Table Of Content

Bloom’s Modern Critical Views African American Samuel Taylor John Keats Poets: Coleridge Jamaica Kincaid Wheatley–Tolson Joseph Conrad Stephen King African American Contemporary Poets Rudyard Kipling Poets: Julio Cortázar Milan Kundera Hayden–Dove Stephen Crane Tony Kushner Edward Albee Daniel Defoe Ursula K. Le Guin Dante Alighieri Don DeLillo Doris Lessing Isabel Allende Charles Dickens C. S. Lewis American and Emily Dickinson Sinclair Lewis Canadian Women E. L. Doctorow Norman Mailer Poets, John Donne and the Bernard Malamud 1930–present 17th-Century Poets David Mamet American Women Fyodor Dostoevsky Christopher Poets, 1650–1950 W. E. B. DuBois Marlowe Hans Christian George Eliot Gabriel García Andersen T. S. Eliot Márquez Maya Angelou Ralph Ellison Cormac McCarthy Asian-American Ralph Waldo Emerson Carson McCullers Writers William Faulkner Herman Melville Margaret Atwood F. Scott Fitzgerald Arthur Miller Jane Austen Sigmund Freud John Milton Paul Auster Robert Frost Molière James Baldwin William Gaddis Toni Morrison Honoré de Balzac Johann Wolfgang Native-American Samuel Beckett von Goethe Writers Th e Bible George Gordon, Joyce Carol Oates William Blake Lord Byron Flannery O’Connor Jorge Luis Borges Graham Greene George Orwell Ray Bradbury Th omas Hardy Octavio Paz Th e Brontës Nathaniel Hawthorne Sylvia Plath Gwendolyn Brooks Robert Hayden Edgar Allan Poe Elizabeth Barrett Ernest Hemingway Katherine Anne Browning Hermann Hesse Porter Robert Browning Hispanic-American Marcel Proust Italo Calvino Writers Th omas Pynchon Albert Camus Homer Philip Roth Truman Capote Langston Hughes Salman Rushdie Lewis Carroll Zora Neale Hurston J. D. Salinger Miguel de Cervantes Aldous Huxley José Saramago Geoff rey Chaucer Henrik Ibsen Jean-Paul Sartre Anton Chekhov John Irving William Shakespeare G. K. Chesterton Henry James William Shakespeare’s Kate Chopin James Joyce Romances Agatha Christie Franz Kafka George Bernard Shaw Bloom’s Modern Critical Views Mary Wollstonecraft Ivan Turgenev Walt Whitman Shelley Mark Twain Oscar Wilde Alexander Solzhenitsyn John Updike Tennessee Williams John Steinbeck Kurt Vonnegut Tom Wolfe Jonathan Swift Derek Walcott Virginia Woolf Amy Tan Alice Walker William Wordsworth Alfred, Lord Tennyson Robert Penn Warren Jay Wright Henry David Th oreau H. G. Wells Richard Wright J. R. R. Tolkien Eudora Welty William Butler Yeats Leo Tolstoy Edith Wharton Émile Zola Bloom’s Modern Critical Views Alice Walker New Edition Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Alice Walker—New Edition Copyright ©2007 by Infobase Publishing Introduction ©2007 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any informa tion storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Chelsea House An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Alice Walker / edited with an introduction by Harold Bloom. p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern criticial views) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7910-9611-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-7910-9611-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Walker, Alice, 1944- —Criticism and interpretation. I. Bloom, Harold. PS3525.I5156Z5145 2007 812’.52—dc22 2006102701 Chelsea House books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Chelsea House on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com. Editorial Consultant, Brian L. Johnson Cover design by Takeshi Takahashi/Joo Young An Printed in the United States of America Bang BCL 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. Contents Editor’s Note vii Introduction 1 Harold Bloom Alice Walker’s Men: Profi les in the Quest for Love and Personal Values 5 Louis H. Pratt “All Saints Should Walk Away”: The Mystical Pilgrimage of Meridian 19 Joseph A. Brown Alice Walker: The Achievement of the Short Fiction 33 Alice Hall Petry Coming to Voice in Alice Walker’s Meridian: Speaking Out for the Revolution 51 Lynn Pifer Alice Walker’s Redemptive Art 69 Felipe Smith Alice Walker’s Vision of the South in The Third Life of Grange Copeland 89 Robert James Butler vi Contents Alice Walker: In Praise of Maternal Heritage 101 Gail Keating Alice Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar as a Pastiche 115 Bonnie Braendlin Visual Marker’s: Art and Mass Media in Alice Walker’s Meridian 133 Deborah E. Barker Teaching Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use”: Employing Race, Class, and Gender 155 Marcia Noe Telling a Critical Story: Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens 169 Laurie McMillan Reanimating the Trope of the Talking Book in Alice Walker’s “Strong Horse Tea” 187 Deborah Anne Hooker Alice Walker Chronology 207 Contributors 209 Bibliography 211 Acknowledgements 215 Index 217 Editor’s Note My Introduction amiably questions Walker’s firm assumption that her books do not engage in any contest with Hurston’s. Linda Selzer reasonably examines the issues of race and domesticity in Th e Color Purple, after which Marcia Noe and Michael Jaynes zealously expound the everyday, ideological use of Walker’s writing. Meridian, Walker’s most ambitious novel, is related by Deborah A. Baker to the prevalence of visual dominance in our mass media, while Bonnie Braendlin defends the experimental Th e Temple of My Familiar, a New Age pastiche. Gail Keating exalts Walker as a high priestess of black maternalism, after which Robert James Butler more temperately considers Th e Th ird Life of Grange Copeland. For Felipe Smith, Walker is a redeemer, while Lynn Pifer joins the chorus of hosannas for Meridian. Walker’s prowess as short story writer is recognized by Alice Hall Petry, after which Louis H. Pratt fi nds Walker’s male characters to be generally a motley ensemble of sexism and racism. Mystical messiahship is granted to Meridian by Joseph A. Brown, S. J. while Deborah Anne Hooker acclaims Walker as an ecocritic. vii HAROLD BLOOM Introduction Alice Walker (– ) I A contemporary writer who calls herself “author and medium” is by no means idiosyncratic, and Alice Walker certainly seems to me a wholly representative writer of and for our current era. The success of The Color Purple is deserved; Walker’s sensibility is very close to the Spirit of the Age. Rather than seek to analyze verse and fictional prose that is of a kind I am not yet competent to judge, or a speculative essay such as “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” which eludes me, I will center here upon Walker’s medi- tations upon her acknowledged precursor, Zora Neale Hurston. There is no book more important to me than this one,” Walker wrote of Hurston’s mas- terwork, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Perhaps the only literary enthusiasm I share with Walker is my own deep esteem for that admirable narrative, about which I have written elsewhere. Walker associated her feeling for Hurston with her similar veneration for famous black women singers, Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith. Th at association is a moving trope or defense, since Hurston, like Walker, was a writer and not a vocalist. Here is another tribute by Walker to Hurston: We live in a society, as blacks, women, and artists, whose contests we do not design and with whose insistence on ranking us we are permanently at war. To know that second place, in such a society, has often required more work and innate genius than first, a longer, grimmer struggle over greater odds that first—and to be able to fling your scarf about dramatically while you demonstrate that 1

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Agatha Christie. Samuel .. remembered the time he removed the genitals of a murdered young Black boy .. lead us into the state of oneness which we seek to hang over his sleeping-place, a kiss of words left upon his brow.