Universitatea Al. I.

Cuza, Iasi
Facultatea de Litere
AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES

LUCRARE DE DISERTATIE

NETWORKS OF FEMININE SUPPORT IN AFRICAN AMERICAN

NOVELS

PROFESOR COORDONATOR:

ABSOLVENT:

Lector dr.

Irina Chirica

Szenti Teodora

IASI
- SESIUNEA IUNIE 2004-

Introduction...................................................................................................................... 1
Chapter I
Novels and Novelists ..........................................................................................................3
I.1 Gloria Naylor The Women of Brewster Place.............................................5
I.2 Alice Walker The Color Purple ...................................................................7
I.3 Toni Morrison Sula .....................................................................................10

Chapter II
Images of Women .14
II.1 The Woman in the Center 19
II.2 The Non-Conformist .22
II.3 The Conformist .29
Chapter III
Dreams of Wholeness ..35
III.1 The Colored Daughters of Brewster .36
III.2 Sisters Choice 39
III.3 We Was Girls Together .44
Chapter IV
Men on the Run 49
IV.1 The Outward Journey. 51
IV. 2 The Inward Journey ...58
Conclusion .62
Bibliography

Introduction
Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison placed black women in the center
of their own historical experience, made them the dynamic interpreters of their own lives.
Their life is made up of happy moments, disappointments and painful experiences. They
struggle to forge an identity larger than the one society would force upon them. They are
aware and conscious, and that very consciousness is potent. In searching out their own
truths, they are rebellious or they learn to be this way, as it is the own possible way to
survive. They are no longer subordinated to male figures, they learn to fight against racism
and sexism. Negative stereotypes of black womanhood have generally been used: wench,
matriarch, mammy these are the images that have been imposed upon her, and her
complexities and truths - simple or complex - have been buried under them. As Kay
Lindsay notes Classifications and categorizations of groups of people by another groups
have always been for the benefit of the group who is doing the classifying and to the
detriment of the classified group.1As suggested here, when black women were defined by
those

others

than

themselves

as

strong,

domineering,

matriarchal

and

emasculating, the qualities ascribed to them were not in their interest, but rather to reflect
the nature of roles which they were intended to play.
After a presentation of the novelists, their convictions and the urge they felt to write
in order to voice their pain and to present the real, complex black female characters. In the
second chapter, Images of Women, we dealt with the female characters in terms of their
choice to conform, to obey the rules of the society or to ignore them. The woman in the
center, the non-conformist and the conformist these are the classifications we focused on.
These women are foreground figures, primary both to the reader and to each other,
regardless of whether theyre involved with men.
It was practically impossible for black women to survive if they do not engage in
meaningful resistance on some level. The strong bond between women helps them beat the
system or at least survive with dignity in it. We have focused on these networks of
feminine support in the third chapter of our paper entitled Dreams of Wholeness where we
illustrated the way in which black women mother each other; they are sisters and very
good friends. These novels present stories of women reaching out to other women. They
1

Kay Lindsey The Black Woman as a Woman in The Black Woman An Anthology, edited by Toni
Cade, A Mentor Book, 1970, p.85

join the circle of black women as they ritualize the experience of womahood, initiating
themselves into its secrets and terrors. This need for women to re-establish connections
with one another is powerfully rendered in the novel discussed. Commenting on her effort
to explore a relationship between two women, Morrison says:
We read about Ajax and Achilles willing to die for each other, but very little about
the friendship of women, and them having respect for each other, like its something new.
But Black women have always had that, they have always been emotional life supports for
each other. Particularly as a result of the strains and fractures of the family, friendship
seems increasingly to be a key source of support and affection.
They come to fulfil the others urge to feel complete, to feel loved and protected as
the male figures are on the run, are shadows that drift in and out of the lives of the family
members. The fourth chapter of our paper has as the subject the male protagonists of the
novels. They are weak and this fact is obvious in their constant drifting away from their
families. There are two types of travels: an outward and an inward one. The outward
journey, as we entitled out first subchapter, is the one underwent by the characters in
Brewster Place and Sula. Eugene, Basil, even Ben as they decide to flee responsibility and
the constraints of marital life or family life in Basils case. The inward journey is that of
Mr.___ and Harpo, from The Color Purple that, in order to be re-integrated in the novels
plot suffer major changes in their behaviour. The treatment of the male protagonists is
relevant because it shows, by comparison, the lives and the beliefs of African American
female characters.
The main task of our paper is to show the strong bond that links the female
characters, bond that helped them surpass the difficult moments in their lives. AfroAmericans as a race could not have survived without the female values of communality,
sharing and nurturing. The different shapes this bond takes are discussed and analysed as
they interconnect in order the form networks of feminine support.

Chapter I
Novelists and Novels
If women writers must overcome patriarchal influence to discover an authentic
voice, the black woman writer must overcome patriarchal influence and racial oppression,
both of which insist that her contribution conform to the existing models of Western male
literary achievement.
Much creative writing by contemporary black women authors highlights gender
politics, specifically black male sexism, poverty, black female labor, and the struggle for
creativity. Celebrating the power of black womens writing in her essay Women
Warriors: Black Women Writers Load the Canon in the Voice Literary Supplement, dated
May 1990, Michelle Cliff asserts:
There is continuity in the written work of many African-American women,
whether writer is their primary identity or not. You can draw a line from the slave narrative
of Linda Brent to Elizabeth Keckleys life to Their Eyes Were Watching God to Coming
of Age in Mississippi to Sula to The Salteaters to Praisesong for the Widow. All of
these define a response to power. All structure that response as a quest, a journey to
complete, to realize the self; all involve the attempt to break out of expectations imposed
on black and female identity. All work against the odds to claim the I.
bell hooks considers that while defining black womens collective work as a critical
project that problematizes the quest for identity, Cliff subsumes that quest solely by
focusing on rites of passage wherein black women journey to find themselves. hooks states
that in much of the fiction by contemporary black women writers, the struggle by black
female characters for subjectivity, through forged in radical resistance to the status quo
(opposition to racist oppression, less frequently to class and gender) usually takes the form
of black women breaking free from boundaries imposed by others, only to practice their
newfound freedom by setting limits and boundaries for themselves2.
The moment the Afro-American female writers realized the necessity of voicing
their pain, their repressed feelings and of their identity, we can speak of a distinct literary
canon. Their novels deal with the recurrent themes of sisterhood between women, the
white men and black men oppression, the hardships of the womens lives. This need for
2

bell hooks Revolutionary Black Women Making Ourselves Subject , p.825 in Cornerstones An
Anthology Of African American Literature, edited by Melvin Donalson, St. Martins Press, New York,
1996, p.820 835

women to re-establish connections with one another is powerfully rendered in their

writings. Commenting on her effort to explore a relationship between two women,
Morrison says:
We read about Ajax and Achilles willing to die for each other, but very little about
the friendship of women, and them having respect for each other, like its something new.
But Black women have always had that, they have always been emotional life supports for
each other.
Thats what I was trying to say in Sula, when Nel discovered that it was not her
husband that she had missed all those years, but her friend Sula. Because when you dont
have a woman to talk to, really talk to, whether it be an aunt or a sister or a friend, that is
real loneliness. That is devastating.3
In their world painful things occur: incestuous relationships, beatings and rape.
Rape continued to be an institutionalised weapon of oppression after emancipation and
thus, the representation of the struggle for sexual autonomy was to remain a crucial
organizing device of the narrative structures of black female writers.
When black women told the stories about their real lives or the real lives of their
characters and their actual experience, they proved the power of art to demolish
stereotypes. Their characters struggle to forge an identity larger than the one society would
force upon them. They are aware and conscious, and that very consciousness is potent. In
searching out their own truths, they are rebellious and risk-taking and they are not defined
by men.
Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison have allowed black women this
kind of heroic stature. In the writing of black men, women are always subordinate to men.
They are often relegated to domestic roles, while the men are involved in the larger
issues of life. African American writers acknowledged the equivalent struggle of the black
woman.

In The Triumphant Song of Toni Morrison by Paula Giddings in Midnight Birds, edited by Mary Helen
Washington

I.1. Gloria Naylor The Women of Brewster Place

Growing up in the North in integrated schools, I wasnt taught anything about
Black history or literature When I discovered that there was this long literary tradition of
Black folk in this country, I felt I had been cheated out of something. I wanted to sit down
and write about something that I hadnt read about, and that was all about me the Black
woman in America

Gloria Naylor is the author of four highly acclaimed novels The Women of
Brewster Place (1982, for which she won the American Book Award for first fiction),
Linden Hills (1985), Mama Day (1988) and Baileys Cafe (1992). According to the
writer, her four novels are all meant to be loosely connected, creative worlds in which
she explores racism, sexism, classism, and intraracial conflicts.
As Gloria Naylor grew up, her literary education offered her no examples of
writing black men, let alone black women writers: I read Emerson, I read Poe, Fitzgerald,
Faulkner, Hemingway, My God! Wonderful writers, wonderful writers! And never having
read anything that reflected me, she declare in American Audio Prose interview. Only
later did Naylor realize the diversity and the richness of the African-American experience
in literature and discover the works of women who, like herself, shared the two
marginalized identities of female and black.
I wrote because I had no choice, but that was a long road from gathering the
authority within myself to believe that I could actually be a writer. The writers I have been
taught to love were either male or white. And who was I to argue that Ellison, Austin,
Dickens, the Bronts, Baldwin and Faulkner werent masters? They were and are. But
inside there was still the faintest whisper: Was there no one telling my story? And since it

appeared there was not, how could I presume to?...[Reading] The Bluest Eyes [was] the
beginning [of my ability to conceive myself as a writer]the presence of the worksaid
to a young black woman, struggling to find a mirror of her worth in this society, not only is
your story worth telling but it can be told in words so painfully eloquent that it becomes a
song.4 Far from being a replica of domestic novels by white women writers, Naylor's texts
mirror the unique realities of black women. Black feminist theorists, and I refer to critics
such as Deborah McDowell, Barbara Christian, Barbara Smith, and others whose writings
reveal a black feminist or womanist approach to the tradition of black women's literature,
have argued persuasively for a reading of black women's texts that takes into account the
interlocking influences of race and gender, and as far as black women's domestic novels
are concerned, those novels reveal black women's domesticity as being bound within a
distinct history traceable to slavery5.
Gloria Naylor started expressing herself through writing the moment she was
convinced that her voice must be heard. Discovering that it was not "true" that black
Americans did not write books was a catalyzing experience, one that provided her with an
image in the mirror, an acknowledgment that she existed. This confirmation of her self and
of her possibilities for artistry "reverberated enough to give me the courage to pick up the
pen", as Gaylor stated in an interview. She became thus one of the most representative
Black feminist voices and defied the limitations imposed on the female writing.

Gloria Naylor A Conversation(with Toni Morrison) from Michael Awkward Authorial Dreams of
Wholeness (Dis)Unity, (Literary) Parentage, and The Women of Brewster Place; Gloria Naylor. Critical
Perspectives Past and Present, edited by Henry Louis Gates and K. A. Appiah, Amistad Press, New York,
1993
5
Maxine Lavon Montgomery - Domestic Ritual in Gloria Naylor's Fiction in Margot Anne Kelley (editor)
- Gloria Naylor's Early Novels, University Press of Florida , Gainesville, Publication Year: 1999

I.2 Alice Walker The Color Purple

I find my own
Small person
A standing self
Against the world
An equality of wills
I finally understand
Alice Walker On Stripping Bark from Myself

Alice Walker claims to be a womanist. She had defined the term womanist in detail
in her anthology In Search of Our Mothers Garden: Womanist Prose. To her the term
womanist means:
1. From womanish (opp. Of girlish, i.e., frivolous, irresponsible, not serious). A
black feminist or feminist of color. From the black folk expression of mothers
to female children, you acting womanish i.e., like a woman. Usually referring
to outrageous, audacious, courageous or wilful behaviours wanting to know
more or in greater depth than is considered good for one. Interested in grown
up doings. Acting grown-up. Being grown-up. Interchangeable with another
black folk expression: you trying to be grown. Responsible. In charge. Serious.
2. Also: A woman who loves other women, sexually and/ or non-sexually.
Appreciates and prefers womens culture, womens emotional flexibility (values
tears as natural counter balance of laughter), and womens strength. Sometimes
loves individual men, sexually and/or other women. Committed to survival and
wholeness of entire people, male and female.6

Alice Walker In Search of Our Mothers Garden, extract from Ranveer, p.147

Dorothy Perry Thompson7 considers that Walker's definition originates from the
expressive culture of black folk. From the black vernacular she has chosen a word that
every African-American female with spunk probably heard as a youngster from scolding
adults: womanish. Additionally, the syntax of the culture is used in the rhetoric of the
explanation of the word, and the public history of the culture is invoked with the allusion
to Harriet Tubman and other female liberation figures. Nevertheless, Walker frames these
cultural elements in the traditions of Western academic definition: etymology first, then
identification of class (feminist), and, finally, differentiation, or explanation of how the
womanist is unlike other things in her class (black).
"Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender," Walker writes in In Search of
Our Mothers' Gardens. Appearing at the end of a list of womanist determinants, this
metaphor is intended as a visual illustration of the ideological gap between womanism and
feminism. The shade of difference is a matter of depth or intensity. Tuzyline Allan 8
considers that while both modes of thought originate from the same wellspring of
resistance to patriarchal domination, womanism intensifies the struggle by fighting from
several fronts because it believes that patriarchy, like the Gorgon, is many-headed. More
than simply being aware of the "multiple jeopardies of race and class, not the singular one
of sexual inequality," the womanist writer is artistically committed to a radical
restructuring of society that will allow for the dissolution of boundaries of race, sex and
class.
Alice Walker declares in an interview that she likes to have words that describe
things correctly. Now to me black feminist does not do that. I need a word that is
organic, that really comes out of the culture I dont choose womanism because it is
better than feminism I choose it because I prefer the sound, the feel, the fit of it,
because I cherish the spirit of the women the word calls to mind9
In addition to this, to achieve the wholeness or roundness of characters in her
novels, Walker tell her mother that she tries to reveal the whole story of black people
because everything around her is deliberately split up:
In "Beyond the Peacock," an essay in her collection In Search of Our Mother's
Gardens, Walker states History splits up, literature splits up, and people are split up too.
7

Dorothy Perry Thompson - Africana Womanist Revision in Gloria Naylor's Mama Day and
Bailey's Caf in Margot Anne Kelley (editor) - Gloria Naylor's Early Novels, Gainesville
,Publication Year: 1999
8
Tuzyline Allan - The Color Purple: A Study of Walker's Womanist Gospel in Harold Bloom
9
Alice Walker Letter, New York Times Magazine, 12 February 1984 taken from Ranveer, p.148

10

It makes people do ignorant things.Well I believe that the truth about any subject only
comes when all the sides of the story are put together and all their different meanings make
one new one. Each writer writes the missing parts to the other writers story. And the whole
story is what Im after.10 This re-made story will affirm the oneness or "wholeness" of life,
the connectedness of all living forms. Tuzyline Allan states in her article The Color
Purple: A Study of Walker's Womanist Gospel that Walker, with the intensity of a
Romantic, has managed to turn the idea of the unity of nature into a personal religion. It
permeates her poetry and prose.
As a black womanist novelist, Alice Walker is after the whole truth of AfricanAmerican life. However, her major concern is the black women themselves. She made it
clear in an interview with Johan OBrien:
I am preoccupied with the spiritual survival, the survival of whole of my people.
But beyond that, I am committed to exploring the oppressions, the insanities, the loyalties,
and the triumphs of black women.11. Therefore, Alice Walkers writings such as Once
(1968), Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems (1973), Good Night, Willie Lee, Ill
See You in the Morning (1979), Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, all
anthologies of poems and The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), Meridian (1976),
The Color Purple (1982), The Temple of My Familiar (1989), novels and In Love and
Trouble. Stories of Black Woman (1973), and You cant Keep a Good Woman Down
(1981) deal with the life of Afro-Americans with a special emphasis on the black womens
life.
The Pulitzer prize winning novel, The Color Purple chronicles the life of a black
girl Celie from Milledgeville, Georgia, who despite poverty, near-illiteracy, physical and
mental exploitation, transcends her plight through self-awareness, and attempts to scale the
subtle and warm dimensions of womanist consciousness. Walker tells Celies story in the
form of letters first written to God and later to her sister Nettie. Celie writes to God to help
her survive the spiritual, emotional and physical abuse she suffers at the hands of her
father. Moreover, Celies attitude about her own self-worth and her perception of God
emerges in these letters, and the readers quickly recognize that Celie believes she is totally
powerless and worthless. Thus she begins her journey from powerlessness to the state of
full empowerment and from self abnegation to self recognition.

