches a powerful attack on the exclusionary discourses and practices within the movement during the most militant era of black politics.
In my paper, I will look at the different ways in which Walker's novel questions the narrow categories of identity which may seem necessary for political action, but which are based on far too restrictive and confining notions of identity. Challenging the fixed unitary subject proposed by black identity politics, Walker's book explores the differences within the group and individual identity. Moreover, crossing the rigidly constructed boundaries between "race," gender, ethnicity, and class, Meridian clearly alligns itself with the margin of hybridity that, according to Homi K. Bhabha, "resists the binary opposition of racial and cultural groups" (…) "as homogeneous polarized political consciousnesses" (Bhabha 207). Ultimately, through a complex process of signification, Walker's novel not only suggests a more fluid, hybrid black identity but also charts a shift to the recognition of the heterogeneity of black identities.
It is noteworthy that the novel's opening section takes place in the South in the mid-1970s when "militancy was no longer in the sidewalks" (Cooke 140), showing how, as a result of persistent racism, poor black people's lives have not changed much since the 1960s. The exaggerated opening scene in which the eponymous protagonist is introduced draws attention to its stage-like qualities, and it also seems to propose the idea of gender and ethnic performativity. Written in a very self-conscious mode, the novel's beginning foregrounds Meridian's—the black female protagonist's—lonely fight against the white townspeople's army tank. It also juxtaposes her with the grotesque, decaying body of a white woman that is publicly displayed by her husband for profit. Indeed, the notion of the performative aspects of gender and ethnicity is intensified when, a little later, the text goes as far as to make Meridian use the word "perform" about her own public appearances.
As Walker's novel progresses, it becomes quite clear that while the text raises critical questions about identity construction, it also suggests that by disrupting the performative aspects of identity construction, it becomes possible to destabilize fixed notions of identity to effect social change. Furthermore, the narrator's use of various black traditions also serves as an additional strategy of questioning the dominant discourse of black nationalism and its black subject.
Historically, black nationalism in America grew out of the American enslavement of Africans and, in its broadest sense, it presupposes the collective efforts of blacks to overcome their shared racial oppression. Opposed to the dominant white culture's reproduction of its hierarchical power, the black nationalists of the 1960s advocated a new, affirmative ideal of selfhood that, as they put it, could only be achieved through the repudiation of all aspects of American society that militated against a positive black self-image. Their emphasis on a "positive" black self, epitomized in the well-known politicized slogan "Black is beautiful," also tended to preclude those elements of the blacks' oppressive historical past in the United States that could not pass through the filter of black pride (Dubey 25-26). In addition to avoiding painful issues like slavery, black nationalist discourse tended to gender its racial subjects as masculine.
Some scholars have linked black women's marginalization in the black nationalist movement to these issues. During slavery black women were treated as breeders and slavery has also served as the source of the stereotype of the strong black matriarch (Dubey 19). New scholarship argues that these elements of the past could not be reconciled with the investment of black male nationalists in the powerful subject position of patriarchal masculinity (Dubey 18, 19). As far as the central issue of race was concerned, the same discourse conceived it in terms of simple, monolithic binary oppositions between white and black citizens and emphasized a mythical African origin common to all African-Americans.
The opening scene of Walker's novel bristles with multi-layered irony. In Reconstructing Womanhood, Hazel Carby argues that it is necessary to study ideologies of white Southern womanhood in order to be able to explain ideologies of black womanhood in the 19th century (20). It is evident from what follows in Meridian that the white mummy-woman's husband's definition of his ideal woman is in accordance to the 19th century cult of true womanhood. As a Southern prewar code of sexuality it glorified white women and excluded black slave women from the parameters of virtuous possibilities (Carby 27). When Walker contrasts Meridian's militant figure with the mummified corpse, she suggests "an alternative to the untenable roles of wom- anhood" (Nadel 159). By an ironic twist, however, the text shows that the postwar black community in the segregated south where Meridian grows up is committed to conventions of expected female behavior reminiscent of the white ideal. Within the old discourse of the cult of true womanhood, the prime objective of a woman was to be a mother, to manage a household, and to keep one's husband pleased (Carby 26). Imitating the white middle class, Meridian's black middle class surroundings stress the same self-sacrificial role expectations.
