WALKER, Alice (Malsenior)

Nationality: American. Born: Eatonton, Georgia, 9 February 1944. Education: Spelman College, Atlanta, 1961-63; Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York, 1963-65, B.A. 1965. Family: Married Melvyn R. Leventhal in 1967 (divorced 1976); one daughter. Career: Voter registration and Head Start program worker, Mississippi, and with New York City Department of Welfare, mid-1960s; teacher, Jackson State College, 1968-69, and Tougaloo College, 1970-71, both Mississippi; lecturer, Wellesley College, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1972-73; lecturer, University of Massachusetts, Boston, 1972-73; associate professor of English, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, after 1977; Fannie Hurst Professor, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, Fall 1982; distinguished Writer, University of California, Berkeley, Spring 1982; cofounder and publisher, Wild Trees Press, Navarro, California, 1984-88. Lives in San Francisco. Awards: Bread Loaf Writers Conference scholarship, 1966; American Scholar prize, for essay, 1967; Merrill fellowship, 1967; MacDowell fellowship, 1967, 1977; Radcliffe Institute fellowship, 1971; Lillian Smith award, for poetry, 1973; American Academy Rosenthal award, 1974; National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1977; Guggenheim grant, 1978; American Book award, 1983; Pulitzer prize, 1983; O. Henry award, 1986. Honorary doctorates: Russell Sage College, Troy, New York, 1972; University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1983.

Publications

Short Stories

In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women. 1973.

You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down. 1981.

The Complete Stories. 1995.

Novels

The Third Life of Grange Copeland. 1970.

Meridian. 1976.

The Color Purple. 1982.

The Temple of My Familiar. 1989.

Possessing the Secret of Joy. 1992.

Everyday Use. 1994.

Poetry

Once. 1968.

Five Poems. 1972.

Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems. 1973.

Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning. 1979.

Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful. 1984.

Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems 1965-1990. 1991.

Other

Langston Hughes, American Poet (biography for children). 1974.

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose. 1983.

To Hell with Dying (for children), illustrated by CatherineDeeter. 1988.

Living by the Word: Selected Writings 1973-1987. 1988.

Finding the Green Stone, with Catherine Deeter (for children). 1991.

Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blindings of Women. 1993.

Alice Walker Banned. 1996.

Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's Activism. 1997.

Editor, I Love Myself When I Am Laughing … and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader. 1979.

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Bibliography:

Walker: An Annotated Bibliography 1968-1986 by Louis H. Pratt and Darnell D. Pratt, 1988; Walker: An Annotated Bibliography 1968-1986 by Erma Davis Banks and Keith Byerman, 1989.

Critical Studies:

Special Walker issue, Callaloo, Spring 1989; "Walker: The Achievement of the Short Fiction" by Alice Hall Petry, in Modern Language Studies, Winter 1989; "Tradition in Walker's 'To Hell with Dying"' by Michael Hollister, in Studies in Short Fiction 21, Winter 1989; Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and Present edited by Henry Louis Gates and Anthony Appiah, 1993; "She's Just Too Womanish for Them: Alice Walker and The Color Purple " by Angelene Jamison-Hall, in Censored Books: Critical Viewpoints edited by Nicholas J. Karolides, Lee Burress, and John M. Kean, 1993; "Womanism Revisited: Women and the Use of Power in The Color Purple" by Tuzyline Jita Allan, in Feminist Nightmares: Women at Odds edited by Susan Ostrov Weisser and Jennifer Fleischner, 1994; Alice Walker's The Color Purple by Dina Benevol, 1995; "Race and Domesticity in The Color Purple" by Linda Selzer, in African American Review, Spring 1995, pp. 67-82.

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Alice Walker's short stories, like her other fiction, are marked by her concern with African American life and with African American women in particular. Walker's literary influences include those of Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Toomer, but by far the greatest influence on her work is her own personal and cultural background. From this she draws on a rich oral tradition for her stories, and she invests her realism with mystical experience. Her folk material is often used for political and psychological purposes rather than the mere provision of local color. This tends to create a dialectic between liberal ideology in her work and the folk values that serve to subvert ideological claims to absolute truth.

In "Everyday Use" Dee wants nice things: "At sixteen she had a style of her own: and knew what style was." Her sister, Maggie, burned in a house fire, knew that she was not bright: "Like good looks and money, quickness passed her by." Maggie's mother, the narrator of the story, attempts to mediate between her daughters. The conflict is effectively between that of the city slicker African American perception of race and the more homely perceptions of the unsophisticated rural dwellers. When Dee returns home for a visit, she has taken an African name, Wangero Lee-wanika Kemanjo, and a man friend with a name "twice as long and three times as hard." She sports an African American hairdo and wants to bring her mother and sister into the "new day." She also wants the churn top as a centerpiece for her alcove table and will "think of something artistic to do with the dasher." The other things Wangero wants are the quilts Grandma Dee had made from scraps of dresses 50 years before, and when asked what she will do with them, she replies that she will hang them: "As if that were the only thing you could do with quilts." In an interesting reversal of the prodigal son theme, her mother feels something hit her, "just like when I'm in church and the spirit of God touches me." As in many of Walker's characters, the mystical experience is a precursor to personal growth, and, recognizing the worth of her second daughter, she gives Maggie the quilts. "This was Maggie's portion," and it is she who will put them to "everyday use."

Many of the stories in In Love and Trouble take up the theme of women victimized by men. The title of the collection suggests the dual focus of women who must deal with a life full of love but one that also includes violence, injustice, and oppression. In "The Child Who Favoured Daughter" a sister named Daughter is cast out of her family for desiring sexual freedom. The story explores the ambiguous nature of her brother's feelings toward her. When confronted by his own daughter's burgeoning sexuality, the brother commits the horrible act of cutting off her breasts. Many of the men in Walker's stories are the emasculated casualties of racism, but in turn they vent their frustration and anger on women who are punished for wanting an identity of their own. In this sense African American folk culture provides nurture for such women, and it is the daughters who must learn to speak for their mothers. This function is implied, if not overtly stated, in Walker's essay "In Search of Our Mother's Gardens." It is one that seems to motivate much of Walker's own work.

The distinction between fiction and ideological discourse is not always explicit in Walker's work, and the stories in You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down represent a departure in that several are ideological statements in fictional form. "Coming Apart" and "Porn" demonstrate the effects of pornography on relations between the sexes, while "1955" fictionalizes the exploitation of African American blues singers. In a thinly disguised version of Big Mama Thornton and Elvis Presley, who turned Thorton's "Hound Dog" into a commercial success, the white male singer is shown as being obsessed with a mystical African American culture represented by the song, which he can never quite own or quite understand.

In Walker's work it is perhaps the perception of God in everything that renders it possible to forgive even great evils. This perception creates a form of magical realism in which even the pain of being female and black is offset by an inherent capacity to endure. Her work is exemplified by companionable and strong women who, like Maggie and her mother, have the fortitude to watch the dust settle and afterward say, "I asked Maggie to bring me a dip of snuff. And then the two of us sat there enjoying, until it was time to go in the house and go to bed."

—Jan Pilditch

See the essay on "To Hell with Dying."