realizes she does not fit the prevailing definition
o f “ p r e t t y.”
The remaining vignettes take us through
Maud’s somewhat uneventful adolescence, her
marriage, and the birth of her daughter Paulette.
Always the driving force is desire, but Brooks uses
each vignette to highlight other moods, attitudes,
and emotions, including intrigue, anxiety, shame,
resolve, despair, resignation, and optimism. Espe-
cially poignant is the vignette “kitchenette folks,”
which describes the people who live in the build-
ing where Maud and Paul’s disappointing kitchen-
ette apartment is located.
Several experiences eventually help Maud
Martha toward a sense of self that is not based on
others’ perceptions. A stint as a domestic worker
helps her better understand her husband’s atti-
tudes, but a major turning point comes when she
gives birth and realizes that she is responsible for
the life of another human being. She stands up to
her mother for the first time; she realizes that she
need not envy her “prettier,” more desirable sister
Helen; and she even musters up enough self-con-
fidence to confront both a pushy salesperson and
a white Santa Claus who tries to snub her child.
Thus, Brooks ties motherhood to the protagonist’s
self-development. The novel ends on a note of op-
timism as Maud looks forward to the birth of her
second child. The reader is left with the feeling that
Maud Martha is finally in touch with her own cre-
ative power, her natural love of life, and her capac-
ity for self-definition.
Though Maud Martha received scant atten-
tion when it was first published, black feminist
critics resurrected the novel in the 1980s. It rep-
resents the multiplied effects of both the percep-
tion and the reality of being on the bottom rung
of society’s race, class, gender, caste, and color hi-
erarchies. Initially published by Harper and Row,
Maud Martha was reissued in 1993 by Chicago’s
THIRD WORLD PRESS. Students should read the
novel with Brooks’s poetry, particularly Annie
Allen. This story of self-discovery (bildungsro-
man) also fits in well among texts such as HAR-
RIET JACOBS’s INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SL AVE GIRL
(1861), ZORA NEALE HURSTON’s THEIR EYES WERE
WATCHING GOD, PAULE MARSHALL’s BROWN GIRL,
BROWNSTONES (1959), TONI MORRISON’s The Bluest
Eye (1970), AUDRE LORDE’s ZAMI (1982), and Alice
Randall’s The WIND DONE GONE (2001). Compa-
rable to RALPH ELLISON’s INVISIBLE MAN, Brooks’s
Maud Martha represents a pending break with the
naturalistic and deterministic tone set by RICHARD
WRIGHT in NATIVE SON (1940) and ANN PETRY in
The STREET (1946). In some ways Maud Martha is
more akin to the realism of Their Eyes Were Watch-
ing God with its focus on a woman’s journey of
self-discovery and her growing awareness of her
own agency. Certainly Maud Martha and Paule
Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones help connect
the relatively few previously published quest nar-
ratives with black female protagonists to the pro-
liferation of women-centered texts that would ap-
pear in subsequent decades.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bryant, Jacqueline K. Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Mar-
tha: A Critical Collection. Chicago: Third World
Press, 2002.
Lovalerie KingMayfield, Julian (1928–1984)
Journalist, essayist, dramatist, and novelist Ju-
lian Mayfield was born in 1928 in Greer, South
Carolina, but was raised by his parents, Hudson
and Annie Mae Prince Mayfield, in Washington,
D.C. After graduating from Dunbar High School,
Mayfield joined the U.S. Army, serving a stint in
the Pacific before returning home to continue his
education at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.
He lived in New York working as an actor, pro-
ducer, playwright, and director. His play 417 was
produced off-Broadway. As a journalist, he wrote
for the Puerto Rico World Journal. He was briefly
involved in the CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT and the
Marxist organizations Jefferson School for Social
Research and the Committee for the Negro in the
Arts.
In 1961 Mayfield left the United States for
Ghana, where he served as a communications ad-
viser to the Nkrumah government and worked as
a journalist and editor for the African Review. Re-340 Mayfield, Julian