10
11

Alice Walker In Search of Our Mothers Garden, extract from Ranveer, p.148
Johan OBrien, Interviews with Black Writers, New York, Liveright, 1973, p.197 in Ranveer, p.148

11

I.3 Toni Morrison Sula

There are things that I try to incorporate into my fiction that are directly and deliberately
related to what I regard as the major characteristic of Black artOne of which is the
ability to be both print and oral literature [African American literature] should try
deliberately to make you stand up and make you feel something profound in the same way
that a Black preacher requires his congregation to speak, to join himto weep and to cry
and to accede to change and to modify

The third novelist discussed in our paper is Toni Morrison born Chloe Wofford,
Morrison wrote her first novel in 1970, The Bluest Eye, followed by Sula in 1973.
Several other novels followed in quick succession: Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby
(1981), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), and Paradise (1998). She has also written several
plays and song cycles. Additionally her book of literary criticism, titled Playing in the
Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, was published in 1992.
Toni Morrison is currently one of the most celebrated U.S. authors, having gained
increasing attention since the publication of her first novel, The Bluest Eye, in 1970. Her
place in international arts and letters was firmly established after she was awarded the
Pulitzer Prize for Beloved in 1988 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. She has
now been an important voice in American literature for nearly thirty years.
In Colette Dowling "The Song of Toni Morrison," Morrison specifies her concern
for a particular cosmology that comprises Afro-America. She says she is concerned with
"the elaborately socialized world of black people. . . . I wanted to find out who those

12

people are ... and why they live the way they do. I want to see the stuff out of which they're
made."12
Sula is considered by many critics to be Toni Morrison's best book. Although it has
not won the number of awards that some of her later books have earned, it is noted for its
plain structure, sparkling language, and intense investigation of human questions - much
like her other books, but with a simplicity and blunt reality all its own. Sula has been
compared to Zora Neal Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and was, indeed,
published not long after that book enjoyed a resurrection in the early 1970s. She is studied
from the Black perspective and the feminist perspective. Sula portrays the friendship of
Nel Wright and Sula Peace in the context of their community, called the Bottom. The
Bottom was an African American settlement in the hills above Medallion, Ohio, until it
was bulldozed for a golf course. Before presenting critical events in the life of the Bottom
from 1919 to 1965, the narrator meditates on the meaning of this community's life and
death.
The two Black women who represent the main characters of the novel have very
different outlooks about themselves and life. While Sula judges her life as "wrong," Nel
believes that she herself is the picture of goodness and propriety. Within their own
perceptions, they each make choices and do the best they can, continuing to change and
test their affections for each other and the people around them. As a chronicle of the lives
of Black women from small mid-western towns in the first half of the century, the book
has no equal. As a chronicle of the human heart, it is sympathetic and honest.
The narrative blurs and confuses the binary oppositions of good / bad, female /
male, self / other, black / white. Morrison glories in paradox and ambiguity. Missy Dehn
Kubitchek considers that Sula concerns persistence - of women's friendship, of individual
growth, of spirit13. The rich and ambivalent relationship between Sula and Nel suggests
that Morrison is experimenting with alternative conceptions of selfhood and friendship.
Their closeness calls into question the traditional notion of the unitary self, and their
enduring yet strained relationship also questions the stereotype of undying friendship14.
12

Cited from W. Lawrence Hogue - Discourse and the Other: The Production of the Afro-American Text,
Chapter 7. Sula: History, Mythical Thought, and the Production of the Afro-American Historical Past, Duke
University Press, Durham, NC, 1986
13

Missy Dehn Kubitchek Toni Morrison, A Critical Companion, Westport, CT, 1998
Philip Page Shocked into Separateness: Unresolved Oppositions in Sula in Harold Bloom - Toni
Morrison's Sula, Chelsea House, Philadelphia, 1999
14

13

We have chosen these three novels: Gloria Naylors The Women of Brewster
Place, Alice Walkers The Color Purple and Toni Morrisons Sula as they all deal with
images of women and focus on the strong relationship between the women characters
portayed, relationships that have the ability to defy time, space and the social conventions
of the society within which they occur.

Bibliographical references:

14

1. hooks, bell Revolutionary Black Women Making Ourselves Subject , p.825 in

Cornerstones An Anthology Of African American Literature, edited by Melvin
Donalson, St. Martins Press, New York, 1996, p.820 835
2. Giddings, Paula In The Triumphant Song of Toni Morrison by in Midnight Birds, edited by
Mary Helen Washington
3. Naylor, Gloria A Conversation(with Toni Morrison) from Michael Awkward
Authorial Dreams of Wholeness (Dis)Unity, (Literary) Parentage, and The Women of
Brewster Place; Gloria Naylor. Critical Perspectives Past and Present, edited by Henry
Louis Gates and K. A. Appiah, Amistad Press, New York, 1993
4. Montgomery, Maxine Lavon Domestic Ritual in Gloria Naylor's Fiction in Margot
Anne Kelley (editor) - Gloria Naylor's Early Novels, University Press of Florida ,
Gainesville, Publication Year: 1999
5.Walker, Alice In Search of Our Mothers Garden, extract from Ranveer, p.147
6.Allan, Tuzyline - The Color Purple: A Study of Walker's Womanist Gospel in Harold Bloom
7. Walker, Alice Letter, New York Times Magazine, 12 February 1984 taken from
Ranveer, p.148
8. Walker, Alice In Search of Our Mothers Garden, extract from Ranveer, p.148
9. OBrien, Johan, Interviews with Black Writers, New York, Liveright, 1973, p.197 in Ranveer,
p.148
10. Hogue, W. Lawrence - Discourse and the Other: The Production of the Afro-American
Text, Chapter 7. Sula: History, Mythical Thought, and the Production of the Afro-American
Historical Past, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 1986
11. Page, Philip Shocked into Separateness: Unresolved Oppositions in Sula in Harold
Bloom - Toni Morrison's Sula, Chelsea House, Philadelphia, 1999
12. Kubitchek, Missy Dehn Toni Morrison, A Critical Companion, Westport, CT, 1998

Chapter II
Images of women

15

one character couldnt be the Black woman in America. So I had seven different
women, all in different circumstances, encompassing the complexity of our lives,
the richness of our diversity from skin color on down to religious, political and
sexual preference.
Gloria Naylor
Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison have populated their novels with
diverse women figures. In this chapter we have decided to discuss the images of women as
they are presented in The Women of Brewster PlaceThe Women of Brewster Place by
Gloria Naylor, The Color Purple by Alice Walker and Sula by Toni Morrison.
In contrast to the monolithic image of the mythical black matriarch, Naylor refuses
to portray one uniform image of the black woman or the black family; this strategy allows
Naylor the freedom to discuss African-American women without confining their image to
the shape of her discussion.15
The women living in Brewster Place speak through individual short stories, loosely
structured as a novel. There are seven chapters and each chapter focuses on a different
woman who experiences and endures within herself and as a result of her interaction with
others. These seven women constitute the major characters or protagonists of this literary
work, and their struggle comprises the theme of the novel. Although each of their
narratives could be called a short story, the novel consists of the interrelationship of the
stories, as a pattern evolves, not only because all the characters live in Brewster Place but
also because they are connected to one another.
Naylor chose to place her characters in the dead-end street, Brewster Place. The
relevance of the setting is mentioned in the novels prologue and epilogue, entitled Dawn
and Dusk. Dawn provides a description of Brewster Place and how it came into
existence as the bastard child of clandestine meetings between local white politicians, at
first to satisfy expected protests from the Irish community over the undeserved dismissal of
their too honest police chief and later it became the neighbourhood of successive waves of
European immigrants, unwanted Americans who finally became, over time, the black
people. Barbara Christian16 speaks about a geographical fictional world that Naylor
created in order to gives life to her fictional ideas. As Brewster Place is a dead end street
and the black who live there are poor, powerless and ignored by others in the city, it exists
15

Celeste Fraser Stealing B(l)ack Voices: The Myth of the Black Matriarchy and The Women of Brewster
Place
16
Barbara Christian Naylors Geography: Community, Class and Patriarchy in The Women of Brewster
Place and Linden Hills

16

independently of the outside world and perpetuates its own values and mores according to
the needs of its residents and the limitations imposed on them from the larger society. As a
result, this setting created a unique social environment. "Their physical structure protects
its residents from direct interference from the outside world; thus they are able to formulate
and maintain their own social rules of behaviour and to condemn and to punish those who,
because of their life style or background, do not stick to a prescribed pattern. 17 Within this
limited environment, all the residents exist under similar circumstances.
Each of the novels stories is named after the specific woman on whom she is
focussing, even as she might include that woman in anothers story. The only exception is
The Two that focuses on the lives of the lesbians. By using this form, one that heightens
the individuality of her characters so that they are not merely seen as faceless female
heads of households, while stressing their interrelationships, Naylor establishes Brewster
Place as a community in spite of its history of transients a community with its own
mores, strengths, and weaknesses. Even when that specific Brewster Place is destroyed, its
characteristics remain, for most of its inhabitants must move to a similar street. Brewster
Place then stands for both itself and other places like it.
The seven women of Brewster Place are Mattie Michael, an unwed mother who is
displaced from her home and forced to move to Brewster Place after her son skips bail;
Etta Mae Johnson, a sassy, middle-aged woman who searches for both pleasure and a self
identity in various cities and with various men, but returns to Brewster Place when she had
run out of money and men; Kiswana Browne, a young, middle-class black woman who
rejects her background and her name (Melanie), and moves to Brewster Place and attempts
to help the people who live there under disastrous and lamentable conditions; Lucielia
Louise Turner, who tolerates abuse from her husband; Cora Lee, another unwed mother,
who, in her fascination for babies, has one child after another but neglects them when they
get older; and Lorraine and Theresa, The Two, who because they are lesbians, encounter
hostility and rejection by the people of Brewster Place. All of them struggle to survival and
shape their lives under the conditions and environment that overpower them.
Alice Walker is primarily known as a novelist and short story writer whose tragic
and triumphant depictions of black women range from abused and ghostly figures
suspended in the webs of an atavistic southern system to the strange, mysterious and
defiant Meridian.
17

Kashinath Ranveer Black Feminist Consciousness A Study of Black Women Writers, p. 112, Printwell,
Japur, India, 1995

17

The Color Purple is the story of a shift in though, location and class position that
Celie undergoes, her movement from object to subject to her success as a capitalistic
entrepreneur18. She breaks free fro the patriarchal prison that is her home when the
novel begins and she creates her own household. Her change is influenced by the female
figures with whom she interacts. It is Sofia Butler, the beloved turned into wife of Harpo
who demonstrates to Celia how to live with ones husband as a self respecting person. The
day Harpo marries Sofia, his father stars giving him wages for the work he does on his
farm. However, he feels that Sofia does not behave with him the way Celie behaves with
Albert. He complains that she never does what he tells. When he consults Albert about
Sofias disobedience, he preaches his gospel: Wives is like children. You have to letem
know who got the upper hand. Nothing can do that better than a good sound beating.
When Sofia is imprisoned, her vacant position in the kinship network is assumed by
Squeak, a thin small woman, who gains presence only when she acts to free Sofia,
passively enduring rape to fulfil her mission. bell hooks (Writing the Subject: Reading The
Color Purple) considers that this rape of a black woman by a white man does not have
grievous traumatic negative consequences, even though it acts to reinforce sexist
domination of females and racist exploitation. Instead, it is a catalyst for positive change
Sofia's release, Squeak asserting her identity as Mary Agnes.
Nettie is Celies sister; they have a spiritual bond as their minds converge and they
feel each other even though they are thousands of miles away. Much of what Nettie writes
to Celie describing the situation in Africathe breakdown of male/female relationships,
the power of male domination, and the bonding between womenis replicated in Celie's
experiences in the rural South. Nettie writes to Celie of the paved roads in Africa; Celie, to
her, of those in Georgia. Nettie describes her round and windowless African hut; Celie,
Shug's difficulty including windows in her plans for a round house in Memphis.
The characters in the novel help each other to surpass difficult moment and to
assess themselves as women. Celies journey from a dumb, illiterate, ignorant, ugly black
girl to the awakened and self conscious woman is not a phenomenon that occurs at random.
It is the result of the company of Nettie, her sister, Sofia, Harpos wife and Shug Avery,
Alberts beloved. All these women stand united against racism and sexist tyranny.
The Color Purple closes with a celebration of kinship, its concluding action
composed of a series of family reunions: Sophia patches things up with Harpo; Shug visits
18

bell hooks Revolutionary Black Women Making Ourselves Subject , p.825 in Cornerstones An
Anthology Of African American Literature, edited by Melvin Donalson, St. Martins Press, New York,
1996, p.820 835

18

her estranged children (for the first time in thirty years); and the novel's two narrators,
Celie and Nettie, are joyfully and tearfully reunited. Even Albert and Celie are reconciled,
his change of heart signaled by his earning the right to have his first name written. Coming
after Celie has achieved both economic independence and emotional security, the reunions
at the end of The Color Purple testify to the importance of kinship to the happiness of
every individual19.
What distinguishes Toni Morrisons novel is not just that black life is dealt with on the
mythological level but that the mythical hero is a woman. In all of the great myths that
function in black literature from the great migration, bondage to freedom, the confrontation
with invisibility, the marginal black the heroes we have come to associate with those
myths are, for the most part, men. Mary Helen Washington 20 considers that the justification
is simple: men have always been allowed and encouraged to be writers and have followed
the natural instinct to make their heroes black. What Morrison does in Sula is therefore of
major importance because she allows us to see the black womans experience not only as
valid but in larger mythic terms.
Sula concerns the frienship between two black girls, Sula Peace and Nel Wright, as
they grow into womanhood in the Black Bottom of a town called Medallion, Ohio. As they
grow up, they take different ways in life. Nel choses respectability, prayer meetings,
keeping hose, catering to a husbands whims. Sula chooses to be a wandered, a violator of
the communitys standards. Self-invented, she lives by her own whim, strangely
independent but also impulsive, idle and dangerous.
The plot of the novel chronicles the lives of two opposed characters who grow up in
two opposed houses managed under two opposed theories of child-rearing. The character
pairings of Nel and Sula are doubled in the pairings of their contrasting mothers (Helene
and Hannah) and grandmothers (Rochelle and Eva)21.
Although they are best friends through most of the book, they are very different.
Unconventional, "wild", and complex, Sula is often a disturbing character who sometimes
seems to be driven by negative qualities. Nel, on the other hand, is a more conventional
character, possessing many attributes that make her seem somehow better, nicer, or more
respectable than Sula. Both women are searching for themselves and meaning in life during
the course of the novel. Double-faced, her focal characters look outward and search
19

Tuzyline Allan - The Color Purple: A Study of Walker's Womanist Gospel in Harold Bloom, op.cit.
Midnight Birds, edited by Mary Helen Washington, p. 153
21
Philip Page Shocked into Separateness: Unresolved Oppositions in Sula in in Harold Bloom - Toni
Morrison's Sula
20

19

inward, trying to find some continuity between the seasons, the earth, other people, the
cycles of life, and their own particular lives. Often they find that there is conflict between
their own nature and the society that man has made, to the extent that one seems to be an
inversion of the other22.
In the histories of the Peace and Wright households, Morrison presents three generations
of women. In each, the traits of the grandmother reappear, with different manifestations, in
the granddaughters. Nel's family structure is nevertheless matrifocal, even perhaps
matriarchal although it defines itself through patriarchal and church-generated stereotypes 23.
As part of her attempt to escape the shame she feels for her mother's prostitution, Helene
Wright tries to make her daughter conform to perfect middle-class respectability. Nel and
the reader find Helene's mother, Rochelle, much more appealing than Helene, however. The
presence of the rebellious, independent Rochelle in Nel's background makes Nel's interest in
Sula more credible.
In the same way, the Peace household contains a triad: Eva, Hannah, and Sula. As with
the Wrights, the second generation does not have much influence on the third, because
Eva's independence is reincarnated in Sula. Missy Dehn Kubitchek states that these
groupings of three generations are the first expression of Morrison's interest in
characterization beyond immediate households.
Hannahs namesake is the mother of Samson, a mighty warrior, a strong and
independent man, in the Bible. Although Hannah Peace is one of Eva's daughters, she has
none of her mother's independence or vigor. Her chief activity consists of having casual sex
with the willing men of the Bottom. Hannah continues this evolution of freedom initiated by
her mother into the realm of sexuality. Hannah was not completely independent of men, due
to the fact that she needed some touching every day. After her husband Rekus dies, she
samples many of the married men of Bottom while retaining a very modest level of
respectability. Hannah eventually falls in a dramatic Sodoma and Gomorrah kind of death.
The narrative invites the reader to imagine a different script for women that transcends
the boundaries of social and linguistic convention.

