Mythmaking and Metaphor in Black Women's Fiction.

Although neither Jacqueline de Weever's Mythmaking and Metaphor in Black Women's Fiction nor Donna Haisty Winchell's Alice Walker deliberately creates controversy, both do focus many of the areas of debate which have surrounded African American literature and women's writing. Both books are meant as general overviews of a particular body of fiction: de Weever's book an overview of mythic patterns in seventeen novels by seven African American women writers, and Winchell's book an overview of Alice Walker's life and writing. Yet there the similarity ends, for while Winchell's book seems content to make general statements about the themes of Walker's novels or to summarize other critics' interpretations of Walker's texts, de Weever presents new and original readings of the novels she discusses. And while Winchell's central thesis is that Walker's texts (like her life) move from fragmentation to unification, de Weever emphasizes not unification or closure in texts but the openness of myth and metaphor.

At opposite ends of the spectrum, then, in terms of their conclusions, these books together present the tensions evident in much criticism of African American literature and women's writing. Winchell's totalizing and frequently simplistic thesis tends to homogenize Walker's life and denies her works their specificity, whereas de Weever's broad and general thesis - that African American women use myth and metaphor, sometimes revising it, sometimes inverting it, sometimes deconstructing it - at times seems inconclusive and vague. Of the two strategies, de Weever's is the more successful, but neither book finds a balance between oversimplification and overspecificity; neither presents an argument which does justice to the complexity as well as the specificity of the works they discuss.

Winchell's book is a very readable basic introduction to Walker's life and writing. It contains useful and accurate summaries of the plots and themes of Walker's first four novels, two collections of short stories, two collections of critical essays, and some of her poetry. It also has a very helpful annotated bibliography and a chronology of Walker's life. However, because much of this critical and biographical information is available elsewhere, the book seems mainly meant to be a compilation of research, rather than an addition to the scholarship. Moreover, since Winchell presents quick overviews of the themes of the works and relies heavily on other critics' interpretation of Walker's texts, those seeking new and insightful readings may find the book disappointing.

Even as a general summary of Walker's work, however, Winchell's book has some limitations. Most importantly, it tends to gloss over textual and critical controversies in favor of its totalizing argument: Walker's personal movement from despair to hope. Walker's early life was traumatic and difficult; the daughter of a poor and abusive father, she was educated during a time when no African American women writers were available to her as literary models. According to Winchell, Walker was able to triumph over these obstacles and became a writer by discovering "how much of life is a matter of perspective." At forty, Walker would write in her journal:

In some ways, I feel my early life's work is done, and done completely. The books that I have produced already carry forward the thoughts that I feel the ancestors were trying to help me pass on. In every generation someone (or two or three) is chosen for this work. . . . Great Spirit, I thank you for the length of my days and the fullness of my work. (x)

Winchell's book charts Walker's movement from suicidal disunity to optimistic integration.

Walker has discussed her writing as both a means of survival and a way of healing herself, so for Winchell it comes as no surprise that Walker's characters, like Walker, are in search of healing and wholeness. Walker's female characters "achieve psychological wholeness when they are able to fight oppression," whereas her male characters "achieve psychological health and wholeness only when they are able to acknowledge women's pain and their role in it" (x). This movement toward wholeness occurs within individual works (such as The Temple of My Familiar), but it also occurs in the development of Walker's fiction as a whole. Early works such as the collection of short stories In Love and Trouble or the novel The Third Life of Grange Copeland tend to emphasize characters' "often fruitless battles for physical security and psychological health" (43). Winchell contrasts these works with later ones such as the collection of short stories You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down or the novels Meridian and The Color Purple, which include characters who are more active and successful in taking control of their lives and destinies. These later works are more in harmony with Winchell's vision of the mature Alice Walker, "the latter-day-hippie, in her dreadlocks and yogi pants, throwing open her door and reaching out in an all-encompassing gesture to draw in life in all of its varied human and nonhuman forms" (107). This is the New Age Alice Walker, Walker the environmentalist, the vegetarian, the animal lover who believes that in a perfect universe "freedom and justice would extend to nonhuman animals as well as to human ones" (111).

