Hurston Walker Marshall Women Writing Other Women

Hurston, Walker, Marshall; Women Writing Other Women Essay, Research Paper

Alice Walker, through her essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens”, and Paule Marshall, in “Poets In The Kitchen”, both write about the African-American women of the past and how these women have had an impact on their writing. Walker and Marshall write about an identity they have found with these women because of their exposure to the African culture. These women were searching for independence and freedom. Walker expresses independence as found in the creative spirit, and Marshall finds it through the spoken word. Walker and Marshall celebrate these women’s lives and they see them as inspirations to become black women writers.

Zora Neale Hurston’s “Sweat” embodies some aspects that are found in Walker’s and Marshall’s essays. Delia, the main character, has an identity that is found through her hard work and spirituality. She also finds her freedom and independence in her home.

It is essential to first analyze Walker’s and Marshall’s essays through each of the themes of identity, independence, and inspiration, respectively. Then these themes will be drawn out of Hurston’s work to show the similarity between each of these writers’ works.

Walker and Marshall write about an identity that they have found with African-American women of the past. They both refer to great writers such as Zora Neale Hurston or Phillis Wheatley. But more importantly, they connect themselves to their ancestors. The see that their writings can be identified with what the unknown African-American women of the past longed to say but they did not have the freedom to do so. They both admire many literary greats such as Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, and Jane Austen, but they appreciate these authors’ works more than they can identify with them.

Walker’s and Marshall’s identification is related to the African-American culture that they have been exposed to throughout their lives. Walker states that:

Therefore we must pull out of ourselves and look at and

identify with our lives the living creativity some of our

great-grandmothers were not allowed to know. I stress

some of them because it is well-known that the majority

of our great-grandmothers knew without even “knowing”

it, the reality of their spirituality, even if they didn’t

recognize it beyond what happened in the singing at

church (Walker, 1996: 2318-2319).

Walker delves into the subconscious and ever-present spirituality that is found in African-American women and she believes that it is important to identify with this. Some of these women had the potential to be great writers. Walker identifies with this potential and she expresses their creativity and culture through her own writing. Therefore, Walker’s writings become the bridge that connects the gap between African-American women of the past and their search to be able to express their creativity and spirituality. Walker breaks down the barriers that these women could not overcome:

[T]he subject of recovery has been the concern of many

black women writers who seek various kinds of redemption

for women who have been imprisoned in sexist fantasy or

racist stereotype for too long (Dixon, 1987: 107).

Walker may have the freedom to write, but she can also identify with the historical racism that had haunted her ancestors. She feels connected to the toils and hardships that the black women had been subjected to, and this is a way that Walker identifies herself to her African-American ancestors.

Marshall’s identification with her African-American ancestors is more explicitly involving her mother and her mother’s friends. What may be viewed on the surface as a typical black woman domestic labourer to most people, is what Marshall sees as the ultimate expression of art. In her essay, Marshall identifies with her mother and the African-American tradition that her mother expressed. Marshall describes the kitchen setting she was exposed to as a child:

They were women in whom the need for self-expression

was strong, and since language was the only vehicle

readily available to them they made of it an art form that-

in keeping with the African tradition in which art and life

are one – was an integral part of their lives

(Marshall, 1996: 1948).

The ancestry Marshall refers to had the same barriers as Walker expressed that her ancestors had: they had only their voice through which they chose to speak or sing, and to write as a form of self-expression was not an option. Marshall equates her being a writer to the oral heritage of her mother and explains how they both transcend the everyday. Through identifying with her mother, Marshall finds that they have things in common because they both express their creativity in an art form: one in the oral tradition and the other in the written tradition:

The role of art in this tradition unifies the seemingly disparate

themes of motherhood and orality. Mother love physically

and emotionally nurtures individuals; oral art analogously

sustains the tribe. The written works of literate daughters

incorporate the oral ancestral voices of tribal mothers

(Kubitschek, 1991: 181).

Marshall u

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