Even if Meridian manages to expose the double standard implicit in the dominant codes of femininity in her brief teen-marriage, depicted in the ironically named chapter "The Happy Mother," she is very successful in her repetition of the cultural conventions of what constitute good mothering. Compelled to approximate the ideal mother in spite of the fact that she harbors murderous and suicidal thoughts, "She was told by everyone that she was an exemplary young mother, so mature, so calm" (70). The text uses popular media to raise critical questions about the construction of female identity. While Meridian is not alone in looking for advice in fictional popular magazines," the way in which she reads their representations of women is far from confirming conventional expectations: "According to these magazines, Woman was a mindless body, a sex creature, something to hang false hair and nails on" (71).
The boundaries and borders of race and gender in the United States penetrate to the depths of Walker's female characters and even their bodies are inscribed with the prevailing ideological construction of femininity. In Meridian, the narrator calls attention to the fact that the fictional black women who accept white models from the fantasy world of movies wear them like masks: "their faces (old remembered faces now completely reconstructed by Max Factor and Maybelline) perfected masks through which the voice of some person formerly known came through" (109). Butler emphasizes the fact that gendering cannot be a willful appropriation and "it is certainly not a question of taking on a mask" (Bodies 7). Walker's narrator seems to be in tacit agreement by further extending the same critique to a willful attempt to appropriate white racial identity.
After the breakup of her marriage the protagonist studies at the aptly-named, all-female Saxon College, an elite institution for bright black girls where, ironically enough, "Most of the students—timid, imitative, bright enough but never daring, were being ushered nearer to Ladyhood every day" (39). In performative theory, identity construction is a temporal process in which gaps and fissures are opened up as the constitutive instabilities in the repetitive labor of a norm (Butler, Bodies 10). In Meridian, the possibility of destabilizing the dominant gender norms becomes evident when the protagonist sees a group of student activists—black and white, male and female—all dressed in workers' overalls with bibs, apparently performing gender differently from the absolute polarization of masculinity and femininity familiar to her from her immediate surroundings. The young civil rights workers' example makes the protagonist question the hierarchical division of gender and, inspired by her involvement in the movement, she subsequently wants to resist the prescribed feminine ideals.
In principle, the student movement of the 1960s was "group-centered" and egalitarian, and every activist who worked hard enough supposedly had some say in policy decisions (Giddings 300). Looking back, however, it is hardly surprising that the sexist treatment of female activists in Meridian had its counterpart in actual black militant organizations of which the most nationalistic are said to have been the most sexist (Giddings 316-317). As I have already mentioned, contemporary scholarship links the male activists' sexist attitudes to the construction of the revolutionary black subject. In Walker's novel, the tendency is traced even further back: Mr. Raymonds, a light-skinned, old fashioned "race man" and a radical nationalist of the 1920s, speaks about white violence against black women while, at the same time, he sexually harasses the young black protagonist.
The Black Aesthetic, developed by the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, reflected black nationalist concerns. In Meridian, Truman Held, the ironically-named aspiring artist with whom Meridian falls in love, represents the advocates of a new revolutionary subjectivity. Sharing the gender assumptions of black nationalist discourse, he constructs black women as potential mothers and paints them "as magnificent giants, breeding forth the warriors of the universe" (168). The flip side of his idealizations is, of course, that in a direct reflection of black nationalist ideology, Truman wants to apply his womb-centered definition of black women to the protagonist whose black feminine identity is thereby constructed in explicit opposition to the revolutionary black subject (Dubey 20).
The body has not only been seen as a text of culture but also as a practical, direct locus of control (Bordo 13). One of the most remarkable features of Walker's novel are the depictions of Meridian's disintegrating body and the scenes in which she enters into paralyzed death-like coma. Madhu Dubey claims that, in Walker's book, "Meridian's skeletal frame is her most conspicious bodily mark of difference from (the) ideal black woman conceived as sheer bodily abundance" (Dubey 127). Meridian's fainting spells force a parallel between her and the mummy-woman, and it has also been argued that her catatonic trances mimic the white mummy-woman's paralysis (Dubey 127). Both Bhabha and Judith Butler have theorized the possibility of resisting the prevailing regimes of power, and each of them sees performative power as a discursive basis for opposition.
They emphasize the role of hyperbolic gestures of imitation and miming as a means of reversing discursive conventions (Bhabha 86; Butler, Bodies 232). In Meridian, the protagonist's hyperbolic "performance" of death-like inactivity effectively counters the dominant discourse of femininity as well as the Black Aesthetic conception of black feminine identity as an absence.
