States and abroad, including Yale, Columbia, Cor-
nell, Oxford, Virginia Commonwealth University,
the University of California at Berkeley, and the
Iowa Writers Workshop. Since 1997 she has been
on the faculty of New York University’s gradu-
ate creative writing program, where she holds the
Helen Gould Sheppard Chair of Literature and
Culture. Through careful research into historical
events and figures that is followed by painstaking
writing, Marshall has done justice to the past in
order to affect positively her readers’ present and
future. Marshall reminds us of the solace and joy
to be found in embracing one’s past and heritage,
a universal message that, through her vivid charac-
terizations, transcends culture.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Christian, Barbara. “Ritualistic Process and the Struc-
ture of Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow.”
Callaloo 18 (Spring–Summer 1983): 74–84.
———. “Trajectories of Self-Definition: Placing
Contemporary Afro-American Women’s Fic-
tion.” In Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction and the
Literary Tradition, edited by Marjorie Pryse and
Hortense Spillers, 233–248. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1985.
DeLamotte, Eugenia C. Places of Silence, Journeys
of Freedom: The Fiction of Paule Marshall. Penn
Studies in Contemporary American Fiction, ed-
ited by Emory Elliott. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1998.
Denniston, Dorothy Hamer. The Fiction of Paule
Marshall: Reconstructions of History, Culture, and
Gender. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press,
1995.
Hathaway, Heather. Caribbean Waves: Relocating
Claude McKay and Paule Marshall. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1999.
Marshall, Paule. “Characterizations of Black Women
in the American Novel.” In In the Memory and
Spirit of Frances, Zora, and Lorraine: Essays and
Interviews on Black Women and Writing, edited by
Juliette Bowles, 76–79. Washington, D.C.: Institute
for the Arts and the Humanities, Howard Univer-
sity, 1979.
———. “The Negro Woman in Literature.” Freedom-
ways 6 (1966): 21–25.
———. “Shaping the World of My Art.” New Letters
40, no. 1 (Autumn 1973): 97–112.
Elizabeth McNeilMaud Martha Gwendolyn Brooks (1953)
Maud Martha reveals the developing conscious-
ness of a young girl living in a northern city before,
during, and after World War II. Composed of 34
very poetic sketches, the novel expands DuBoisian
double consciousness—the almost schizophrenic
identity African Americans must assume of being
both black and American—to include matters of
gender, caste, and color. For most of the story,
Maud Martha Brown is overly preoccupied with
the way others (a domineering mother, a chauvin-
istic husband, boys who prefer light-skinned girls
with good hair, people of wealth, and white society
in general) see her. GWENDOLYN BROOKS renders
the loosely autobiographical narrative from the
third-person limited omniscient perspective.
The novel opens with a description of pre-
school-aged Maud Martha and introduces the
metaphor of the dandelion (a common thing of
undervalued beauty) to which Maud compares
herself. Desire is the overwhelming emotion de-
picted in this opening sketch, which introduces
the protagonist’s longing. Brooks uses the second
sketch to provide detail about a spring landscape
and to depict children at play in the schoolyard
in the morning. The day is cool and blustery, and
the overwhelming mood is one of anticipation
and possibility. The third vignette provides insight
into Maud’s parents’ relationship and Maud’s par-
adoxical relationship with her mother. The death
of Maud’s grandmother is the focus of the fourth
vignette, which evokes feelings of vulnerability
and disgust. In the fifth sketch, Maud’s feelings of
racial inferiority surface as she anticipates a visit
from a white classmate. From Maud’s perspective,
he is the entire white race sitting in judgment of
her, the entire black race. The dominant emotion
is self-loathing. In the 13th vignette, titled “Low
Yellow,” Brooks explores the definition of “pretty”
and how it is defined in terms of skin color and
hair texture. Dark-skinned, coarse-haired MaudMaud Martha 339