Praisesong For The Widow Essay Research Paper

Praisesong For The Widow Essay, Research Paper

“The fight raged on. Brawling like fishwives! Like proverbial niggers on a Saturday night! With the fur stole like her hard-won life of the past thirty years being trampled into the dirt underfoot” (45). Avey Johnson, the main character in Paule Marshall’s novel Praisesong for the Widow, is haunted by this dream of her Great Aunt Cuney. This nightmare awakens in her an emptiness and longing for something that she can not initially explain. Her life up to that point had seemed successful, especially in the eyes of others, almost akin to the American Dream. However, her nightmare becomes an indication of the arduous journey and struggle that she will have to undergo in order to rekindle her forgotten identity. Avey has to journey back through her past in order to reconnect herself to the roots that had been severed by her pursuit of a “better life” for herself and her family. There are three key elements in the novel that are essential to understanding how Avey’s transformation takes place. First of all, it is important to understand why she begins to experience a mild form of hysteria while vacationing on the cruise ship. Her

peculiar habit of referring to herself and others by using their first and last names is also of particular importance. Finally, an understanding of the dream and how her great aunt’s memory shapes her true identity will relinquish the final piece to Avey’s puzzle. After Avey dreams about her great aunt she is no longer content with her affluent surroundings. She becomes annoyed, not only by her two companions, but also by the other passenger’s shallow conversations. “It had to do with the expression in their eyes, which seemed to pass cleanly through them whenever they glanced across, and even, ironically, with the quick strained smiles some of them occasionally flashed their way” (47). Avey isn’t impressed by the blank formality and empty politeness the other passengers exhibit. She also has an immediate distaste for the immaculate parfait that is served for desert. Her discontentment stems from the fact that money and luxury had never brought her happiness. She doesn’t come to this realization until she’s reminiscing about her husband Jay while staying at the hotel on the island. Thinking that she would escape the disappointment and confusion associated with the cruise, Avey cuts her trip short and checks into a hotel while awaiting her flight home. The ritzy hotel

accommodations only serve to bring back the same feeling of dread that she experienced on the boat. “Whatever rebel spirit it was that had put her up to abandoning the cruise had skipped out on her, leaving her to face the sudden flood of doubts and misgivings alone” (83). She starts remembering the fight she had with her husband when she was pregnant with her third child and desperate. Money had forced Jay to work overtime and in her loneliness she began to speculate that he might be cheating. The fight that ensued forced a reckoning which made it obvious that the pressures of Halsey Street were warping her with their bitterness. The need to find some level of security became all consuming. Looking back on the effort that Jay put into finding a job, putting himself through school, and ultimately creating his business she laments, “What kind of bargain had they struck. How much had they foolishly handed over in exchange for the things that they had gained.–an exchange they could have avoided altogether had they been on their guard” (139). Gone were the small daily pleasures that had existed during the first part of their life on Halsey Street. They were replaced by a relentless desire to achieve, that only wound up bringing emptiness; the same kind of emptiness that she sees in the passengers while aboard the Bianca Pride. She elaborates on this saying, “that (they) seemed determined to draw her down into the hollowness of their talk, to make her part of it,” and that it, “began to have a familiar ring. They were the same voices she could have sworn she had sought to escape the last place she had been, as well as the place before that” (55). The type of emptiness that she sees in these people relates directly to her habit of

calling them by their full names. She talks about Jay’s transformation after the fight they have on Halsey Street, saying that when he became obsessed with his work and started berating other Negroes, “it was Jerome Johnson who spoke. While continuing to call him Jay to his face, she gradually found herself referring to him as Jerome Johnson in her thoughts” (132). This nothingness that had infected her husband inevitably crept into her soul. Even their friends started teasing them about how much they had started to resemble each other by referring to them jokingly as twins. As the years past it had become

increasingly difficult for her to refer to herself by her first name because, “The names “Avey” and “Avatara” were those of someone who was no longer present, and she had become Avey Johnson even in her thoughts, a woman whose face, reflected in a window or mirror, she sometimes failed to recognize” (141). This void that infected both she and her husband resulted directly from their denial of the past. They were no longer worried about who they were or where they came from but rather where they were going in life. Even though they were improving their financial situation, they were also sacri