In sharp contrast to her former school friends' desire to possess white femininity, the protagonist begins to unsettle culturally specific gender expectations by wearing a railroad cap and dungarees as a signal of "her refusal of the conventional physical signs of femininity" (Dubey 127). Perhaps Meridian's choice of new clothes is more androgynous or even heterogeneous than masculine, but like cross dressing, her crossing of the border of gender "implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself" and thereby suggests an openness to resignification and recontextualization (Butler 1990, 137, 138). Moreover, as a symbolic attempt to reconceptualize herself in terms of hybridity, Meridian's defiant gesture is also related to alternative role models offered by black history. These models point to the fact that race and gender are constituted through each other.
In the novel, a tree that grows on the college grounds is called the Sojourner. The name is an intertextual reference to Sojourner Truth, a former slave and one of the most famous female activists in black history. She not only questioned dominant gender assumptions, but her exposure of the concept "woman" as a construct has been summed up in the oft-quoted phrase "ar'n't I a woman." Harriet Tubman, a self-emancipated farm slave who dedicated her life to antislavery causes, is another historical figure explicitly connected with contemporary women's fight against racism: "black women are always imitating Harriet Tubman" (108). The fact that Tubman's narcoleptic seizures are echoed in Meridian's illness serves as a hint of their affinities for the reader. Like Sojourner Truth, Tubman is a very good vehicle for exploring the intersection of gender and race performativity: excluded from the 19th century white "cult of true womanhood" by race, she even executed an armed expedition against enemy forces.
According to Bhabha revision and reinscription belong to the process by which objectified others may be turned into subjects of their history and experience (191-192). Significantly enough, such a process is an integral part of Meridian. It is also worth bearing in mind that in Bhabha's theory the concept of the hybrid is linked to resistance. In the novel, Meridian criticizes Mr. Raymonds's talk about "The Race" as a monolithic entity, "as if it were a lump of homogenized matter that could be placed this way or that way, at will, to effect change" (111). Gradually, she also becomes aware of the dangers implicit in student activists' black nationalist construction of blackness as a unified essence.
While Meridian's understanding of her conventional mother increases when she relates Mrs. Hill's behavior to her enslaved maternal great-grandmother's and grandmother's fight for a better future, her father's Indian background gives her insight into the unfolding of complex relationships between different racialized identities. Even here Walker's narrator highlights the intersection of gender and race: the father figure's masculine identity is simultaneously positioned within African American history and Native American history that is symbolized by the ancient Indians' burial mound in the novel. Instead of excluding Meridian from his dual construction of ethnicity, the father tell her about the dispossession of the Indians and together they speak about Feather Mae, Meridian's paternal great-grandmother. Standing on the mound, Feather Mae is known to have experienced physical ecstasy in mystical trances through which she demonstrates, according to Rachel Stein, that her "spiritual legacy enabled the transformation of black women from sexually exploited objects into inspirited subjects" (97). It is important to notice that Meridian's trances also mimic Feather Mae's mystical experiences: she enters into a similar liminal state on the mound feeling that she is "a speck in the grand movement of time" (59). Looking for sites of resistance, hybridity theory has explored liminality and linked it with the transformational ability of cultural mixings and crossovers. Lacking fixity, Meridian's "rootedness" and committed positioning allow her to retain her respect for the justified interests of others.
The gender assumptions of black nationalist discourse also extended to white women, who were regarded as desirable sexual objects until 1967, when "Black Power called for Whites to be purged from the movement" (Giddings 303). Unlike Truman, Meridian manages to come to terms with her and his white, Jewish wife's shared past: "Look at it this way, black folks and Jews held out as long as they could" (181). Their reconciliation reveals that shared experiences of oppression can create bridges and serve as the basis for alliance.
The Black Aesthetic perceived artistic form as a transparent medium of ideological messages, whereas several critics have observed that because of its inventiveness, Walker's fragmentary novel that crosses genre boundaries seems to flaunt the structure of the text. Like the Black Aesthetic ideal, the form of Walker's novel can be discussed in relation to the construction of the black subject. The narrative self-reflexivity of Meridian helps to destabilize the categories of blackness and femininity, and this process is enhanced by the narrator's use of certain black oral, religious and musical traditions that were excluded from black nationalist discourse. Suffice it here to refer to the singing of Meridian's father that makes her connect the church music with the beliefs of American Indians, to Miss Winter's music classes where she teaches the blues, and to the Baptist preacher who, among other things, asks "the young women to stop looking for husbands and try to get something more useful in their heads" (195).