II.1 The Women in the Center

22

Barbara Christian - The Contemporary Fables of Toni Morrison in Harold Bloom - Toni Morrison's Sula
Stephanie A. Demetrakopoulos - Sula and the Primacy of Woman-to-Woman Bonds in Harold Bloom Toni Morrison's Sula
23

20

We have chosen to entitle out subchapter The women in the Center as in every
novel there is at least one woman who governs over the place, who influences the other
characters, provides psychological support, a shoulder to cry on. The word matriarch is
considered a term coined by whites to de-valorised the black women. bell hooks states that
male social scientists formulated theories about the matriarchal power of black females in
order to provide an out-of-the-ordinary explanation for the independent and decisive role
that black women played within the black family structure 24. They labelled black women
matriarchs a title that in no way accurately described the social status of black women in
America. No matriarchy has ever existed in the US, hooks states, because the term
matriarch implies the existence of a social order in which women exercise social and
political power, a state which in no way resembles the condition of black women in
American society. No real effective power exists that allows the females in question to
control their own destinies.
In the article Is the Black Men Castrated, Jean Bond and Pauline Perry write of
the matriarchy myth:
The casting of this image of the black female in sociological bold relief is both
consistent and logical in racist terms, for the so-called Black matriarch is a kind of folk
character largely fashioned by whites out of half truths and lies about the involuntary
conditions of black women.
The argument that black women were matriarchs was readily accepted by black
people even though it was an image created by white males. bell hooks considers that the
black mummy figure is also a creature of white imagination.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his report in 1964 entitled The Negro Family: The
Case for National Action, since then known as Moynihan Report deplored women as
matriarchs. Moynihan argued that, unable to fulfill the masculine role of provider,
demoralized black fathers deserted their families. As a result, he claimed, matrifocality
increased, together with sexual promiscuity and illegitimate births. In his view the slaverooted matriarchy had become a self-perpetuating institution. Contemporary black women
were said still to be relatively advantaged, enjoying more familial power, educational and
professional success, and greater psychic well-being than their men. The Afro-American
mother was thus punished and maligned for being too strong, too central in her family, for
24

hooks, bell Aint I A Woman - black women and feminism, South End Press, Boston, Masachussets,
1992, p. 72

21

being a matriarch, a vortex of attitudes which culminated in white American government

policy such as Moynihan Report and in black cultural nationalist rhetoric of the 1960s.
In The Women of Brewster Place Mattie is the woman in the center, as her
presence is felt throughout the novel, in all the short stories. She is the link, the center and
the soul of the community of women that populate Brewster Place. The first short story
bears her name and depicts her at the end of her trip through life, moving in Brewster
Place, refusing to think that she would have to die here on this crowded street because
there just wasnt enough life left for her to do it all again. 25 Although she has had
opportunities to avoid a dead-end street like Brewster Place, Mattie like her friend Etta
Mae, ends up here because of her concept of herself as woman. As a result the sweet
Mattie arrives at a certain period in her life without sufficient economic and psychological
resources. Mattie sacrifices herself to her son, Basil, the one she lived for only to lose him
through the boys cowardice.
Mattie Michael (like Miss Eva before her) leads the community of women,
providing continuity with the past. She rocks Ciel through her grief after she loses her
baby, and she dreams of unity at the end of the book. She is the primary agent of female
coalescence in the novel. Not only does she act to save Ciels life, but she serves as a
supportive friend for Brewster Places other females. She provides for Etta Mae Johnson
after her ill-fated encounter with Reverend Woods the light and the love and the comfort
to allow her to transcend her pain. Further, she gently chides Cora Lee about her full
load of children, and, along with Etta Mae, defends Lorraine against Sophies attacks.
Mattie, everybody's mother and the first in a long line of larger-than-life maternal
figures in Naylor's canon, is the medium through whom the community's hopes for a
radically transformed future are channeled. Given her prominence among the women in the
community, it is only fitting that Mattie dreams the women's collective dream.
Even if Mattie functions as a symbolic center in the novel she does not have the
power to prevent evilness to manifest itself. She is not able to control her own destiny not
to mention the others. Lorraine is still savagely raped and dies, Ben is still murdered. Her
role is important in the novel as she has a strong impact on the other characters lives.
Alice Walker in her novel, The Color Purple, presents Sofia, the black woman who
wants to fight for her own dignity. Carla Kaplan considers that Sofia is fighting conflict
itself26. "All my life I had to fight. I had to fight my daddy. I had to fight my brothers. I
25

Naylor, Gloria The Women of Brewster Place, Penguin Books, New York, 1988
Carla Kaplan - "Somebody I Can Talk To": Teaching Feminism Through The Color Purple in Harold
Bloom
26

22

had to fight my cousins and my uncles." she says. Unlike Celie or Shug, she is regarded as
a serious threat to the social order and is violently attacked, brutalized, and subdued.
Always a revolutionary, Sofia has never been victimized or complicit in her own
oppression. Tortured and persecuted by the State, treated as though she is a political
prisoner, Sofia's spirit is systematically crushed. Unlike Celie, she cannot easily escape and
there is no love strong enough to engender her self-recovery. Her suffering cannot be
easily mitigated, as it would require radical transformation of society 27.
She refuses to be a whitemans housemaid. Sofias struggle is for dignity as an
individual who is both black and female. Though her struggle is not always successful, it
provides an opportunity to her to display her fortitude and agility to transcend her racist
and sexist circumstances.28 Her response to the society illustrates the need for the
development of the black society which allows for an individual to define ones
meaningful existence within the larger American society. The image of the strong,
nonsubmissive black female head of a household became a negative image, a figure of
oppressive proportions with unnatural attributes of masculine power that came to be
labeled as black matriarchs.
Toni Morrison depicts in her novel, Sula perhaps the most memorable fragmented
character, the one-legged matriarch, Eva Peace. Apparently she gives up a leg in order to
survive, in order that her children may survive. Eva represents both the nurturant and the
violent aspects of the archetypal Earth Mother. Like the primeval Earth Mother Goddess,
feared and worshipped by man, like the goddesses of antiquity, older even than the biblical
Eve, Eva both gives life and takes it away. She performs a ritual killing inspired by
lovea ritual of sacrifice by fire29.
She becomes a mother to most of the Bottom, renting part of her large house to
lodgers, supervising newlywed women's cooking for their husbands, and taking in orphans.
Eva does not advocate her own unconventionality for other women, and in fact calls Sula
selfish for not wanting to marry. Although capable of great self-sacrifice for her children,
she throws herself out a window in an unsuccessful attempt to rescue Hannah from a fire,
she purposely burns her son Plum to death. Eva and Sula are linked by their great energy
and independence. Eva somehow knows that Sula and Nel were instrumental in Chicken
Little's death, though she was not present when it happened. When she confronts Nel with
27

bell hooks - Writing the Subject: Reading The Color Purple, p. 65 in Harold Bloom - Alice Walker's The
Color Purple, Chelsea House, Philadelphia, 2000
28
Ranveer, op.cit., p.184
29
Barbara Christian - The Contemporary Fables of Toni Morrison in Harold Bloom - Toni Morrison's Sula

23

her knowledge many years later, she prepares Nel to perceive the persistence of Sula's
spirit.
The character of Eva, temptress and sinner in the Bible, is termed creator and
sovereign in Morrisons novel. Eva found herself trapped in a traditional role as a
housewife. She "is arrogant, independent, decidedly a man lover who loves and hates
intensely"; strong by virtue of her will, wit, and idiosyncrasies. After being abandoned by
BoyBoy, she heroically reconstructs her life without relying one anyone but herself,
redefining the typical nuclear household into a completely feminine-directed one. Although
the rules differ, Eva controls her household as rigidly as Helene Wright does.

W.

Lawrence Hogue consideres Eva a repetition of the discursive fact of the extreme,
uncommon, and eccentric character within the text30.

30

W. Lawrence Hogue - Discourse and the Other: The Production of the Afro-American Text, Chapter 7.
Sula: History, Mythical Thought, and the Production of the Afro-American Historical Past, Duke University
Press, Durham, NC, 1986

24

II.2 The Nonconformist

In The Women of Brewster Place Etta Mae Johnson, Kiswana Browne and the
two break the pattern.
Etta spent her teenage years in constant trouble. Rock Vale had no place for a
black woman who was not only willing to play by the rules, but whose spirit challenged
the very right of the game to exist. Rock Vale had followed her to Memphis, Detroit,
Chicago, and even to New York. Etta soon found out that America wasnt ready for her yet
not in 1937.
Etta Mae Johnson is the picture of vibrant sexuality 31: "She stood out like a
bright red bird among the drab morality that dried up the breasts and formed rolls around
the stomachs of the other church sisters. This woman was still dripping with the juices of a
full-fleshed life". This physical appearance is only one manifestation of her rebelliousness,
for she is "a black woman who was not only unwilling to play by the rules.
We could speak about Etta Mae Johnson and Mattie Michaels in the same term as
with Sula and Nel. The use of the double, the pair, brings the two novels closer. In each
pair, the friends choose separate ways. Etta and Mae had taken totally different roads that
with all of their deceptive winding had both ended up on Brewster Place(p.60). Etta Mae
chose to shock, to make a change in the ways women were supposed to behave while
Mattie chose a more conformist role, that of mother. Nevertheless, in the world of Brewster
Place, Etta Mae is largely powerless, as is apparent when she comes home to Mattie after
failing to marry the reverend.
Kiswana feels repressed both communally, in her natal home, Linden Hills. She
sees her sojourn in Brewster Place as bonding with her true people, black people. As well,
her interaction with her mother, the major event in her story, demonstrates quite clearly that
Kiswana sees Linden Hills morality as hypocritical and narrow-minded. When her mother
tells her that she is worried to see her daugher living among these people Kiswana
replies: What do you mean, these people. There my people and yours, too. Mama were
all black. But maybe youve forgotten that over in Linden Hills.32
31

Amy K. Levin - Metaphor and Maternity in Mama Day in Margot Anne Kelley (editor) - Gloria
Naylor's Early Novels, Gainesville ,Publication Year: 1999

32

Naylor, Gloria The Women of Brewster Place, Penguin Books, New York, 1988, p.83

25

Kiswana rebels against classism and racism: My place was in the streets with my
people, fighting for equality and a better community. Her mother tells her that she lives
in a fantasy world always going to extremes turning butterflies into eagles. Her
mother perceives life in a different way, life for her is accepting what is and working from
that.
Her prim mother characterizes African sculpture, the heritage Kiswana proudly
displays, as obscene, too blatantly sexual. Yet these two women have much in common in
that they both enjoy their sensuality, the younger quite openly (at least in Brewster Place),
the older more covertly. Naylors use of adornment of their feet, a part of the female body
that is usually hidden and which is not considered particularly sexual is an indication of
their own pleasure in themselves. But finally it is Mrs. Brownes willingness to visit
Kiswana in Brewster Place, the fact that she is concerned about her daughters welfare
despite their disagreements that is an indication of the strength of their bond.
Kiswana is a non-conformist as she decides to live on her own and to fight for her
people. She resents her name even if her mother informs her that it was the name of her
grand-grandmother a woman who bore nine children and educated them all, who held off
six white men with a shotgun when they tried to drag one of her sons to jail for not
knowing his place. Kiswana makes a step forward in the advancement of black female
that decide to carve a way for their own.
The Two, Lorraine and Theresa, are roommates and lovers. Their difference is
not accepted by the inhabitants of Brewster Place. "The Two" serve as balance for the two
beginning characters of Mattie and Etta Mae. They have fled the homophobia of the world,
only to have their lives destroyed by rumor and, finally, rape and murder at the end of
Brewster Place. The two lesbians, are never encircled into the circle of saving grace of the
women of Brewster Place because of their sexuality.
Because Lorraine chooses to claim a lesbian identity, she is forced to sever all
connections to her natal family. However, if the economic system were not one in which
Lorraine could work to earn enough wages to survive independently of that unit, her
decision to "refuse to lie about what [those letters] meant" would not have been a viable
option. Instead, she would have been forced either to deny her feelings and live within
prescribed heterosexual norms or to act on those feelings and live in secrecy and in fear. In
either case, she would have been unable to claim a homosexual identity. However, because
the free labor system provided Lorraine with the opportunity for economic independence,

26

she was able to make the decision to act on her homosexual desires and to claim a lesbian
identity.
Kimberly A. Costino states that although capitalism makes this decision possible, it
does not necessarily make it profitable. In other words, although Naylor makes it clear that
the free labor system played a significant role in enabling the emergence of homosexual
identity (or at least for the emergence of Lorraine as an individual asserting a homosexual
identity), she complicates this relationship by making it equally clear, in this first novel,
that choosing such an identity often means giving up complete access to economic
privilege. For example, although Lorraine is able to "work at night in a bakery to put
[her]self through college" ( p. 148) and thereby earn her teaching certificate, her lesbian
identity subsequently causes her to lose her teaching position. Not only does Lorraine lose
her job because of homophobia. She and her partner Theresa are also limited in where they
can reside; they are effectively forced to live on Brewster Place. When Lorraine starts to
sense that even the women of Brewster Place exclude them, that even "they" regard
Lorraine and Theresa as freaks, Theresa reminds her that there is no place left for them to
go:
"They, they, they!" Theresa exploded. "You know, I'm not starting up with this again,
Lorraine. Who in the hell are they? And where in the hell are we? Living in some dump of
a building in this God-forsaken part of town around a bunch of ignorant niggers with the
cotton still under their fingernails because of you and your theys. They knew something in
Linden Hills so I gave up an apartment for you that I'd been in for the last four years. And
then they knew in Park Heights, and you made me so miserable there we had to leave. Now
these mysterious theys are on Brewster Place. Well, look out that window, kid. There's a
big wall down that block, and this is the end of the line for me." ( WBP, 134-35)
Clearly Theresa and Lorraine do not reside on Brewster Place because they cannot
afford to live elsewhere; they live on Brewster Place because communities like Linden
Hills and Park Heights refuse to accept them because of their homosexual identity. In other
words, because Theresa and Lorraine refuse to conform to traditional notions of the
nuclear family, no "respectable" neighborhood will accept them33.
The Color Purple presents Shug Avery. The mother that left her children, the
mistress that does not take into consideration the moral rules of the society, the singer of
33

( Kimberly A. Costino - "Weapons Against Women" Compulsory Heterosexuality and Capitalism in

Linden Hills in Harold Bloom, op. cit.)

