Conversions and Visions in the Writings of African-American Women.

Kimberly Rae Connor. Conversions and Vision in the Writings of African-American Women. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1994. 317 pp. $34.00.

This book will be of more use to scholars in religious studies than to those in literary criticism or theory. It examines works by three nineteenth-century figures (Harriet Jacobs, Rebecca Cox Jackson, and Sojourner Truth) and one novel by each of four twentieth-century writers (Zora Neale Hurston, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker). The book attempts to establish a continuity between the literal conversions recorded in the last century's texts and the "literary" conversion of the contemporary works. Readers are likely to be confused by the author's use of conversion for what would generally be called simply a character's change. The expansion of conversion at first seems arbitrary because the book does not clearly state its premise: In a world view that does not separate sacred and profane, every profound change of character amounts to a conversion.

The selection of texts is particularly problematic. The decision to work across genres receives little discussion, for example. The book argues that nineteenth-century autobiographers necessarily selected incidents relating to a perceived conversion, ordered them, and thus produced autobiographies in some sense fictional. This rationale seems insufficient to justify comparing the conversion narratives to twentieth-century novels. The book's contention suggests several issues that it does not address, even briefly: Do nineteenth-century novels by African-American women writers display the same conversion conventions as the autobiographies? Do twentieth-century women's autobiographies?

The nineteenth-century works are themselves heterogeneous--Jacobs's slave narrative (which plays off the conventions of the sentimental novel), Cox's journal (unpublished until 1981), and the collection of speeches and newspaper articles compiled by an editor with Sojourner Truth (who was not print-literate). The variety of these sources might have been made a strength if the book were explicitly to argue that conversions so permeated African-American culture that virtually every print production of the nineteenth century presents one, but instead the reader is left to make sense of the choices. Connor's bibliography clearly shows a knowledge of other nineteenth-century African American women's spiritual autobiographies, but the text proper does not mention any of them. In another case of unexplained and rather odd selection, Conversions and Visions examines The Color Purple while highlighting Walker's ties to Rebecca Cox Jackson. The path of Jackson's life anticipates the plot of a Walker novel, but not that of The Color Purple. Jackson left a Shaker community to serve the black community but continued to honor Shaker beliefs, including celibacy. Surely the better analogue to Jackson's life would be Meridian.

Connor casts her literary analysis in the vocabulary of religious studies, so that the nineteenth-century texts are categorized, for instance, by voluntary and involuntary conversion. The importance of this distinction for literary analysis or understanding remains unclear, especially since the categories are not strongly present in the second section, which deals with the novels. Conversions and Visions is much better grounded in previous literary criticism than many cross-disciplinary efforts, however. The book redraws several paradigms, for example the quest for identity, from a spiritual perspective, and it offers clear and tenable if not exciting readings. The close textual analysis (especially in the novels section) emphasizes the writers' understanding of African-American culture as a spiritual resource and their construction of sacralized identities as part of a sacralized universe.