In her study of black women novelists, Dubey argues that Meridian employs modes of psychological realism that are typical of the bildungsroman. She goes on to claim this reinstates the humanist model of the full integral self that she associates with the subject constructed by black nationalist discourse (156). According to Stuart Hall, the recognition of "blackness" as a construction portended the end of an innocent notion of the essential black subject (28). Walker's novel participates in this process by focusing on the negotiations at the borders of gender, race, and ethnicity. Samira Kawash links the insecurities of hybridity to the unknowable, the unforeseeable and the risky (217). In the end, the protagonist, who is recovering from her illness, leaves everything behind to become an engaged performer who sings from memory. Crucially, Walker's revision and hybridization of the traditional gender borders is not only limited to Meridian, but it also involves the self-centered black male protagonist indicating that he also has to change. Ultimately, Truman is left with the symbolic sleeping bag and the cap, both redolent of the possibility of an identity that may refuse to fit the traditional mold and suggestive of alternative hybrid sites of cultural negotiation.
Works Cited
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
Bordo, Susan R. "The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity: A Feminist Appropriation of Foucault." Gender/ Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing. Eds. Jaggar, Alison M. and Bordo, Susan R. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989. 13-33.
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex." New York: Routledge, 1993.
———. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Carby, Hazel. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Cooke, Michael. "Walker: The Centering Self." Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Eds. Gates, Henry Louis Jr. and Appiah, K. A. New York: Amistad, 1993. 140-154.
Dubey, Madhu. Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994.
Giddings, Paula. When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. New York: Bantam Books, 1984.
Hall, Stuart, "New Ethnicities." Black Film, British Cinema. ICA Documents 7, 1988. 27-31.
Kawash, Samira. Dislocating the Color Line: Identity, Hybridity, and Singularity in African-American Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.
Nadel, Alan. "Reading the Body: Meridian and the Archeology of Self." Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives. Eds. Gates, Henry Louis Jr. and Appiah, K. A. New York: Amistad, 1993. 155-167.
Stein, Rachel. Shifting the Ground: American Women Writers' Revisions of Nature, Gender, and Race. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997. Walker, Alice. Meridian. New York: Washington Square Press/Pocket Books, 1977.
Ernece B. Kelly (essay date 2003)
SOURCE: Kelly, Ernece B. "Paths to Liberation in Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982)." In Women in Literature: Reading through the Lens of Gender, edited by Jerilyn Fisher and Ellen S. Silber, pp. 75-8. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003.
[In the following essay, Kelly details how Celie's capacity to express herself through letters, combined with her relationships with other women—who themselves are working toward liberation—helps her develop a sense of her own power.]
Alice Walker's epistolary novel, The Color Purple, depicts African-American women in the early twentieth century striving to realize selfhood. Focusing on her protagonist's development, Walker shows Celie's progression from sexually abused child to less passive spouse to outspoken equal partner. Ultimately, Celie finds inner strength through the letters she writes, and through the influence and support of the women around her. Dramatizing the capacity for growth and redemption that comes from both self-expression and female bonding, Walker creates several characters who, in following their unique paths toward personal fulfillment, guide Celie to explore and honor her own.
After being raped and bearing her stepfather's two children, 14-year-old Celie fearfully heeds Alphonso's warning to "not never tell nobody but God" (1) and vents her troubles by writing letters addressed to an imagined white deity. For Celie, writing helps compensate for loss. At first, her letters to God ease her loneliness: when the cruel older man she is forced to marry, Mr.———, makes sexual advances toward Nettie, her sister, Nettie runs away. Before she and Nettie part company, Celie says to her, "‘Write!’" Nettie responds: "Nothing but death can keep me from it" (19), foreshadowing the vital role that letters will play in these sisters' lives. Although she doesn't hear from Nettie for many years, Celie immediately takes pen to paper. Thus valuing her innermost thoughts, Celie eventually moves from being ashamed and silenced to living proud and in full possession of her voice.