27

blues, Shug is a powerful character in the book. She is considered the novel's professor of
desire and self-fulfilment, and as such her "example" is not only symbolic but technical,
practical34. Her first gift of knowledge to Celie is transmitted through a picture Celie and
her stepmother see that has fallen out of Mr. 's wallet. The answer to Celie's question
"What is it?" is "The most beautiful woman I ever saw.... I see her there in furs. Her face
rouge. Her hair like somethin tail. She grinning...." She plays an important role in Celies
change, she offers her the love and support that she needed in order to find her identity in
the world.
She is the image of the sexual temptress. bell hooks 35 considers that Shug, whose
very name suggests that she has the power to generate excitement without the ability to
provide substantive nourishment, must also give up sexual pleasure. Betrayed by the sexual
desire that has been the source of her power, Shug's lust for a young man is not depicted as
an expression of sexual liberation, of longing for a new and different sexual pleasure,
instead it is a disempowering force, one that exposes her vulnerability and weakness.
Placed within a stereotypical heterosexist framework wherein woman is denied access to
ongoing sexual pleasure which she seeks and initiates, as the novel progresses Shug is
depicted as an aging female seducer who fears the loss of her ability to use sex as a means
to attract and control men, as a way to power. Until this turning point, sex has been for
Shug a necessary and vital source of pleasure. As object of intense sexual desire, she has
had power to shape and influence the actions of others but always in the direction of a
higher good.
While Celie is a victim of male domination, Shug is not. She is her own master and
her own guide in life. She is a nonconformist because she refuses to play by the rules.
We also have to place Sofia in this pattern as she is different, The voice of sexual
and racial resentmentfor instance, she twice expresses a desire to "kill" her sexual and
racial oppressors Sofia is the first woman Celie knows who refuses to accede to both the
patriarchal and the racist demand that the black woman demonstrate her abjection to her
oppressors36. But the mythic test of Sofia's strength takes place in her refusal to enter the
servitude of double discourse demanded of blacks by white culture. She says "Hell no" to
34

Lauren Berlant - Race, Gender, and Nation in The Color Purple in Harold Bloom - Alice Walker's
The Color Purple, Chelsea House, Philadelphia, 2000
35

bell hooks - Writing the Subject: Reading The Color Purple, in Harold Bloom, Alice Walker's The
Color Purple

28

the mayor's wife's "complimentary" suggestion that Sofia come to work as her maid; next
Sofia answers the mayor's scolding slap of her face with her own powerful punch. For her
effort to stay honest in the face of the white demand for black hypocrisy, Sofia gains
incarceration in a set of penal institutions that work by a logic similar to that of lynching:
to racialize the scene of class struggle in the public sphere and to deploy prejudice against
"woman" once behind the walls of the prison and the household. As Sofia tells Celie about
her stay in prison: "Every time they ast me to do something, Miss Celie, I act like I'm you.
I jump up and do just what they say."
In an interview, Toni Morrison characterizes Sula: She was experimental. She was
interested in herself. ()She was determined to be whoever she was. To be totally free. 37
I always thought of Sula as quintessentially black, metaphysically black, if you will,
which is not melanin and certainly not unquestioning fidelity to the tribe. She is new world
black and new world woman extracting choice from choicelessness, responding inventively
to found things. Improvisational. Daring, disruptive, imaginative, modern, out-of-thehouse, outlawed, unpolicing, uncontained and uncontainable. And dangerously female.
Toni Morrison - "Unspeakable Things Unspoken"38
Sula Peace bears a name itself ironic, since her mode of individualism can achieve no
peace whatsoever39. Sula takes the evolution initiated by her grandmother and her mother
even further into a narcissistic sexuality where human beings are mere things to be used
and thrown away. She is completely self-absorbed throughout most of the novel, in stark
contrast to Eva and Hannah, who have a certain concern for their fellow human beings.
Sula lives an experimental life, directed towards the gratification of her desires,
completely despising the traditional role of mother and wife.
Because of her drive for self-knowledge, and because of the imagination she brings
to the memories of her ancestors and to her own experiences, Sula emerges as a unique
woman. In two beautifully terse analyses, Morrison illuminates her character:
36

Lauren Berland - Race, Gender, and Nation in The Color Purple in Harold Bloom - Alice Walker's

The Color Purple Chelsea House, Philadelphia, 2000

37

Toni Morrison in An Interview with Toni Morrison by Gerald Gladney, The EASY Guide to Black
Arts, September, 1976 in Midnight Birds, edited by Mary Helen Washington, p. 153
38
taken from Galehouse Maggie, `New World Woman: Toni Morrison's Sula , Papers on Language &
Literature, Fall99, Vol. 35, Issue 4
39
Harold Bloom - Toni Morrison's Sula, Chelsea House, Philadelphia, 1999

29

Sula was distinctly different. Eva's arrogance and Hannah's self indulgence
merged in her and, with a twist that was all her own imagination, she lived out her days
exploring her own thoughts and emotions giving them full reign, feeling no obligation to
please anybody unless their pleasure pleased her40.
Sula has the distinction of being herself in a community that believes that self-hood
can only be selfishness. Her view of life is different from others, as if the birthmark above
one of her eyes has either distorted or enlarged her vision. Sulas birthmark is a sense of her
permanence, of her immortality her blessing and her curse. It seems to confirm this
wholeness and difference, distinguishing her from other "heavy brown" (Sula 52) girls:
[It] spread from the middle of the lid toward the eyebrow, shaped something like a
stemmed rose. It gave her otherwise plain face a broken excitement and blue-blade
threat....The birthmark was to grow darker as the years passed, but now it was the same
shade as her gold-flecked eyes, which, to the end, were as steady and clean as rain (53) As
Sula develops, the birthmark on her eye changes. When she is the rose develops a stem, and
as Sula grows older, the mark grows darker.
Her mark is interpreted in various, mostly negative, ways throughout the novel: Nel's
children think of the mark as a "scary black thing" (p. 97-98), and Jude, Nel's husband,
who gets angry when Sula will not participate in the "milkwarm commiseration" he needs
to feel like a man, thinks that Sula has a copperhead over her eye (p. 103). The
community, indicting the evil Sula for every accident that befalls it, recognizes the mark
as the sign of a murderer: They "cleared up for everybody the meaning of the birthmark
over her eye; it was not a stemmed rose, or a snake, it was Hannah's [Sula's mother's]
ashes marking her from the very beginning" (114). Nel thinks that the mark gives Sula's
glance "a suggestion of startled pleasure" (96). Only Shadrack recognizes the mark as a
sign of Sula's developing self: "She," he thinks, "had a tadpole over her eye" (p. 156).
Sula's mark is that of a self who is absolutely unbounded and free. The mark as rose and
snake signifies the beauty and danger of Sula's kind of freedom.
With very few exceptions, Morrisons female characters are fiercely independent and
subvert the traditionally assigned roles of dutiful wife, mother and daughter. Nel allows
herself to be chosen by men, while Sula does her own choosing. Sulas loneliness is a
chosen one, while Nels loneliness was given to her by others, a secondhand loneliness
(in Sulas own words).
40

in Barbara Christian - The Contemporary Fables of Toni Morrison in Harold Bloom, op.cit. - Toni
Morrison's Sula

30

The community scapegoats Sula out of fear and hatred. Sula threatens the Bottom by
exposing the weaknesses of its social institutions. Sula neither accepts women's traditional
role nor lies about its effects on the women around her. Beautiful when she is thirty years
old, she sees about her women soured by living without men and women used up by
childbearing and male demands. Through contrasting themselves with her, the women see
it too. As a single, independent woman, Sula is perceived as a threat to the institution of
marriage. When the Bottom's married men have sex with her, their lack of commitment to
the institution is clear. Not surprisingly, the women of the community prefer to blame Sula.
bell hooks states that Toni Morrisons Sula chronicles the attempt by a black female to
constitute radical black female subjectivity. 41Sula challenges every restriction imposed
upon her, transgressing all boundaries. Defying conventional notions of passive female
sexuality, she asserts herself as desiring object. Rebelling against enforced domesticity, she
chooses to roam the world, to remain childless and unmarried. Sulas death at an early
stage does not leave the reader with a sense of her power, instead she seems powerless to
assert agency in a world that has no interest in radical black female subjectivity, one that
seeks to repress, contain, and annihilate it. In the end Sula is annihilated.

II.3 The Conformist

As opposed to the characters described in the previous subchapter that defied
conformity, social rules and the statures imposed on them by the society, the conformists
chose another way in life. They chose to be wives and mothers, participants in the life of
their community.
In The Women of Brewster Place Naylor presents Lucielia Louise Turner, the one
who maintain the unity of her family. But her relationship fails with her husband fails and
more than that, she has loses one child to a tragic accident and another to a doctors
hand.
Major hindrances to the creation of a utopian society that consists mainly of
marginalized women arise from both a white, patriarchal system and black women
themselves. Because of their social conditioning, these women often carry the burden of
41

bell hooks Revolutionary Black Women Making Ourselves Subject , p.826 in Cornerstones An
Anthology Of African American Literature, edited by Melvin Donalson, St. Martins Press, New York,
1996, p.820 835

31

guilt when their relationships with men are unstable. Rather than assert themselves in
challenging the men in their lives, the women sometimes insist on remaining in a
subservient posture. This is Lucielia Louise Turner's dilemma. It is Eugene's inability to
find suitable employment that is the catalyst for many of the couple's arguments, and when
he loses yet another job, he directs his anger toward Ciel. She, in turn, blames herself for
their problems. Naylor offers insight into Ciel's psychology while the young woman carries
out her daily housekeeping tasks. Instead of voicing her anger over Eugene's protestations
when he learns that she is pregnant with their second child, she folds their towels with
greater intensity. Ciel is in a state of denial even after Eugene tells her that he is leaving
again. She remains quiet during his tirade as he blames her for their economic situation,
but while Ciel rinses rice in preparation for dinner, her thoughts reveal her silent
frustration: "The second change of the water was slightly clearer, but the starch-speckled
bubbles were still there, and this time there was no way to pretend deafness to their
message. She had stood at that sink countless times before, washing rice, and she knew the
water was never going to be totally clear. She couldn't stand there forever--her fingers were
getting cold, and the rest of the dinner had to be fixed, and Serena would be waking up
soon and wanting attention. Feverishly she poured the water off and tried again" (p. 94).
Just as Ciel is unsuccessful at ridding the water of starch, she is unable to suppress the truth
concerning her marriage to Eugene. Ciel then places the pot of rice on the stove and
continues cooking.
Ciel's persistent attention to the daily routine associated with housekeeping and
mothering, even in a socioeconomic context that suggests the women's efforts at
maintaining an orderly home are futile, takes on ritual dimensions in narrative action.
Collectively, through a repetition of the chores such as cooking and cleaning, Ciel engages
in the completion of tasks, which suggests the possibility of transcending the difficult
reality she faces. It is Ciel who, with Mattie's careful maternal guidance, reverses the
psychologically destructive effects of temporality and enters a realm peopled by bereaved
mothers across time and space. 42 In the most moving scene in the text, Mattie bathes Ciel,
and the ritual act allows the two women to share in a global community of women, one
centered around the mother-child relationship.
In The Color Purple Celie plays the role of the conformist. It is not a choice she
has made for herself, it is an enforced role.
42

Kimberly A. Costino - "Weapons Against Women" Compulsory Heterosexuality and Capitalism in Linden
Hills in Margot Anne Kelley (editor) - Gloria Naylor's Early Novels, Gainesville ,Publication Year: 1999

32

Celies name by various etymologies means "holy," "healing," and "heavenly" 43.
She suffers more than one hits of fate, she is raped by the one whom she considered to be
her father and later, she is sold into marriage to Mr.____ only to be treated like a beast of
burden and at times even beaten. Though Celie does not know how to fight, she knows
how to work. When Alberts two sisters, Carrie and Kate, come home they appreciate
Celies ability to work. In their eyes she is a good housekeeper, good with children and
good cook. However, after finding Celie in such a trouble and mess Kate gives a new
vision to Celie. It is at the request of Kate, Celie gets her own dress for the first time from
Albert. When Harpo, the oldest boy, does not help Celie in her work believing that it is the
duty of women to work and not of men, Kate orders him to help her and like Nettie she
advises Celie, You got to fight them for yourself. However, Celie questions the validity
of fighting and reveals her strategy of life: I dont fight I stay where Im told. But Im
alive. To her survival is of supreme importance and she does survive through all odds.
Celie suffers not only at the hands of her step children but also at the hands of
Albert. To be wife means to be submissive, to be subordinate, to be obedient and to be a
punch bag for the man. Albert beats Celie as and when he likes. Celie describes the
treatment meted out to her as follows:
He beat me like he beat the children. Cept he dont never hardly beat them. He
says, Celie, git the belt. The children be outside the room peeking through the cracks. It all
I can do not to cry. I made myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. Thats how
come I know trees fear man.44 The fact that Celie, in moments of extreme physical pain
transforms herself into a tree was interpreted as a telling example of a black womans
proximity to a passive and suffering agony of nature. 45However, Celie gains a new
perspective on life when she meets Shug Avery, Alberts mistress and Sofia, Harpos wife.
Celie thus adopts a mode of sensual pleasure and power beyond the body that
effectively displaces the injustices that have marked her tenure in the quotidian. She
heralds her glorious transformation into self-presence by shedding her scarred historical
body as she leaves Mr. ___: "I'm pore, I'm black, I may be ugly and can't cook, a voice say
to everything listening. But I'm here". This pure and disembodied voice speaks of its
liberation from the disfigured body and enacts, through disembodiment, the utopian scene
of self-expression from Celie's point of view. In this scene, the negated, poor, black, female
bodycreated for Mr. 's pleasure, profit, and scornis replaced by a voice that voids the
43

Molly Hite - Romance, Marginality, Matrilineage: The Color Purple in Harold Bloom, op.cit.
Alice Walker The Color Purple, p. 23
45
Ranveer Kashinath, op.cit., p. 183
44

33

vulnerability of the bodied historical subject. To Mr. 's prophecy that Celie will fail in the
world because she has neither talent, beauty, nor courage "to open your mouth to people,"
Celie performs her triumphant Being"I'm here"and asserts the supremacy of speech
over the physical, material despotism characteristic of patriarchy. Her new mode of
counteropposition also deploys the supernatural power of language, turning Mr. 's
negativity back on himself: "Until you do right by me, I say, everything you even dream
about will fail." The authority of this curse comes from nature: "I give it to him straight,
just like it come to me. And it seem to come to me from the trees." Speech here becomes
the primary arena of action: the natural world lends not its material resources but a spiritual
vitality that can always assert itself while the body is threatened and battered. And writing,
as the fact of the letters suggests, is the place where the voice is held in trust for the absent
subject who might be seeking a way of countering the patriarchal and racist practices of the
social world.46
In Toni Morrisons Sula, Nel is the conformist. She decides to marry, and becomes
a different person. To her, love means security. In fact, she marries Jude Green not out of
love but because they have common need for security. Frustrated with the racism he finds
as he looks for a job, Jude turns to Nel out of rage. Judes pain attracts Nel because it is a
sign that he needs her, a symbol of security.
Because Nel accepts the normal societal restrictions in which she measures her selfworth, she values the relationship more than Jude of her feelings for him. In her confusion,
Nel tries to develop with Jude a sense of connectedness she found with Sula, but in doing
so, she loses her sense of self in a way she never did with Sula.
Nel behaves properly; she fits nicely "into the scheme of things," into her society's
hierarchical structure which has a clear moral top and a definite moral bottom 47. Indeed,
Nel admirably performs all of the obligatory roles: dutiful friend, respectful daughter, loyal
wife, and nurturing mother. Later, she acts the wronged wife and the forgiving Christian
woman.
Karla F. C. Holloway believes that the novel finally belongs to Nel, the survivor,
who is still picking up the pieces of her life, still working, and still doing the "right thing."
She is, as Holloway points out, "everywoman": "She carries the additional burden of
shadow that white culture projects onto black people. But she is still typical of most
46

Lauren Berlant Race, Gender, and Nation in The Color Purple extract from Harold Bloom - Alice
Walker's The Color Purple, Chelsea House, Philadelphia, 2000
47
Harold Bloom - Toni Morrison's Sula, Chelsea House, Philadelphia, 1999

34

women in Western culture." Holloway continues that no matter how sympathetic one may
be about Jude's plight, "the bottom line is that he abandons his family. It is Nel who ends
up as sole parent; she cleans houses to support the three children who for many years
became her life."48 Nel does as she is told; any sparkle she has is rubbed down to a dull
glow so she can become a sensible, comforting wife, so she can do those things, however
tedious, necessary for survival. But her world is dependent on another, the world of her
husband or her children. Since these worlds collapse, she is left without a context.