Winchell seems well aware that this New Age Alice Walker may be a bit difficult to swallow: "Unfortunately Walker, the would-be savior of the planet, at times looks rather foolish and eccentric as she munches seaweed straight off the rocks on the beaches of California or lies across a path in a national park talking to the trees or considers changing her name to Treeflower or Weed" (113). Yet this is a rare moment of evaluation; for the most part Winchell maintains a non-judgmental attitude toward Walker's life and work. Contradictions and controversies, when they arise, are soon dispensed with. In discussing The Color Purple, for example, Winchell focuses on Celie's and Albert's movement toward wholeness, but does not consider the characters who are not so successful. The destiny of a character as important as Sofia is dispensed with in two sentences: "She eventually goes to jail for striking the white mayor, surviving there only by masking her own natural aggression and pretending instead to be the meek and submissive Miss Celie. When at the end of the novel Harpo and Sofia are together again, they revert to the roles that they are most comfortable with. . . "(95-96). However, readers of The Color Purple know that Walker, through Sofia, raises the question of whether aggressive resistance to racism is a viable strategy in a society which is overwhelmingly racist, and that this is not a question which the novel answers completely. Winchell glosses over this ambiguity in favor of her reading of the novel as a movement toward wholeness. She also glosses over ambiguities and contradictions having to do with Walker's attitude toward her male characters and toward lesbianism.

Nor does Winchell dwell on the contradictions of Walker's own identity. Walker recognizes the African American and Native American strands of her ancestry, but has more difficulty acknowledging the white blood in her veins, the blood of her great-great-grandfather who raped an eleven-year-old slave - Walker's great-great-grandmother. Winchell also avoids dealing with conflicts in Walker's philosophy, although Winchell does acknowledge them. Walker's search for unity, for example, would take her to China in 1983, where she and a traveling companion would feel most at peace sitting in the middle of T'ien An Men Square. Winchell notes the irony of this in light of the events of June 1989, but only comments that "Walker's optimism about the future of the planet must have been sorely tested . . ." (114). Tested, but presumably not found wanting. Winchell's thesis will not allow her to acknowledge the possibility of retrenchment, contradiction, pessimism, or ambiguity in Walker's psyche or her works. In fact, Winchell will not even acknowledge the conflict between Walker's vision of the world and the reality of history and events as they are actually lived.

Jacqueline de Weever's Mythmaking and Metaphor in Black Women's Fiction, on the other hand, is quick to note ambiguities and contradictions in the novels she studies by Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara, ntozake shange, and Alice Walker. De Weever argues that many of these texts, in fact, deliberately resist closure, leaving their characters "suspended," either literarily or figuratively, at the novels' conclusions. This lack of closure is, perhaps, the reason that de Weever chooses a particularly open thesis. According to de Weever, the seventeen novels she studies demonstrate how their authors "reshape figures from old mythologies, how they create new myths from old structures, and how they give new meaning to particular motifs of myth . . . by transforming them into metaphors for psychological growth" (1). De Weever looks at these authors' reflections on and revisions of European, African, African American, and Native American myths, yet she does not develop a general argument about how these authors as a group use the myths. Some authors reject myths entirely, while others revise them; therefore "one cannot generalize about mythology on the basis of all the works discussed because its use is so various and complex" (12).

Since the book's overarching thesis is so broad, the merit of the book rests all the more firmly on the individual readings within chapters. Many of de Weever's readings are insightful and useful. However, at times the readings seem inconclusive; this is the case with Chapter One, which argues that Morrison, shange, and Marshall are in an intertextual dialogue with myths from European, Christian, and African cultures. Chapter Two, which focuses on metaphors of transformation (with special attention to birds, insects, and snakes) argues that the writers discussed use metaphors which mingle human and animal forms in order to signal psychic transformations:

Chthonic metaphors based on images of creatures of the earth generally appear at turning points in the lives of the characters, as metaphors for change in the psyche. . . . The metaphors of the source domain, the earth, enable the writers to develop discussion of the healing power of the target domain, the mind . . . . (88) These first two chapters tend to get bogged down in a variety of specific details about specific myths, but the next two chapters are more successful in moving towards interpretation of these mythic patterns.