As she records what she sees and knows, Celie also befriends Shug, Sofia, and Mary Agnes—each of whom insists on egalitarian love relationships. Fundamental to Celie's emergence is the self-assured Shug, an entertainer whose lifestyle contrasts vividly with Celie's. Shug urges Celie to "git man off [her] eyeball" (204), and so disrupts Celie's narrow world, consisting entirely of meeting her husband's excessive demands. Notwithstanding their differences, Shug sympathizes with Celie's abusive situation and her helplessness, insisting that Mr.———, known to Shug as Albert, treat Celie with respect, preparing Celie to assert her rights against his abuses.
Perhaps most importantly, Shug offers Celie emotional support and sincere declarations of love. Their physical intimacy seems natural, not controversial. Indeed, their caring sexual interactions, full of mutual admiration, enhance Celie's sense of self-worth, bolstering her resistance to Albert's domination. While Celie's distrust of men ("whenever there's a man, there's trouble" [212]), and Shug's bisexual orientation may be part of classroom discussion, students should observe that Walker eschews categories—thereby questioning social constructs such as heterosexuality, monogamy, and marriage—and instead delineates a relational universe in which the ability to give and experience love is more important to one's growth than whom one loves.
Most students become readily involved in debating Walker's depiction of Black men. Critics argue (for example, George Stade) whether Celie "redeems … men by releasing the woman already in them …" ultimately, depicting "the rejection of men and all their ways" (381-82). Certainly, as he sews in Celie's pants factory, Albert does sound and act sweet, utterly different from the brutal Mr.———. His son, Harpo, also softens; he has "learn something in life" (289), according to his no-nonsense, first wife Sofia. In the words of Trudier Harris, Walker has created "born again male feminists," redeemed by the novel's end (388). Sparking controversy, teachers may ask: Does Albert seem "feminized" or desexualized or genuinely "liberated" as he learns to sew, and for the first time becomes Celie's partner and friend?
Sofia, the first woman Celie meets who retaliates against anyone who tries to dominate her, responds to her own husband's ineffective attempts to rule by beating him up. While initially Harpo accepts the role reversal in their marriage, he eventually feels enfeebled by it, anxious about his manly image as he compares the indomitable Sofia to Celie, his father's obedient, and therefore enviable wife. Like Shug, Sofia rejects traditional female roles; with aplomb, she does the heavy domestic tasks—expertly repairing the roof and cutting wood.
Here, Walker makes an important point about a woman's abilities as equal to a man's, critiquing men's resistance to women's competence. Depicting tough-minded Sofia as perhaps the most courageous woman in the novel, Walker nonetheless has Sofia learn from Celie, using her friend's meekness as a model of how to behave in prison: "Every time they ast me to do something, Miss Celie, I act like I'm you. I jump up and do what they say" (93).
Mary Agnes—who becomes Harpo's wife when Sofia leaves him—finds her own voice when she intervenes to release Sofia from prison. Influenced by Mary Agnes' growth, Celie first sees her as "a nice girl, friendly and everything, but she like me. She do anything Harpo say" (83). Stronger than Celie, however, Mary Agnes fights for her man; symbolically, after acting on Sofia's behalf by satisfying her jailer's sexual demands, "Squeak" triumphantly discards her diminutive nickname. As Mary Agnes, she feels free to sing publicly with Shug. Letting loose her "funny" voice, she "come to life" (103). For both Mary Agnes and Celie, self-expression through the channel of musical or narrative voice augurs each woman's emancipation.
In the latter part of the novel, Walker uses Celie's sister's return from West Africa to advance Celie's liberation and Nettie's liberation as well. Shug's discovery of Nettie's unopened letters that Mr.———has vengefully stolen from the mailbox over many years, offers Celie an intimate audience to whom she can direct her correspondence. Writing to her sister, Celie begins to lay claim to her own authority: She no longer writes anonymously, as she did to God; now, Celie proudly signs her name.
Meanwhile, Nettie's letters allow her to gather and convey her understanding of cross-cultural gender parallels and differences that students are generally eager to discuss. During her years in West Africa, Nettie, on her own path to liberation, labors alongside the missionary couple Samuel and Corrine. In exchange, she requests—and receives—an education. In contrast, Olinka girls are denied education since "A girl is nothing to herself; only to her husband can she become something." Moreover, the Olinka maintain divisions between men's and women's work, and Nettie, who works hard and likes to learn, is considered a "drudge" (162). But from Nettie's viewpoint, the Olinka women are unhappy and "work like donkeys" (163). An Olinka man explains: "Our women are respected here…. There is always someone to look after the Olinka woman" (167).