Bibliographical references:
1. Berlant, Lauren - Race, Gender, and Nation in The Color Purple in Harold Bloom - Alice
Walker's The Color Purple, Chelsea House, Philadelphia, 2000
2. Harold Bloom - Toni Morrison's Sula, Chelsea House, Philadelphia, 1999
3. Christian, Barbara Naylors Geography: Community, Class and Patriarchy in The Women of
Brewster Place and Linden Hills
4. Christian, Barbara - The Contemporary Fables of Toni Morrison in Harold Bloom - Toni
Morrison's Sula
5. Costino, Kimberly A. - "Weapons Against Women" Compulsory Heterosexuality and Capitalism
in Linden Hills in Margot Anne Kelley (editor) - Gloria Naylor's Early Novels, Gainesville
,Publication Year: 1999
6. Demetrakopoulos, Stephanie A. - Sula and the Primacy of Woman-to-Woman Bonds in Harold
Bloom - Toni Morrison's Sula
7. Fraser, Celeste Stealing B(l)ack Voices: The Myth of the Black Matriarchy and The Women of
Brewster Place
48

In Marie Nigro - In Search of Self: Frustration and Denial in Toni Morrison's Sula in Harold Bloom - Toni
Morrison's Sula, Chelsea House, Philadelphia, 1999

35

8. Hogue, W. Lawrence - Discourse and the Other: The Production of the Afro-American Text,
Chapter 7. Sula: History, Mythical Thought, and the Production of the Afro-American Historical
Past, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 1986
9. Gladney, Gerald - Toni Morrison in An Interview with Toni Morrison, The EASY Guide to
Black Arts, September, 1976 in Midnight Birds, edited by Mary Helen Washington, p. 153
10. Hite, Molly - Romance, Marginality, Matrilineage: The Color Purple in Harold Bloom,
op.cit.
11. hooks, bell Revolutionary Black Women Making Ourselves Subject , p.825 in Cornerstones
An Anthology Of African American Literature, edited by Melvin Donalson, St. Martins Press,
New York, 1996, p.820 835
12. hooks, bell - Writing the Subject: Reading The Color Purple, p. 65 in Harold Bloom - Alice
Walker's The Color Purple, Chelsea House, Philadelphia, 2000
13. Levin, Amy K. - Metaphor and Maternity in Mama Day in Margot Anne Kelley (editor) Gloria Naylor's Early Novels, Gainesville ,Publication Year: 1999
14. Page, Philip Shocked into Separateness: Unresolved Oppositions in Sula in in Harold Bloom
- Toni Morrison's Sula
15. Ranveer, Kashinath Black Feminist Consciousness A Study of Black Women Writers, p. 112,
Printwell, Japur, India, 1995
16. Walker, Alice The Color Purple, Washington Square Press, 1983, p.253

Chapter III
Networks of Woman Support (Dreams of wholeness)
Because of their origins and history, Afro-American women could lay claim to a
viable tradition in which they had been strong central persons in their families and
communities, not solely because of their relationship to men, but because they themselves
had bonded together to ensure survival of their children, their communities, the race. Partly
because of the matricentric orientation of African people from which they were descended,
partly because of the nature of American slavery, Afro-American women had had to bond
with each other in order to survive. Afro-Americans as a race could not have survived
without the female values of communality, sharing and nurturing.
At the same time, the centrality of Afro-American women in their communities was
in such great contrast to the American norm of womans subordination in the nuclear
family that they were denigrated both in black and white society. The Afro-American
mother was punished and maligned for being too strong, too central in her family, for being

36

a matriarch, a vortex of attitudes which culminated in white American government

policy such as Moynihan Report and in black cultural nationalist rhetoric of the 1960s.
Afro-American women writers of the 1970s responded to black and white societys
denigration of the black mother and of female values by showing how such a position was
sexist, was based on a false definition of woman as ineffectual, secondary, weak. Writes
presented in their novel women who are strong, who believe in their own primacy, and
who are effective in some ways. But they also presented another view that AfroAmerican women who internalise the dominant societys definition of women are courting
self-destruction. They are destroyed by their inability to resist societys false definitions of
man and woman. (Pecola - The Bluest Eyes) It is important to note as well that these
novels demonstrate not only how these specific women fall prey to sexist ideology but also
that they do partly because black communities themselves are sexist. Thus Morrison in
Sula and Walker in Meridian critique motherhood as the black communitys primary
definition of woman. 49

bell hooks50 states that contemporary fiction by black women focussing on the
construction of self and identity breaks new ground in that it clearly names the ways
structures of domination, racism, sexism, and class exploitation, oppress and make it
practically impossible for black women to survive if they do not engage in meaningful
resistance on some level. The strong bond between women helps them beat the system or
at least survive with dignity in it.
III. 1. The Colored Daughters of Brewster
Naylors rendition of her womens lives in the community of Brewster Place
indicates that she is intensely knowledgeable of the literature of her sisters and that the
thought of Afro-American women during the seventies is one means by which she both
celebrates and critiques women-centered communities.

49

Barbara Christian Naylors Geography: Community, Class and Patriarchy in The Women of Brewster
Place and Linden Hills, p. 119, from Gloria Maylor Critical Perspectives Past and Present, Edited by
Henry Louis Coates, Jr. and K.A.Appiah
50
bell hooks Revolutionary Black Women Making Ourselves Subject , p.825 in Cornerstones An
Anthology Of African American Literature, edited by Melvin Donalson, St. Martins Press, New York,
1996, p.820 835

37

The Brewster Place women mother one another. Perhaps these women are
sometimes labelled matriarchs because together they are able to endure so much. There
is no question that their stories in this novel are interconnected because of the caring bond
they assume for one another, a bond that does not, however, preclude disagreements,
falling-outs, even ineffectiveness.
By creating a tapestry of nurturing women in her first novel, Naylor emphasizes
how female values derived from mothering nurturing, communality, concern with human
feelings are central to Brewsters Place survival. The novel experiments with kinship
among feminine lines. Miss Eva becomes the mother that Mattie, Basil and her own
granddaughter all need so desperately as she bonds together a family from the damaged
urban setting. A Mattie realizes, Miss Eva replaces the mother she had lost when she left
her home. Thirty years later, as Mattie prepares to take Miss Evas place, she remembers
the lessons the old woman taught her, and she too in her turn takes over the task of
sheltering the lost and the weak. As an alternative to unquestioned acceptance of an ideal
patriarchal family, Naylor offers a federation among the women of the street. Naylor
widens the circle of permissible family in her representation of what Dorothy Height calls
the black tradition of the extended family [which] grew out of the primary need to
survive, an urgency that for the most part made gender largely irrelevant51.
The obvious characteristic that her women share, with the exception of Kiswana
and the two, is that they must live in streets like Brewster Place, that is that they are
displaced persons.
The bond between Etta Mae and Mattie is of paramount importance in the novel.
Etta Maes complementarity to Mattie is most evident when Mattie offers to bake a cake
for Ciel's wedding and Etta Mae volunteers to dance at the event. Finally, while the pairing
of Mattie and Etta Mae exemplifies Naylor use of dual leaders. Etta Mae Johnsons
relationship with Mattie is the best example of sisterly friendship without the maternal
connection. A woman weary but still dripping with the juices of a full-fleshed life in
Preacher Woods eyes, Etta returns to Mattie and Brewster Place as a homecoming again:
She breathed deeply on the freedom she found in Matties presence. Here she had no
chance but to be herself. The carefully erected decoys she was constantly shuffling and
changing to fit the situation were of no use here. Etta and Mattie went back, a singular term
that claimed the co-knowledge of all the important events in their lives and almost all of
the unimportant ones. And by rights of this possession, it tolerated no secrets.
51

Dorothy Height Self-Help: A Black Tradition, The Nation 24/31 (July, 1989) in Celeste Fraser

38

After Preacher Woods one-night stand shatters her brief illusion that she might
achieve her dream of quick respectability as a preachers wife in the front pew, she returns
again to Matties as to a centre: She laughed softly to herself as she climbed the steps
toward the light and the love and the comfort that awaited her. With no worthy object for
her flamboyant spirit, Etta yet has the deep friendship, support, and even moral judgement
of Mattie in warding off loneliness and despair.
Both these middle-aged women, Mattie and Etta Mae, live through others; but this
is also true of the younger Lucielia and Cora Lee. Their lives complement Matties and
Etta Maes. Lucielia had come to look on her own daughter as the only thing that I have
ever loved without pain. Just before Serena electrocutes herself, Ciel has detached herself
emotionally from her unreliable man Eugene. What Mattie and Ciel come to share in
Matties act of primal mothering is their isolation, their burden of responsibility as
mothers, and the loss of their children. This rocking back into history recalls Helene
Cixous's words in "The Laugh of the Medusa": "As subject for history, woman always
occurs simultaneously in several places. Woman un-thinks the unifying, regulating history
that homogenizes and channels forces, herding contradictions into a single battlefield. In
woman, personal history blends together with the history of all women, as well as national
and world history". In order to "un-think" male-recorded history, women must (at least
initially) work with the preverbal- the sounds of moans and screams and laughter. Once the
sounds have created the "new" - the new narrative, the new women's community- then this
history can merge with or perhaps replace the verbal text. Thus, a new history can be told.
With the scream, Ciel has given birth to herself, healing herself and Mattie, as well as,
perhaps, the reader. Another "new" is created. Another salvation is given to the woman's
body, which is the text52.
Kiswana brings sisterly nurture to Cora Lee, another woman unbalanced in her
mothering. Strangely obsessed with doll babies as a child, Cora Lee bears numerous
children by the many shadows men in her life who slip in and out her bedroom at night.
Cora Lee wants nothing more than to take care of babies. No longer concerned with her
children when they naturally grow beyond babyhood, Cora Lee lives in a fantasy world,
interrupted only by the growing demands of the human beings she has birthed. Kiswanas
friendship, through an invitation to Shakespeare in the park, rekindles her old dreams of
52

Jenny Brantley - Women's Screams and Women's Laughter Connections and Creations in Gloria
Naylor's Novels in Margot Anne Kelley (editor) - Gloria Naylor's Early Novels, University Press of Florida
, Gainesville, Publication Year: 1999)

39

education. The act of friendship and offer to help, once Kiswana gets beyond her own
initial condescension, contributes to restoring Cora Lees self-esteem both as a person and
as a mother. Her new mothering energy will be directed toward her childrens education,
and she has found a sisterhood in Kiswana that lifts her out of her isolation.
The relationship between the two lesbians, Lorraine and Theresa, alternates
between fostering and fighting as the two women still struggle to find their identities.
Lorraine hates the cynical gay bars that are Theresas element and wants to feel at one with
her neighbours in Brewster Place. Theresa resents Lorraines vulnerability yet is
uncomfortable when Lorraine acquires firm convictions. Each seeks a different
community. When Lorraine discovers an accepting listener in the alcoholic janitor Ben,
Theresa insists on their own mutual dependence on outcasts, and Lorraine rebels. After
their final quarrel, when Theresa lets Lorraine go to the party by herself, there is no more
opportunity for them to resolve their conflicts and reaffirm their love. Lorraine is
physically and psychologically destroyed by C.C. Baker and his gang, and in her
derangement she murders her only friend, Ben. Because of its unresolved tensions and
concern over power, this relationship between two women, despite its seeming intimacy,
remains less successful that that between Mattie and Etta, who generously accept and
nurture each other.
Matties dream of female unity seems an imaginative extension of her efforts
throughout the text. Matties vision and voice control the final section of the novel and
provide the work with a closing hopeful note: the possible coming to fruition of Matties
dream of a supportive female community.53 Images

of

Lorraine

have

entered

the

unconscious thoughts of all of Brewsters females, causing the dreams of both mothers and
daughters to be haunted by the image of the tall yellow woman in the bloody green and
black dress. Ciel returns in the final chapter of the novel and recounts a strange dream:
one of those crazy things that get all mixed up in your head. Something about the
wall and Ben. And there was a woman who was supposed to be me, I guess. She
didnt look exactly like me, but inside I felt it was me. () And something bad had
happened to me by the wall I mean to her something bad had happened to her.
And Ben was in it somehow.
By presenting a community in which strong women bonds do not break the cycle of
powerlessness in which so many poor black women are imprisoned, Naylor points to a
53

Michael Awkward Authorial Dreams of Wholeness (Dis)Unity, (Literary) Parentage, and The Women of
Brewster Place;p. 62 in Gloria Naylor. Critical Perspectives Past and Present, edited by Henry Louis Gates
and K. A. Appiah, Amistad Press, New York, 1993

40

theoretical dilemma which feminist thinkers have been wrestling. For while the values of
nurturing and communality are central to a just society, they often preclude the type of
behavior necessary to achieve power in this world, behavior such as competitiveness,
extreme individualism, the desire to conquer.
III. 2. Sisters Choice
Dear God,
Me and Sophie work on a quilt. Got it frame up on the porch. Shug Avery donate her old
yellow dress for scrap, and I work in a piece every chance I get. Its a nice pattern call
Sisters Choice.54
By eschewing the identity of Mother, black women in The Color Purple, like Shug
and Sofia, rebelliously place themselves outside the context of patriarchal family norms,
revisioning mothering so that it becomes a task any willing female can perform,
irrespective of whether or not she has given birth. Displacing motherhood as central
signifier for female being, and emphasizing sisterhood, Walker posits a relational basis for
self-definition that valorizes and affirms woman bonding. It is the recognition of self in the
other, of unity, and not self in relationship to the production of children that enables
women to connect with one another.55 Molly Hite in her article Romance, Marginality,
Matrilineage: The Color Purple states that the concept of motherhood is redifined:
mothering is presented as a wholly relational activity. In The Color Purple children
create mothers by circulating among women who in other contexts are daughters, sisters,
friends, wives, and lovers. Celie's children pass first to Corrine, then to Nettie. Squeak
takes on Sofia's children when Sofia goes to jail, and Sofia later mothers Squeak's daughter
Suzie Q and with exasperated acknowledgment that even unwilling nurture can
engender filial affectionthe white girl Eleanor Jane.
Throughout The Color Purple, Walker also portrays female friendships as a means
for women to summon the courage to tell stories. In turn, these stories allow women to
resist oppression and dominance. Relationships among women form a refuge, providing
reciprocal love in a world filled with male violence.
54

Alice Walker The Color Purple, Washington Square Press, New York, 1982, p.62
bell hooks - Writing the Subject: Reading The Color Purple, p. 65 in Harold Bloom - Alice Walker's The
Color Purple, Chelsea House, Philadelphia, 2000
55

41

Female ties take many forms: some are motherly or sisterly, some are in the form of
mentor and pupil, some are sexual, and some are simply friendships. Sofia claims that her
ability to fight comes from her strong relationships with her sisters. Nettie's relationship
with Celie anchors her through years of living in the unfamiliar culture of Africa. Samuel
notes that the strong relationships among Olinka women are the only thing that makes
polygamy bearable for them. Most important, Celie's ties to Shug bring about Celie's
gradual redemption and her attainment of a sense of self.
The Color Purple is about growth, endurance, loyalty, solidarity and joy all
nurtured by the strength of love. People are changed by love and this idea is illustrated in
the relationship between Celia and Shug Avery, a relationship that changes them both, that
illuminates and enlightens. Shugs love for Celie is deep-rooted and results in an on-going
physical relationship as well as a powerful emotional affiliation. As a result Shug inspires
Celie to celebrate her existence. She also loves Shug in a way that radiates all elements of
Gods world that he has given to Celie. Once Shug implants the idea in Celie that she is
somebody, she undergoes a transformation which encompasses her sexual awakening.
Because the female body is the most exploited target of male aggression, women have
learned to fear or even to hate their bodies. Coming to terms with the body can be a painful
experience. Celie has no desire to know her body because it is the source of her
exploitation. However, Shugs presence generates an exotic stirring and creates a spiritual
bond between them. In finding and knowing with pride her own body, Celie begins to
desire for selfhood and becomes aware of her body and falls in love with it. Shug becomes
not only a model for Celie but also a mother that she never had. She protects Celie from
Albert, gives knowledge about her body, the essential spirituality of the world, retrieves
back her lost sister, Nettie, and Netties letters from the custody of Mr., and also make her
financially independent. Shug works as a transforming force 56 in Celies life. She names
one of her songs after Celie and calls it Mrs. Celies song; teaches her to love herself and
her body and also makes her financially independent.
Sister, you been on my mind Oh Sister, we're two of a kind Oh Sister, I'm keeping
my eye on you. I bet you think I don't know nothing but singing the blues, Oh sister, have I
got news for you I'm something, I hope you think you're something too. These are the lines
of the song "Miss Celie's Blues" in the film version directed by Steven Spilberg. Kaplan
considers that this song fits a scenario in which sisterhood, as a metaphor for both safety

