A History of American Literature

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women’s culture. It establishes a specifically womanist tradition, a series of role

models from the silent and unheralded (mothers whose gardens or hand-crafted

quilts are their art) to the writer who has been the “queen bee” for Walker, Zora

Neale Hurston. Searching for foremothers, Walker has helped to establish the pivotal

importance of works by African-American women. She has also helped to promote

that work – for instance, by co-founding a publishing outlet, the Wild Tree Press,

and by editing I Love Myself When I Am Laughing (1979), a seminal selection of

Hurston’s prose.

In fiction, Walker inaugurated her career with The Third Life of Grange Copeland

(1970), a realistic novel describing three generations of a family whose history is

marred by racial oppression and sexual violence. It is notable, in particular, for its

stark account of a repetitive cycle of abuse, wife beating, and sexual exploitation

within the black family and community. Meridian (1976), Walker’s second novel,

concentrates on the civil rights movement and the fight for social change. It is,

however, centered on the experience of women. Its central character, Meridian Hill,

lives in the North but returns to the South to help in a voter registration drive.

Meridian, the reader learns, is “held by something in the past,” a “something” that

includes, above all, her mother and a church that is both her mother’s church and –

whether she likes it or not – her mother church. “Her mother’s life was sacrifice,”

Meridian reflects. And her main feeling when she thinks about her is guilt: guilt over

abandoning her own child and so betraying “maternal history,” and guilt over

involving herself in politics. Meridian never comes to personal terms with her

mother but, by returning to her mother’s history and ancestry, she does experience

a symbolic rapprochement. “Mama, I love you. Let me go,” Meridian is able to

whisper to the figure of her mother she sees in a dream. She has made peace with

her, and can move on. Meridian is also able to make her peace and come to terms

with the church, and in a less purely symbolic way. For the church she encounters in

the South is one transformed by the civil rights revolution. From it, she learns a new

song: “it is the song of the people, transformed by the experience of each generation,

that holds them together.” It offers a new form of personal and sociopolitical

revolution; and it enables Meridian to connect her present to her past. Her return to

origins has initiated change, but change that is contiguous with the earlier experiences

of her community. In that way, she has come back to her own history only to

transcend it and become a whole woman.

Change, a purely secular salvation involving the discovery of identity and

community, is also at the heart of The Color Purple (1983). At the center of this novel

is Celie, the victim of racial and sexual oppression. Raped by the man she believes to

be her father, she is battered and abused in a loveless marriage. Nevertheless,

she gradually learns “how to do it,” how to grow into being and companionship.

Her mentors here are three women. One, called Sofia, teaches her by example the

lesson of resistance to white and male oppression. Another, her sister Nettie, offers

her a more complex lesson, primarily through her letters. A missionary who goes to

work in Africa, Nettie discloses to Celie the ancient cultural and spiritual dimensions

of the African-American tradition: the proud inheritance they share. Through her

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