Teachers may want to examine these paradoxes: In what ways can being well educated and "smart" sometimes create difficulties for girls and women in the supposedly progressive United States? What does it mean for a man to "look after" a woman in the Olinka culture and what does it mean in our culture? What are the costs of such protection? Interrogating Olinka and North Ameri- can cultures by analyzing gender roles can help students of The Color Purple shape not only "womanist" (Walker's term, quoted in Abbandonato 297) but also multicultural, non-Western perspectives.
Works Cited
Abbandonato, Linda. "Rewriting the Heroine's Story in The Color Purple." Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K. A. Appiah. New York: Amistad, 1993, 296-308.
Harris, Trudier. "The Color Purple as Fairy Tale." Emerging Voices: A Cross-Cultural Reader. Ed. Janet Madden-Simpson and Sara M. Blake. Fort Worth, TX: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1990, 386-88.
Stade, George. "Womanist Fiction and Male Characters." Madden-Simpson and Blake, 379-83.
Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Pocket Books, 1982.
For Further Reading
hooks, bell. "Writing the Subject: Reading The Color Purple." Reading Black, Reading Feminist. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Meridian, 1990, 454-70.
FURTHER READING
Criticism
Heglar, Charles J. "Named and Namelessness: Alice Walker's Pattern of Surnames in The Color Purple." ANQ 13, no. 1 (winter 2000): 38-41.
Finds that Walker's narrative strategy of either including or withholding the surnames of characters in The Color Purple relates to issues of male dominance and authority.
Newson-Horst, Adele S. Review of The Way forward Is with a Broken Heart, by Alice Walker. World Literature Today 75, no. 2 (spring 2001): 335-36.
Considers The Way forward Is with a Broken Heart as a revision of Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road, and praises the characterizations in the former, judging them as essential to the collection's success.
Sol, Adam. "Questions of Mastery in Alice Walker's The Temple of My Familiar." Critique 43, no. 4 (summer 2002): 393-404.
Argues that The Temple of My Familiar clearly is an attempt to redefine what a prodigious text is meant to do: how it is to confront history, to make a political stand, and to tell a story."
Winchell, Donna Haisty. "Beautiful, Whole, and Free: You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down." In Alice Walker, pp. 72-84. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992.
Identifies the search for self—for an identity defined by oneself, and not by others—as a main theme in the stories of You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down.
Additional coverage of Walker's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Gale: African American Writers, Eds. 1, 2; American Writers Supplement, Vol. 3; Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vols. 3, 33; Beacham's Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: Biography & Resources, Vol. 3; Bestsellers, Vol. 89:4; Black Literature Criticism, Ed. 1:3; Black Writers, Eds. 2, 3; Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography, Vol. 1968-1988; Concise Major 21st-Century Writers, Ed. 1; Contemporary Authors, Vol. 37-40R; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 9, 27, 49, 66, 82, 131; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vols. 5, 6, 9, 19, 27, 46, 58, 103, 167; Contemporary Novelists, Eds. 4, 5, 6, 7; Contemporary Popular Writers; Contemporary Southern Writers; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 6, 33, 143; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors 3.0; DISCovering Authors: British; DISCovering Authors: Canadian Edition; DISCovering Authors Modules, Eds. MST, MULT, NOV, POET, POP; Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, Ed. 3; Exploring Novels; Exploring Short Stories; Feminism in Literature: A Gale Critical Companion, Ed. 1:6; Feminist Writers; Literature and Its Times, Vol. 3; Literature Resource Center; Major 20th-Century Writers, Eds. 1, 2; Major 21st-Century Writers (eBook), Ed. 2005; Modern American Literature, Ed. 5; Modern American Women Writers; Novels for Students, Vol. 5; Poetry Criticism, Vol. 30; Reference Guide to American Literature, Ed. 4; Reference Guide to Short Fiction, Ed. 2; Short Stories for Students, Vols. 2, 11; Short Story Criticism, Vol. 5; Something about the Author, Vol. 31; St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers; Twayne's United States Authors; and World Literature Criticism Supplement.