56

Ranveer,op.cit., p.186

42

and similarity, comes increasingly to dominate and shape all other forms of social relation,
at the expense of both difference and eros.
Celie, a person who in the beginning is helpless, poor, black, ugly and sexually
abused girl moves from her helplessness towards the state of complete independence and
in the end expresses black womanist consciousness. She becomes aware of the womanist
tradition of self-reliance and self-esteem.
As we have mentioned before, the relationship between Celie and Shug is more
than sexual. They are mothers, sisters, friends and lovers. When Shug is sick, Celie acts as
her mother, taking care of her, washing her, clothing her and feeding her. Through people
believe she will die soon, Shug is recovered under Celies motherly treatment. The role as
mother is reversible when Shug helps Celie to be independent of Celies husband, Albert.
Shug provides her residence in Memphis, and gives her money to tailor pants, but they are
equal parties. Just as Shug says to Celie, You not my maid. I didnt bring you to Memphis
to be that. I brought you here to love you and help you get on your feet. They love and
help each other as sisters and lovers.
While Shug stops Albert from abusing Celie and helps to get Netties letters from
him for her, Celie gives Shug a kind of tolerance and love which Shug has never earned
from men nor from any women. Men love Shug for her beauty, fame and money, whereas
women are jealous of her incomparable charm. Different from them, Celie will love Shug
even if she becomes old and ugly. Their relationship seems to be sanctified.
Similarly, the relationship between other black women characters is amazingly
good. They may fight against each other in the very beginning, but eventually they become
friends and sisters. For example, Celie and Sofia quarrel with each other when Celie
teaches Harpo to beat Sofia in order to make her obedient to him. They are soon reconciled
after Celie apologizes to her. Also, Sofia takes good care of Suzie, even though Suzie is an
offspring of her husband and another woman, Mary Agnes. Mary sleeps with Sofias man,
and Sofia even knocks two of Marys side teeth out, but they still become friends. Those
black women help each other and stand up to men. Shug not only helps Celie found the
clothing business, but also helps Mary Avery sing. Shug gives them practical and political
support by which they become economically independent and socially important.
Sisterhood as a genuine relationship is rendered as the bond between Celie and
Nettie. Celie herself is left in the position of surrogate mother to her sister, Nettie, and

43

Nettie becomes her primary female relation 57. She hopes to protect Nettie from her own
fate. "I see him looking at my little sister. She scared. But I say I'll take care of you. With
God help." Later on in the novel Nettie fills Celies place as a mother for Adam and Olivia,
the children who were taken away by Alfonso and handed over to Samuel and Corrine who
adopted them. When Albert hands Celie a letter from the Department of Defense which
tells her that the ship on which Nettie and Samuel sailed has been sunk near Gibraltar,
Celie does not completely believe that Nettie is dead because she still feels a spiritual
connection to her sister. Eventually she receives letters from Nettie so she knows that her
sister is still alive. Celia acts like a mother for Nettie as she wants to protect her from being
sexually abused by the one they considered their father. She offers herself in offer to make
him let Nettie alone.
According to Barbara Christian, Walker "sees the possibility of empowerment for
black women if they create a community of sisters that can alter the present-day unnatural
definitions of woman and man." At the end of The Color Purple, Celie and Mister
actually become rather close friends. Because of her love for Shug, Celie is able to move
toward an understanding of the man she only knew as "Mister" for many years.
Another relationship, but this time, an enforced one, is between Sofia and the white
masters daughter Miss Eleanor Jane. Since Sofia practically raises her, it is not surprising
that the young girl dotes on Sofia and is always sticking up for her. When Sofia finally
leaves the mayors house after fifteen years of service, Miss Eleanor Jane continues to visit
Sofia and seek her help and approval with the mess back at the house. However Sofias
feelings for Miss Eleanor Jane are more ambivalent. When she first joins the mayors
household, Sofia is completely indifferent to her charge, wondering why she was ever
born. After rejoining her own family, Sofia resents Miss Eleanor Janes continuing
intrusions into her family life and suggests that the only reason for which she helps the
white girl is because she is on parole Got to act nice. But later Sofia admits that she
does feel something for Miss Eleanor Jane because of all the people in your daddys
house, you showed me some human kindness.
Sofia is forced into the role of the black mammy. Separated from her own family and
forced to join the mayors household against her will, living in a room under the house,
Sofia carries out a role in the mayors household which clearly recalls that of the
stereotypical mammy on the Southern plantation. As a person who prefers to build a roof
57

Carolyn Williams - "Trying To Do Without God": The Revision of Epistolary Address in The Color Purple
in Alice Walker's the Color Purple in Horold Bloom, op.cit.

44

on the house while her husband tends the children, Sofia is particularly unsuited for the role
of the mammy. That is precisely Walkers point: Sofia is entirely unsuited for the role of
mammy, but whites including and perhaps especially Miss Eleanor Jane continually
expect her to behave according to their cultural representations of the black mother.
The network of women support in Alice walkers novel includes Shug Avery, the
strong-minded and strong-armed Sofia, Sofias sisters, Mr_s sisters and Mary Agnes
known as Squeak. Though capable of murderous jealousy, the women on the whole support
each other warmly and band together against the common enemy: man.
The patriarchal system itself enslaves and degrades women, for it institutionalizes
and valorizes the subject-object dichotomy. Woman, according to Simone de Beauvoir, "is
defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the
incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute
she is the Other." In The Color Purple, Celie, with Shug's help, succeeds in freeing
herself, (de)objectifying herself, from this system which is characterized by interlocking
dualisms. 58The women in this novel form a community that resists patriarchal control.

III. 3. We Was Girls Together

When Morrison published Sula in 1974, no novel considered central to the American
tradition of fiction had explored a life-long attachment between women friends. The
originality of the novel's subject necessitated originality in its development. Doubling the
traditional bildungsroman, Morrison shows both Nel and Sula growing into womanhood.
What womanhood means - what social roles are open to women - affects the girls' growth
as individuals and their friendship. With these primary and secondary concerns, Sula is
unquestionably women-centered. While the structural elements of Death, Time, and
Nature unify the novel, the story of the Wright women and the Peace women specify the
community's perception of itself, for its view of women is inexorably connected to its
concept of survival.59.
58

Yvonne Johnson - Alice Walker's The Color Purple in Horold Bloom, op.cit.

59

Barbara Christian - The Contemporary Fables of Toni Morrison in Harold Bloom - Toni Morrison's Sula,
Chelsea House, Philadelphia, 1999

45

Because of its treatment of friendship, Sula will inevitably be compared to Alice

Walkers The Color Purple (1982). Walkers novel, however, moves from isolation to
redemption, whereas Morrisons moves in the other direction; Sulas redemption is
impossible, that of Nel and the remainder of the community only possible.
Morrison herself has declared that her motivation for examining female friendship was
because too little had been written about women as friends. If you really do have a
friend, Morrison says, a real other, another person that complements your life, you
should stay with him or her. Youll never be a complete person until you know and
rememberwhat life is without that person.
At the beginning of this section, Sula and Nel, both twelve years old, are on their
way to Edna Finch's Mellow House, an ice cream parlor where children are welcome. The
men of The Bottom sit outside and watch every female in sight walk past them. As Sula and
Nel pass, one of the men named Ajax calls, "Pig meat." The girls are both embarrassed and
pleased. Although the two girls have only dimly begun to understand the mysteries of
sexuality, they are becoming interested in the opposite sex. It is obvious by their behavior
that Sula and Nel have become soul mates. Although basically different, the two girls
complement each other and understand one another instantly and intimately. Each believes
she had dreamed of the other before they ever met.
Sula and Nel provide one another with support crucial to establishing and maintaining
their identities in somewhat hostile contexts. Nel escapes her mother's stifling conformity
to middle-class norms in the less conventional Peace household. With Nel, Sula
experiences the sense of order and control not present in the Peace home, as well as the
love that her mother cannot offer her. Missy Dehn Kubitchek observes that in a wider
context, the girls' friendship originates in their separate discoveries of being "neither white
nor male" and realizing that "all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them". Nel and
Sula thus join forces to affirm for each other the personal worth that the surrounding
racism and sexism deny.60 When Nel and Sula silently agree to keep their involvement in a
playmate's drowning a secret, their reliance on each other is confirmed. For each, the other
is the only person who knows her completely.
The novel positions its doubles, Nel and Sula, in adolescence, a state of becoming when
they are unshaped, formless things, using each other to grow on. As doubles, Sula and
Nel complement and flow into each other, their closeness evoked in the text through
metaphors: two throats and one eye. But while Sula and Nel are represented as two parts
60

Missy Dehn Kubitchek Toni Morrison, A Critical Companion, Westport, CT, 1998

46

of a self, those parts are distinct; they are complementary, not identical. As Morrison has
pointed out in an interview, Sula is a "rule-breaker, a kind of law-breaker, a lawless
woman"; but "Nel knows and believes in all the laws of that community. She is the
community. She believes in its values". Although Sula and Nel might share a common
vision (suggested by one eye), their needs and desires are distinct (they have two
throats). Later on, Nel behaves properly; she fits nicely "into the scheme of things," into
her society's hierarchical structure which has a clear moral top and a definite moral bottom.
Indeed, Nel admirably performs all of the obligatory roles: dutiful friend, respectful
daughter, loyal wife, and nurturing mother. Later, she acts the wronged wife and the
forgiving Christian woman. In contrast, Sula disregards social conventions, following only
her own heart and conscience. Sula doesn't care that the definition of a black woman is one
who makes other people. Sula doesn't care that the men she sleeps with are married. The
two girls are different but connected rather than separate and opposed. Rita A. Bergenholtz
states that Morrison clearly wants us to recognize that although Nel and Sula appear to be
quite differentone the epitome of goodness and the other the embodiment of evilthey
are also quite similar61. That is, if Sula is evil for watching Hannah dance in pain as flames
melt her lovely skin, then Nel is also evil for experiencing a sense of pleasure and
tranquility when Chicken Little disappears beneath the water. In contrast, Morrison
suggests that the distinction between good and evil is rarely so clear-cut as Helen and Nel
suppose; consequently there is some good and some evil in both Sula and in Nel.
Nel and Sula are, like two sides of the same coin, two faces turned away from each
other, yet they are inextricably united by their dependence and natural attraction to qualities
that the reader recognizes as deficiencies in the other 62.Sulas understanding of her
relationship to Nel results from self-understanding and self-intimacy, a process that Nels
marriage to Jude interrupts.
Nel and Sula also complement each other physically and emotionally. Nel is lightcolored, almost like the color of sand; in contrast, Sula is a rich, earthy brown. Nel is the
picture of innocence and purity; Sula has a birthmark, shaped like a rose, on her eyelid,
giving her a somewhat mysterious appearance. In terms of personality, Nel is normally
calm and constant, while Sula is likely to flare up with emotion. When some white boys
harass Nel after school, Sula decides to scare them away. She takes out a knife and cuts the
61

Rita A. Bergenholtz - Toni Morrison's Sula: A Satire on Binary Thinking in Harold Bloom - Toni
Morrison's Sula, Chelsea House, Philadelphia, 1999
62
Cedric Gael Bryant The Orderliness of Disorder: Madness and Evil in Toni Morrisons Sula, Black
American Literature Forum, Winter90, Vol. 24 Issue 4, p731, 15p

47

tip of a finger off to show them how tough she is. The frightened boys flee. Nel appreciates
her friend and feels safe in the company of her tough but slightly crazy protector.
Sula and Nel need each other, their friendship seems to transcend time and space.
She was dead. Sula felt her face smiling. "Well, I'll be damned," she thought, "it didn't
even hurt. Wait'll I tell Nel."(p. 149) This need for the "other" is also confirmed after
death. Sula becomes her sister's keeper; thus, Sula lives on as Nel feels the presence of her
dead friend. It is not until 1965, some twenty-four years after Sula's death in 1941 and after
the spiritual death of the community, that Nel understands: Nel that she never missed her
husband Jude at all but that she did miss Sula: "|We was girls together.... O Lord, Sula, ...
girl, girl, girlgirlgirl'" (174). We learn in Carolyn M. Joness article - 'Sula' and 'Beloved':
images of Cain in the novels of Toni Morrison, that the writer has said that Sula and Nel
make up one whole person: Sula is ship, the "New World Black Woman," and Nel safe
harbor, the "Traditional Black Woman" (Moyers interview). Neither is complete alone.
Sula also explores the mother-daughter experience in the Bottom's equivalent of
the middle class, the Wrights' milieu, and in its poorest sector, the household of the young
Eva Peace. We can also discuss the experience with mothers. This difference may reflect
Hannah's and Sula's divergent experiences with their mothers. Hannah may have been in
doubt about Eva's feelings for her, but Sula learns early the true state of her mother's
affections, having overheard Hannah say that she loves her but cannot like her. This
rejection unfits her for conventional female morality, which assumes that care irrevocably
connects individuals through empathic understanding. The distance between Peace mothers
and daughters in Sula, then, allows the daughters considerable freedom in creating a self,
but it restricts the daughters' capacities for emotional nurturing, empathy, and connection.

48

Bibliographical references:
1. Awkward, Michael Authorial Dreams of Wholeness (Dis)Unity, (Literary) Parentage,
and The Women of Brewster Place;p. 62 in Gloria Naylor. Critical Perspectives Past and
Present, edited by Henry Louis Gates and K. A. Appiah, Amistad Press, New York, 1993
2. Bergenholtz, Rita A. - Toni Morrison's Sula: A Satire on Binary Thinking in Harold
Bloom - Toni Morrison's Sula, Chelsea House, Philadelphia, 1999
3. Brantley, Jenny - Women's Screams and Women's Laughter Connections and
Creations in Gloria Naylor's Novels in Margot Anne Kelley (editor) - Gloria Naylor's
Early Novels, University Press of Florida , Gainesville, Publication Year: 1999)
4. Bryant, Cedric Gael The Orderliness of Disorder: Madness and Evil in Toni
Morrisons Sula, Black American Literature Forum, Winter90, Vol. 24 Issue 4, p731, 15p
5. Christian, Barbara Naylors Geography: Community, Class and Patriarchy in The
Women of Brewster Place and Linden Hills, p. 119, from Gloria Maylor Critical
Perspectives Past and Present, Edited by Henry Louis Coates, Jr. and K.A.Appiah
6. Christian, Barbara - The Contemporary Fables of Toni Morrison in Harold Bloom - Toni
Morrison's Sula, Chelsea House, Philadelphia, 1999
7. Height, Dorothy Self-Help: A Black Tradition, The Nation 24/31 (July, 1989) in
Celeste Fraser
8. hooks, bell Revolutionary Black Women Making Ourselves Subject ,

p.825 in

Cornerstones An Anthology Of African American Literature, edited by Melvin

Donalson, St. Martins Press, New York, 1996, p.820 835
49

9. hooks, bell - Writing the Subject: Reading The Color Purple, p. 65 in Harold Bloom Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Chelsea House, Philadelphia, 2000
10. Johnson, Yvonne - Alice Walker's The Color Purple in Horold Bloom, op.cit.
11. Kubitchek, Missy Dehn Toni Morrison, A Critical Companion, Westport, CT, 1998
12. Ranveer, Kashinath Black Feminist Consciousness A Study of Black Women
Writers, Printwell, Japur, India, 1995, p.281
13. Williams, Carolyn - "Trying To Do Without God": The Revision of Epistolary Address
in The Color Purple in Alice Walker's the Color Purple in Horold Bloom, op.cit.