Chapter Three discusses metaphors of alienation (madness, malaise, and solitude) in Walker's short fiction and in novels by Morrison, Marshall, and Bambara. Although these discussions sometimes are not particularly well connected to myth or metaphor, individual readings of the texts are very strong and well-argued, and the idea that female characters "become ill through the daily struggle to mend the fractures of their inner and outer lives, to contain the contradictions of life in a society that barely recognizes them" (127) is well-supported. Chapter Four examines the complex myth of the mother, who is both devouring and nurturing, a giver and a taker of life, concluding that mothers in African American novels shatter the stereotypes of the Jezebel and the Mammy. From such rejections of stereotypes and myths come new narrative possibilities, as de Weever argues in Chapter Five, the conclusion. These writers

have accomplished an artistic and a psychological synthesis in their fusion of African, European and sometimes Indian myths in their work. Instead of discarding the European and African myths brought to America they adapt and invert them, and their inversion gives a new dimension to old themes. Their unique contribution to the body of American literature lies in this offering of alternative narrative strategies with which to speak about experiences of alienation and integration . . . . (175)

De Weever's book provides some useful background information about the various myths which influence these texts, and some insightful readings. It also fills a gap in criticism, for according to de Weever this is the first book-length study of myth in the work of African American women writers. De Weever has read widely and is able to quote with ease from such diverse writers as Frantz Fanon, Albert Cook, and Edward Taylor. And there is no doubt that this is an ambitious book: It tries to discuss African, European, and Native American myths in seventeen complicated novels in less than two hundred pages. At times, however, de Weever's readings become superficial and confusing. Moreover, because she never defines myth, the book sometimes seems digressive. For example, Marshall's The Chosen Place, The Timeless People is based on several historical (not mythic) slave revolts. Although de Weever argues that Marshall "uses the historical facts of slave revolts led by slaves named Cuffee as the text out of which her own myth grows" (41), this statement merely seems to point to the broadness of her own conception of myth.

The structure of the book also causes confusion, for it necessitates that de Weever discuss the same author and even the same novel in several different chapters, and even in several different parts of a single chapter. Morrison's Beloved, for example, is commented on in three different sections of Chapter Four, but it is never discussed in any depth. De Weever notes that Sethe personifies the mother as death figure, and that Beloved is "the aggressive daughter, determined to have her mother" (159). Yet as several critics have noted, imagery and description surrounding Beloved continually associate her with the generation of slaves who endured the middle passage. Since Sethe's own mother survived the middle passage, Beloved functions as both a daughter and a symbolic mother-figure to Sethe. Such subtleties are not examined in any detail by de Weever. But the most problematic aspect of this book is that its purpose is never entirely clear. If de Weever's study does not want to produce a theory about how myth functions in these writers, then why should we study myth at all?

De Weever raises the question why myth? several times, but to my mind she never successfully answers it.

In these two books, we have two opposite ends of the spectrum: an argument which is so totalizing that it ignores any ambiguities, and an argument which is so specific and focused that it seems to end up saying very little about the group of African American women writers studied. This points to some of the tension in current critical debates about "minority" literature. Should we try to generalize about African American women's writing, or about women's writing, or about African American writing, as a whole? Should we try to find an argument which ties the works of certain "minority" writers together in some way?

Certainly, we ought not, as Winchell does, make generalizations at the expense of ambiguity and complexity. De Weever's book is a step in the right direction, for she more clearly begins to articulate a theory about the literature she discusses. However, the theory she articulates is extremely general, and it seems often to get lost in the plethora of texts she discusses. Neither of these books, then, achieves a balance between totalization and specificity; neither finds a method of interpretation which does justice both to these authors' distinctive qualities, as well as to their presence within a common tradition.

Reviewed by

Martha J. Cutter Kent State University