Alice Walker

African American Review, Spring, 2003 by Loretta G. Woodard

Maria Lauret. Alice Walker. New York: St Martin's P, 2000. 252 pp. $35.00.

Within the last two decades, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Alice Walker has emerged, both nationally and internationally, as one of the most versatile and controversial writers of African American literature. Although extensive critical studies have attempted to assess Walker's works, others still continue to unravel the mystery of this novelist, poet, essayist, and short fiction writer. Thus, Maria Lauret's scholarly work, the first book-length study of Alice Walker's prose to appear in Britain, is a valuable new addition in the Modem Novelists series edited by Norman Page and published by St. Martin's Press. For the scholar and novice reader, Lauret's volume adds significantly to our understanding of a pioneering literary figure who continues "to create new voices and new visions of the role that literature can play in shaping and critiquing society."

The volume opens with a refreshing critical approach to Walker's life. By extracting a biographical sketch from Walker's essays and interviews, Lauret examines Walker's autobiographical voice and the kind of critical authority her persona invokes for the reader or critic. Through Walker's non-fictional writings, Lauret charts the author's self-fashioning "as victim/survivor, activist/teacher, writer/healer and finally elder," from the 1970s to the late 1990s. After such an assessment, Lauret ends the chapter by acknowledging how the works of Zora Neale Hurston and those of Yirginia Woolf have shaped and informed Walker's writing throughout her literary career. While Lauret notes that Hurston is both a role model and ancestor, she further claims Hurston is a "legitimating presence for Walker in the African American literary tradition." She contends that it is Southern folk culture, and more especially the black vernacular, that Walker sees in Hurston. A number of critics trace the similarities in Hurston's The ir Eyes Were Watching God and The Color Purple. However, operating on the premise that there is a need for critics to locate Hurston's presence in other works besides The Color Purple, Lauret successfully traces how Walker uses Hurston's anthropological work on voodoo, Mules and Men, to validate her mother's discourse, especially in the short story "The Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff." In the final comparison of the two, Lauret argues quite convincingly that Hurston's major influence enables Walker to articulate her critique of race and gender relations in the feminist post-Civil Rights era and to theorize it in the concept of womanism. Using Walker's definition of womanism, at the beginning of In Search of Our Mother's Gardens, Lauret indicates how Hurston serves as a model, as Walker formulates, revises, and offers a critique of the term.

Though Lauret heeds Morrison's warning against the comparisons between black and white writers, Lauret argues that her comparison of Walker and Woolf, as with Hurston, provides "a form of knowledge" that, when examined together, "can raise our consciousness about what is involved when' our mother's garden is unfamiliar.' " Hence, Lauret reveals how both Walker and Woolf use a variety of similar forms, such as journalism, novels, essays, biographies, diaries, and letters, which they easily manipulate into other different forms (conventional biography or the English epistolary novel) to achieve the desired effects on their readers. Additionally, Lauret notes how Walker and Woolf use thematic parallels of madness engendered by societal constraints, in Mrs. Dallowaty, Meridian, The Voyage Out, and Possessing the Secret of Joy. Critiques of official historiography and biography appear in Between the Acts, Orlando, Jacob's Room, Meridian, and The Temple of My Familiar. In The Years, The Color Purple, To the Lightho use, and The Third Life of Grange Copeland, both Walker and Woolf employ the family saga to expose the taboo of domestic violence and child abuse.

While tracing Walker's dominant themes, such as child abuse and women's sexuality, in her novels and essays, Lauret shows the progression of a number of Walker's theories and how her vision is actually an extension of her earlier works. Beginning with Walker's first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), Lauret observes that it provides the medium for her later novels. The second novel, Meridian (1976), takes up the Civil Rights theme where it was left with Ruth; Walker's two characters, Mem and Margaret, are revived and rehabilitated in the figure of Celie in The Color Purple (1982). Suwelo, like Grange, also learns a valuable spiritual lesson in The Temple of My Familiar (1989). And in Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), Walker treats child abuse with a different inflection and in a different cultural setting. Overall, Lauret believes it is the "personal transformation" that is at the core of Alice Walker's novels, and "Grange Copeland's third life is only the first of many reincarnations to come ."