Chapter IV
Images of men
Racism has always been considered a divisive force separating black men and white
men and sexism has been a force that unites the two groups63. Black women are one of the
most devaluated female groups in American society, and thus they have been the recipients
of a male abuse and cruelty that has known no bounds or limits. Since the black woman
has been stereotyped by both white and black men as the bad woman, she has not been
able to ally herself with men from either group to get protection from the other. hooks
states that neither group feels that she deserves protection.
In the name of liberating black folks from white oppressors, black men could present
oppression of black women as a strength a sign of newfound glory. Black female/ male
relationships are tyrannized by the imperialism of patriarchy which makes oppression of
women a cultural necessity64.
As a result of this struggle to survive both white and black oppressors, black female
authors found a way to revenge. In the novels discussed we have images of black men that
prove to be weak, or at least weaker than their female counterparts, black men that mistreat
their women just to prove their superiority in the household. This is the case of Mr.___ or
Alfonso, Celies stepfather. Black men were able to use the matriarchy myth, imposed by
the whites, as a psychological weapon to justify their demands that black women assume a
more passive subservient role in the home. Also they regarded black females as a threat to
their personal power and found a way to assert this power.
63

bell hooks Aint I a Woman black women and feminism, South End Press, Boston, MA, 1992, ch.
Three, The Imperialism of Patriarchy, p.99
64
Ibid. p.117

50

While the Afro-American literary tradition is replete with delineations of sexual

violence directed to women, Naylors description of the brutal gang rape of Lorraine is
without question one of the most unsettling.65
In her study Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema Laura Mulvey observes that
woman stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic
order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic control by
imposing them on the silent image of the woman still tied to her place as bearer of
meaning, not maker of meaning. In Naylors description of Lorraines rape the silent
image of woman is haunted by the power of a thousand suppressed screams; that image
comes to testify not to the womans feeble acquiescence to male signification but to the
brute force of the violence required to tie the woman to her place as bearer of
meaning66. As Barbara Christian observes, Lorraine becomes the accessible scapegoat
for the racism and powerlessness in the community. The young black men are blocked the
access to full patriarchal power, they have the status of dwarfed warrior-kings. The
young men do not rebel against the social forces that built the constricting wall, but rather
resort to terror against black women to assert themselves as patriarchs.67
The gang rapes Lorraine against the dead-end wall that limits their own power,
emphasizing the misdirection of such resistance trapped within the enclosure of the
African-American community. The attack on Lorraine, in Christians explication,
represents an attack on all women, not only because lesbians are women, but because
lesbians stereotyping exposes societys fear of womens independence of men.68
In the case of Lorraine, Naylor states that:
Lorraine wasnt raped because she is a lesbian, they raped her because she was a
womanThe repercussions of Lorraines being cut off from a female network, didnt only
stay with her. They came back and affected the entire black community, male and female. I
feel very strongly that we as black people have to be there as nurturing agents for each
other, male and female, female and female. And when that broke down in The Two, I
wanted to show how that could destroy the community.69
65

Michael Awkward Authorial Dreams of Wholeness (Dis)Unity, (Literary) Parentage, and The Women of
Brewster Place;p. 56 in Gloria Naylor. Critical Perspectives Past and Present, edited by Henry Louis Gates
and K. A. Appiah, Amistad Press, New York, 1993
66
Laura E. Tanner Reading Rape p. 71 in Gloria Naylor. Critical Perspectives Past and Present, edited by
Henry Louis Gates and K. A. Appiah, Amistad Press, New York, 1993
67
Celeste Fraser op.cit., p.100
68
Barbara Christian Black Feminist Criticism:Perspectives on Black Women Writers in Celeste Frasers
study, op. cit., o. 101
69
William Goldstein A Talk with Gloria Naylor, Publishers Weekly (September 9, 1983) in Kashinath
Ranveer, op. cit., p. 124-125

51

We decided to focus on the images of men to show, using the technique of comparison,
the power of black females to survive all the attacks directed towards her. The men are
presented as shadows, weak characters that shun responsibility, that decide to flee rather
than assuming their rightful roles as fathers, protectors and providers.
A recurrent theme in the novels is the theme of (the) journey. "One of the central
images in Black literature is the Black man on the moveon trains, in cars, on the road." 70
While women have been traditionally portrayed as remaining at home, African American
women present the motif of journey for their speaking subjects, whether the journey is
inward or external.
IV.1. The Outward Journey
In the place of a permanent partner we find black men in the image of the
sociologist Elliot Liebow observed in his 1967 anthropological study Tallys Corner: A
Study of Negro Streetcorner Men. The adult male, if not simple characterized as absent,
Liebow writes, is a somehow shadowy figure who drifts in and out of the lives of the
family members.71When the fathers-in-residence of her older children leave, Cora Lee
makes love with only the shadows who came in the night and showed her the thing that
felt good in the dark. The shadows would sometimes bring new babies but at least
didnt give you fractured jaws or bruised eyes.
Opposing the strength of the female-headed household to the picture of that
household as a sign of family breakdown, Naylor risks perpetuating the erasure of the
black male under the label absent father. Naylor carefully separates the acts of individual
black men from the patriarchal system in which those men might participate.
Brewster Place is largely a community of women; men are mostly absent or
itinerant, drifting in and out of their womens lives, and leaving behind them pregnancies
and unpaid bills. The author was concerned that her work would be seen as deliberately
slighting of men: My emotional energy was spent in creating the womans world, telling
her side of it because I knew it hadnt been done before enough in literature. But I worried
about whether or not the problems that were being caused by the men in the womens lives
would be interpreted as some bitter statement I had to make about black men. 72 The fact is
70

Yvonne Johnson - Alice Walker's The Color Purple

71

Elliot Liebow - Tallys Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men from Celeste Fraser Stealing B(l)ack
Voices: The Myth of the Black Matriarchy and The Women of Brewster Place; p. 96 in Gloria Naylor.
Critical Perspectives Past and Present,
72
Jill L. Matus Dream, Deferral, and Closure in The Women of Brewster Place p.137 in Gloria Naylor.
Critical Perspectives Past and Present,

52

that the novel would be oversimplified if the problems presented in it were seen only in
terms of male-female relationships. While the author is aware that there is nothing enviable
about the pressures, incapacities, and frustrations men absorb in a system they can neither
beat not truly join, her interest lies in evoking the lives of women, not men. Their
aggression, part-time presence, avoidance of commitment, and sense of dislocation renders
them alien and other in the community of Brewster Place.
Most of the men in the novel may indeed be so ego-crippled by racism 73 as to be
unable to love their women, but Naylor still holds them accountable: the irresponsible
Butch, the enraged father who is ready to kick his pregnant daughter Mattie to death, the
father who rejects his lesbian daughter Lorraine, the transient shadows in Cora Lees
bedroom, the hypocritical Preacher Woods, the insecure Eugene, who abandons Ciel, and,
above all, C.C. Baker and his gang. They are forever on the run, they represent narrative
ciphers. Mostly marginal and spectral in Brewster Place, the men reflect the nightmarish
world they inhabit by appearing as if they were characters in a dream. Only Abshu and Ben
are capable of fruitful relationships with women, and Ben only out of guilt for his
impotence in letting his wife sell their daughters into concubinage with a white man.
Generally, therefore, the men abandon the women to double burdens of work and domestic
life without support.
Lucielia will do practically anything to maintain her relationship with her husband,
while Corra Lee is obsessed with having babies. Their stories are counterpoint to each
other in that Lucielias relationship with her husband is damaged because she does get
pregnant while Cora Lee does not care about men except to get pregnant. Lucielias
husband sees her womanhood as a trap: With two kids and you on my back, I aint never
gonna have nothing. Children for him are a liability since he is a poor man. When Ciel
aborts her second child only to lose her first while she is pleading with her husband to stay
with her, she almost loses all sense of herself. On the other hand, encouraged by adults in
her childhood to desire baby dolls, Cora Lee wants nothing more than to take care of
babies.
Men are present to hurt, to destroy and then disappear. Male psychological
abusiveness and murderous potentional that are suggested in Naylors novel: Sam
Michaels vicious beating of his daughter, Mattie; Eugenes psychological abuse of Ciel;
the fractured jaw, loosened teeth and permanent scars suffered by Cora Lee at the hands of
73

Larry R. Andrews - Black Sisterhood in Naylors Novels p.291 in Gloria Naylor. Critical Perspectives
Past and Present

53

men frustrated by the natural time demands of children effectively prefigure the
abhorrent display of misogyny and homophobia involved in the gangs brutalisation of
Lorraine.
The novels only fully sketched male character, as in some respects representative
of the Afro-American male, Ben is attacked by Lorraine in an attempt to stop the pain that
was in her body. Ben could be considered Lorraines surrogate father; but he is no more
able to protect his surrogate daughter in a northern urban environment from sexual abuse
than he was to defend his own offspring from the deep Souths landowners sexual
exploitation. He had fled from the South and took refugee in drinking. In fact, his wife
frames her view of Bens inadequacies in terms remarkably similar to the narrators
discussion of C. C. Baker and his gangs impressions of manhood. His wife measures
Bens masculine and human worth by his abilities as a provider both of babies and of
moderately good economic stability and finds him seriously lacking. He is not, in
Elviras economically pragmatic perception, even quarter a man.
Throughout Morrison's fiction, male dominion is expressed in the self-defining
liberation universally associated with the myth of flight 74. The males in Sula, displaced by
their inferior racial status, never achieve stable selfhood. Tar Baby, Plum, and the deweys
lose their identities. They are like Shadrack, whose sense of self and other is shattered in
the war. He, however, can provisionally control his fear of disintegration through his
obsessively well-ordered cabin and his ritual of National Suicide Day, measures that
parallel the Bottom's collective ability to control its traumas by incorporating whatever
evils confront it. Other menBoyBoy, Jude, and Ajaxare more capable of coping with
life, but they never attain full integration of self and other. With no meaningful work, they
lack confidence and therefore cannot remain in what they feel are half-emasculated roles.
Symbolized by Ajax's fascination with planes, each of these eligible males therefore flies
from the burden of a permanent role as a husband and father.
When the men leave (and in this book they are always leaving), the women are always
strong enough to put together a life for themselves and their children. If the men stay, they
are often cared for by the women, who seem to expect little from them. Although Eva's
situation was desperate when her husband left, she found a way to cope; in order to gain
money to raise her children, she bravely cuts off her leg for an insurance check in the
amount of $10,000. It is a sad commentary on the plight of poor blacks. Hannah fairs better
74

Cedric Gael Bryant The Orderliness of Disorder: Madness and Evil in Toni Morrisons Sula, Black
American Literature Forum, Winter90, Vol. 24 Issue 4, p731, 15p

54

than her mother, for she and her daughter live with Eva; but she still fights to survive after
losing her husband. She covers up her misery by having petty affairs with all the married
men in town; but she is afraid to have any kind of permanent relationship with a male. In
spite of her loose behavior, she is well liked by the females in town because of her
liveliness. Sula is greatly influenced by the fight for survival that she sees in her mother
and grandmother.
The males presented are much weaker than the females. As we have mentioned
before the Deweys are a commentary on lack of identity. They way of being was
interpreted by Karen Carmean75 as a result of Eves authority throughout the novel.
Together with tar Baby and Plum, they receive Eva's care and all, to some extent, become
her victims. From a folkloristic perspective, the deweys extend the concept of twins
(exemplified in the novel by Sula and Nel) into triplets. As such, they have identical
relationships to those around them and serve in identical capacities. It does not matter than
Eva asks for a dewey to perform a chore, for they are all orphans, dependent, easily
intimidated, and as strange as their personalities and Eva's house make them; they are "a
trinity with a plural name . . . inseparable, loving nothing and no one but themselves."
Made comical by their antics and diminutive size, they remain children into their adult
years.76 People refuse to see them as different and call them all the same name; they never
fight back for their own identity. Tar Baby is hopelessly depressed and alcoholic; his only
redeeming characteristic is his beautiful voice, which he shares in church.
Plum, Sula's brother, is the weakest of all the males presented. He lives his life in a
drugged stupor, often not coming out of his room for days. Plum could no longer survive
as a living, functioning man. He has regressed completely; almost entirely passive, he
becomes active only to steal from everyone in the house. Since Plum cannot control his
own life, the strong-willed Eva takes charge. To save her son from a life of misery, she sets
him on fire and allows him to burn to death. Hannah knows and understands what her
mother has done, for she is also a survivor. Sula also is shaped by her relationship to these
weak males, just as she is shaped by the strong women in her life.
It has been argued that Morrison engages in a vilification / feminist castration of
African-American men. Boyboy and Jude can be regarded as examples of the denigration
75

Karen Carmean Sula in Harold Bloom, op. cit.

76

Trudier Harris - Sula: Within and Beyond the African American Folk Tradition in Harold Bloom,
op. cit.

55

of black man. However, the passages on man love delight in black men, celebrate their
sexuality and rejoice in their verbal skills. By contrast to Morrisons female characters that
with few exceptions are strong, fiercely independent and subvert the traditionally assigned
roles of dutiful wife, mother and daughter, men are weak, with a tendency to run away and
escape responsibility. Ajax is an exception. He is the male equivalent of Sula, but
independence is acceptable for a man, therefore he does not become the communitys
scapegoat like Sula.
Almost a male counterpart to Sula, Ajax is fascinated by airplanes and flying, a
symbolic suggestion of his preoccupation with freedom and exploration. An attractive
character, Ajax genuinely enjoys originality and independence in women. Sula and Ajax's
love relationship emerges as the fullest communication between a man and woman in
Morrison's works. As persons, they are well suited to each other. Ajax, beautifully male
and heroic (as his name implies) had been the object of Nel and Sula's adolescent dreams
of anticipated sexuality. His two loves, his conjure woman mother and airplanes, tell us
that he expects women to be mentally as well as physically interesting, and that he wants
more than anything to fly, far above the limits set for him. Like Sula, he resists limitations
and ties. But unlike her, he has found an object other than himself on which to focus his
imagination, although it is interesting that he, too, will never be able to fulfill his dream,
will never be able to fly a plane. They love each other; in that they find another version of
themselves in each other, at least for a while. He is attracted to Sula, suspecting that "this
was perhaps the only other woman other than his mother he knew whose life was her own,
who could deal with life efficiently and who was not interested in nailing him." Their
relationship solidifies because they have genuine conversations, the real pleasure that Sula
is seeking. But having discovered this pleasure, Sula wants to keep it, possess it, always
have it when she wants it. So in the manner of age-old seduction, she adorns herself, cleans
the house, and whispers to him, "Lean on me," words that epitomize the relationship
between Nel and Jude, words that thrust the concept of dependence and therefore of
possessiveness into their relationship. Knowing the signs, Ajax rushes off to watch the
planes that he will never be allowed to fly. (Barbara Christian). When Sula tries to push
their relationship into a conventional marriage, Ajax leaves her. After his departure, Sula
finds his driver's license with his full name, Albert Jacks. Sula has thought of him as
"Ajax," while really he has been "A. Jacks." Interpreting this mistake symbolically, Sula
feels that she has lost Ajax because she didn't really know him.

56

Some black men in the novel have an attempt to assert their manhood through
respectability and work. Jude Greene wants to be employed at the tunnel Not just for the
good money, more for the work itself. He wanted to swing the pick or kneel down with the
string or shovel the gravel. His arms ached for something heavier than trays, for something
dirtier than peelings; his feet wanted the heavy work shoes .... More than anything he
wanted the camaraderie of the road men: the lunch buckets, the hollering, the body
movement that in the end produced something real, something he could point to. This
passage suggests that, for men like Jude, manhood and self-worth are inextricably bound
with meaningful work and male bonding, which, as signifiers, have greater meaning than
does mere money.
When Jude sees that he is unable to acquire meaningful employment, he becomes
Nel's husband and uses his marriage to Nel, which also fails, as a way of being a man, of
ordering his life. He attracts her with his need for comfort and sympathy in the face of
racism. Jude's ideas of marriage consist of absorbing his wife's personality: "The two of
them together would make one Jude". Jude becomes interested in Sula, however, because
she refuses to provide the sympathy that he whines for, and she turns his needs into a joke.
He has no loyalty to Nel, and in the end nothing to hold Sula's interest. When Nel walks
into their bedroom to discover Jude having sex with Sula, Jude makes no effort to salvage
the marriage and leaves town soon after for Detroit and an unstructured and precarious
existence.
Shadrack is a male who has been completely destroyed by the patriarchal system.
Shadrack bonds with Sula in a different way. He comes to the Bottom when, as a
shellshocked veteran of World War I, he is released from an insane asylum without any
resources. He lives by himself in a hut by the river. A mystic figure, he develops the yearly
ritual of a parade for National Suicide Day to express his fear of death and change.
Shadrack likes Sula. Seeing her afraid when Chicken Little disappears into the river, he
makes her a one word promise, "Always". His very name brings biblical resonance to the
Book of Daniel, in which a man named Shadrach refuses to worship King
Nebuchadnezzar's god or his idol of gold. For this refusal Shadrach and two compatriots
are thrown into a fiery furnace, yet the flames have no power to destroy them.
Furthermore, an unnamed fourth presence is mysteriously seen in the flames with the three
men. According to Houston A. Baker, Shadrack proves the reverse of his biblical
namesake: "Morrison's mad ritualist is a consciousness blasted and terrified into nonsense
by the awesome workings of state power. God is decisively dead in Shadrack's universe".
57

Neither BoyBoy nor Plum is able to live a full life. After five years of "a sad and
disgruntled marriage," BoyBoy leaves Medallion. But a brief visit shows that his travels
have not brought him happiness and fulfilment: "Underneath all of that shine she [Eva]
saw defeat in the stalk of his neck and the curious tight way he held his shoulders." Plum
finds himself in a similar predicament. After getting out of the army in 1919, he wanders
from New York to Washington to Chicago "full of promises of homecomings, but there
was obviously something wrong."
Sulas representation of the American and Afro-American historical past shows
black men as victims of oppression. 77Unable to find employment and his niche in society,
BoyBoy preoccupies himself "with other women. . . . He did whatever he could that he
liked, and he liked womanizing best, drinking second, and abusing Eva third." Also
displaced and abandoned by the society are the "old men and young ones" who "draped
themselves in front of the Elmira Theater, Irene's Palace of Cosmetology, the pool hall, the
grill and the other sagging business enterprises that lined the street. On sills, on stoops, on
crates and broken chairs they sat tasting their teeth and waiting for something to distract
them. Even Ajax, a free spirit, is limited by oppression. Unable to pursue his second love,
airplanes, Ajax takes "long trips" to "large cities" and leans against the barbed wire of
airports "to hear the talk of the men who were fortunate enough to be in the trade." Other
times he watches his mother's magic or he spends his time "in the idle pursuits of bachelors
without work in small towns." With Ajax, as with Sula, Morrison shows us how oppression
and limitations stifle growth, abort potentials, and cause the individual to live an idle life.
Rita A. Bergenholtz states that Morrison parodies all of the boy/men in the novel,
the three deweys decide to remain literally as children in body as well as in mind; spoofing
the Trojan myth, Ajax (or A. Jacks) is (almost) literally a Greek "bearing gifts"; mocking
the conventions of marriage and the white world, Jude literally abandons his tie; and
undermining the dignity of Nel's grief and bitterness, a gray ball literally forms "just to the
right of her, in the air, just out of view." It is hard to feel sympathy for Jude, the betrayer.
We grant him the frustration he must have endured in his job as a waiter, but in seeking a
respite from his frustration, he ruins the life of Nel, the wife who was willing to merge her
own self into his to allow him to feel like a man78.
77

W. Lawrence Hogue - Discourse and the Other: The Production of the Afro-American Text, Chapter 7. Sula:
History, Mythical Thought, and the Production of the Afro-American Historical Past, Duke University Press,
Durham, NC, 1986
78
Marie Nigro - In Search of Self: Frustration and Denial in Toni Morrison's Sula in Harold Bloom - Toni
Morrison's Sula

58

IV. 2 Inward Journey

The portrayal of the men in Alice Walkers novel The Color Purple has been the
subject of several commentators. Often critics believe the men are described too harshly
and seem too mean. The men in the novel are for the most part cruel and unnaturally
uncaring. You can hardly find a male character presented in positive terms. They are seen
entirely from the point of view of women, at a distance, as naives incapable of reflection,
tyrants filled with impotent rage, or totemic do-gooders. To Celie, men look like frogs
and will stay frogs, no matter how you kissem. Relationships with men are seen as
temporary, incidental. You may have children with a man, but the important relationship is
with your children. Men are considered pedophobic and misoginistic: A girl child aint
safe in a family of men. (Sofia, Celie)
bell hooks in her article Writing the Subject: Reading The Color Purple states that,
presuming a female spectator (women and specifically white women from privileged
classes are the primary audience for women-centered novels), Alice Walker constructs a
fiction in which it is the masculine threat, represented by black masculinity, that must be
contained, controlled, and ultimately transformed. Her most radical re-visioning of the
oppressive patriarchal social order is her insistence on the transformation of Mr.___. He
moves from male oppressor to enlightened being, willingly surrendering his attachment to
the phallocentric social order reinforced by the sexual oppression of women. 79 His
transformation begins when Celie threatens his existence, when her curse disempowers
him. Since sexuality and power are so closely linked to politics of domination, Mr.___
must be completely desexualized as part of the transformative process.
Albert is presented in the novel as a weak person, dominated by his father. The
roots of evil in Alberts nature come from his not knowing himself. Alberts father did not
rear him to be independent, but rather to be subservient to his fathers own interests. When
Albert became a man, he used his father for a role model and evolved into a self-centered,
irrational individual. He is the adult image of Harpo, equally weak. Harpo cannot conceive
79

bell hooks - Writing the Subject: Reading The Color Purple, p. 63 in Harold Bloom - Alice Walker's The
Color Purple, Chelsea House, Philadelphia, 2000

59

any relationship with a woman in which the woman does not obey him. He eats a lot in
order to become as big as Sofia, to be able to show her who has got the upper hand, the
way his father taught him "He don't want a wife, he want a dog.", Sofia says. The men
Shug has affairs with are weak too. Grady does not work, so Shug has to keep him. He is
a kept man, ironically as this is a position ordinarily reserved for women.
None of the men stand up for the women when they are in trouble. Men treat
women as property. The patriarchal system objectifies women.

Celie is sold into

marriage, the entire discussion is a transaction, the father gives Celie and a cow. With a few
exceptions, men are brutal in the flesh because they are impoverished in spirit. They are
pitiless when they are not self-pitying. Men are seen as oppressors, deceivers, lovers. They
tend to disappear once the relationship is finished. Men are petty, spiteful, complacent, lazy,
insensitive, vain, inartistic, contemptuous of women, but quick to take credit for their work.
They are lechers, mechanical monsters of sexual appetite.
Men are not strong individually, Mr.____ is a small man physically, and Harpo is
smaller than Sofia. It is the power of patriarchy which makes men strong and enables them
to disadvantage others. We learn that Harpo is awful to women because that is what his
father taught him to be. Harpo, left to himself, would have been happy cooking, watching
the kids, doing the housework for his Amazon wife. Even the formidable Mr.____ is awful
to women because that is what his father taught him to do. Mr.___, as he says, use to try to
sew along with mama cause thats what she was always doing. But everybody laughed at
me. But you know, I liked it. George Stade notices that Celie redeems these men by
giving them the courage to be women, by releasing the woman already in them.80
Mr.____ is redeemed only when he is unsexed, at the end of the novel. And only
then is he considered worthy of a name, Albert. Mr.___. does not merely become a good
listener. He becomes someone increasingly like Celie herself: a good housekeeper, a
designer of folkshirts, a nurturing member of a principally female and decidedly domestic
world81.
The values expressed in woman bondingmutuality, respect, shared power, and
unconditional lovebecome guiding principles shaping the new community in The Color
Purple which includes everyone, women and men, family and kin. Reconstructed black
males, Harpo and Albert are active participants expanding the circle of care. Together this
extended kin network affirms the primacy of a revitalized spirituality in which everything
80

George Stade Womanist Fiction and Male Characters

Carla Kaplan - "Somebody I Can Talk To": Teaching Feminism Through The Color Purple in Harold
Bloom
81

60

that exists is informed by godliness, in which love as a force that affirms connection and
intersubjective communion makes an erotic metaphysic possible. Forgiveness and
compassion enable individuals who were estranged and alienated to nurture one another's
growth. The message conveyed in the novel that relationships no matter how seriously
impaired can be restored is compelling. Distinct from the promise of a happy ending, it
allows for the recognition of conflict and pain, for the possibility of reconciliation. 82 The
resolution of the novel offers us an apocalyptic vision of the "peaceable kingdom"
established by human beings in search of love and justice.83
In the novel, the cycle of patriarchy is broken as the women learn to assert their
identity and independence. Walkers male characters undergo an inward journey towards
understanding the female characters.

82

bell hooks - Writing the Subject: Reading The Color Purple, p. 63 in Harold Bloom - Alice Walker's The
Color Purple, Chelsea House, Philadelphia, 2000
83
Diane Gabrielsen Scholl - With Ears to Hear and Eyes to See: Parable in The Color Purple in Harold
Bloom

61

Bibliographical References:
1. Andrews, Larry R. - Black Sisterhood in Naylors Novels p.291 in Gloria Naylor. Critical
Perspectives Past and Present
2. Awkward, Michael Authorial Dreams of Wholeness (Dis)Unity, (Literary) Parentage, and The
Women of Brewster Place;p. 56 in Gloria Naylor. Critical Perspectives Past and Present, edited
by Henry Louis Gates and K. A. Appiah, Amistad Press, New York, 1993
3. Bryant, Cedric Gael The Orderliness of Disorder: Madness and Evil in Toni Morrisons
Sula, Black American Literature Forum, Winter90, Vol. 24 Issue 4, p731, 15p
4. Carmean, Karen Sula in Harold Bloom, op. cit.
5. Christian, Barbara Black Feminist Criticism:Perspectives on Black Women Writers in Celeste
Frasers study, op. cit., o. 101
6. Goldstein, William A Talk with Gloria Naylor, Publishers Weekly (September 9, 1983) in
Kashinath Ranveer, op. cit., p. 124-125
7. Harris, Trudier - Sula: Within and Beyond the African American Folk Tradition in Harold
Bloom, op. cit.
8. Hogue, W. Lawrence - Discourse and the Other: The Production of the Afro-American Text,
Chapter 7. Sula: History, Mythical Thought, and the Production of the Afro-American Historical
Past, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 1986
9. hooks, bell Aint I a Woman black women and feminism, South End Press, Boston, MA,
1992, ch. Three, The Imperialism of Patriarchy, p.99
10. hooks, bell - Writing the Subject: Reading The Color Purple, p. 63 in Harold Bloom - Alice
Walker's The Color Purple, Chelsea House, Philadelphia, 2000
11. Johnson, Yvonne - Alice Walker's The Color Purple
12. Kaplan, Carla - "Somebody I Can Talk To": Teaching Feminism Through The Color Purple in
Harold Bloom
13. Liebow, Elliot - Tallys Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men from Celeste Fraser
Stealing B(l)ack Voices: The Myth of the Black Matriarchy and The Women of Brewster Place; p.
96 in Gloria Naylor. Critical Perspectives Past and Present,
14. Matus, Jill L. Dream, Deferral, and Closure in The Women of Brewster Place p.137 in Gloria
Naylor. Critical Perspectives Past and Present,
15. Nigro, Marie - In Search of Self: Frustration and Denial in Toni Morrison's Sula in Harold
Bloom - Toni Morrison's Sula
16. Scholl, Diane Gabrielsen - With Ears to Hear and Eyes to See: Parable in The Color Purple in
Harold Bloom
17. Stade, George Womanist Fiction and Male Characters

62

18. Tanner, Laura E. Reading Rape p. 71 in Gloria Naylor. Critical Perspectives Past and Present,
edited by Henry Louis Gates and K. A. Appiah, Amistad Press, New York, 1993

Conclusion
Prior to the 1960s, the protagonist in the Afro-American novel was generally a male who
was part rebel and part victim as a result of his striving to define himself in the whirlwind
of social and cultural forces of his time that denied or threatened to destroy his humanity.
On a deeper level, his journey was a ritualistic reenactment on a more or less abbreviated
scale of the historical experience of his people in the United States. Torn by conflicting
loyalties, he ideally attained a measure of peace and fulfilment by first turning inward drawing what strength he could from himself, his ethnic group, and his usable past - and
then outward to some form of social action or vision of a new social order. Since the 1970s
black protagonists such as Mattie, Etta Mae, Sula, and Celie have been resurrected,
created, and recreated to illuminate the joys and sorrows of those who are poor, black, and
female. Stereotypes and archetypes, idealized and realistic characters contend with each
other as the novelists seek to create fictions that explore the wide range of black American
character and that celebrate the humanistic values of black American life, while criticizing
self-destructive values. We have shown the fact that the myth of black matriarchy stopped
the black women, stole their voices and served the oppressors by attempting to silence
them. African American women writers have reclaimed the voices of black women stolen
by the myth.
The black female writers had a difficult job in illustrating the truth about black women, in
asserting their personalities, their distinct identities. For that, they defied the conventions
and the labels imposed on them by their oppressors. Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker and
Toni Morrison have allowed black women this kind of heroic stature. In the writing of
black men, women are always subordinate to men. They are often relegated to domestic
roles, while the men are involved in the "larger" issues of life. In the African American
novels discussed, the authors acknowledged the equivalent struggle of the black woman.
Each writer has an artistic code, an artistic creed that she follows in her literary career. The
first chapter deals with the beliefs of the novelists, the necessity to voice their pain, their
repressed feelings and their identity. "I wrote because I had no choice, but that was a long
road from gathering the authority within myself to believe that I could actually be a

63

writer", Gloria Naylor confessed. This confirmation of her self and of her possibilities for
artistry reverberated enough to give her "the courage to pick up the pen", as Gaylor stated
in an interview. She became thus one of the most representative Black feminist voices and
defied the limitations imposed on the female writing.
In "Beyond the Peacock," an essay in her collection In Search of Our Mother's Gardens,
Walker states "History splits up, literature splits up, and people are split up too. It makes
people do ignorant things.Well I believe that the truth about any subject only comes
when all the sides of the story are put together and all their different meanings make one
new one. Each writer writes the missing parts to the other writers story. And the whole
story is what Im after." This re-made story will affirm the oneness or "wholeness" of life,
the connectedness of all living forms. As a black womanist novelist, Alice Walker is after
the "whole truth" of African-American life. However, her major concern is the black
women themselves.
In Colette Dowling "The Song of Toni Morrison," Morrison specifies her concern for a
particular cosmology that comprises Afro-America. She says she is concerned with "the
elaborately socialized world of black people. . . . I wanted to find out who those people
are ... and why they live the way they do. I want to see the stuff out of which they're
made."2
The bond that links these writers is very strong and it is justified by their choice to focus on
the image of the black women. As Gloria Naylor stated "one character couldnt be the
Black woman in America". The writers have thus portrayed different women, all in
different circumstances, encompassing the complexity of their lives. In this diverse range
of characters we have identified three types: The Woman in the Centre, The
Nonconformist and The Conformist.
The way these writes have portrayed strong friendships between black women is discussed
in the third chapter of our paper. Even if these bonds are often slackened by
competitiveness, betrayal and physical or socio-economic separation, they play an
important role in the struggle to survive. These bonds derive their power from "the
womens previous sense of isolation, from their mistreatment of men, and from their
regenerative discovery, through suffering, of the saving grace of shared experience" 3.
These friendships are based on the shared experiences of black womanhood and last a

64

lifetime. The strong bond between women helps them beat the system or at least survive
with dignity in it.
In the fourth chapter Images of Men (the Recurrent Theme of "the Man on the Run")
we have focus on the images of men to show, using the technique of comparison, the
power of black women to survive all the attacks directed towards her. In all these novels,
the male protagonists undergo a journey, be it a real one as they flee from their
responsibilities (Basil, Eugene, Cora Lees men, Ben, Ajax, BoyBoy, Jude) or an imaginary
one, and, as a result of the latter they are reintegrated in the plot (Mr.__ and Harpo). Male
dominion is expressed in the self-defining liberation universally associated with the myth
of flight.
In these novels, the cycle of patriarchy is broken as the women learn to assert their identity
and independence.
These authors make magic, as well as fiction. Like their characters, they have the ability to
believe and write with the power of knowing that anything is possible. These novels take
us many keys down, and sometimes back up, in this virtuoso orchestration of survival,
suffering, courage and humour, sounding through the stories of these lives. The novels
reflect a reality that a great many black women share; they are at the same time an
indictment of oppressive social forces and a celebration of courage and persistence.

Notes
1

Andrews, Larry R. Black Sisterhood in Naylors Novels, in Gloria Naylor Critical

Perspectives Past and Present, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K. A. Appiah, Amistad, New
York, 1993
2

Cited from W. Lawrence Hogue - Discourse and the Other: The Production of the AfroAmerican Text, Chapter 7. "Sula": History, Mythical Thought, and the Production of the AfroAmerican Historical Past, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 1986

65

Andrews, Larry R. Black Sisterhood in Naylors Novels, in Gloria Naylor Critical

Perspectives Past and Present, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K. A. Appiah, Amistad, New
York, 1993

66

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