African American women and feminism: Alice Walker's womanism ...

16 Marta Mazurek
invited and in which she plays a part equal to those of other African American
female participants. The rhetorical gesture performed by Walker invoking the
feminist icon is as “outrageous, audacious [and] courageous” as the womanist
herself, according to Walker’s definition 30 ; however, it cannot be interpreted in
terms of a reversed (and thus matriarchal) pattern of Bloom’s theory of literary
tradition known as anxiety of influence.
Walker’s incorporation of the well-known fragments of Woolf ’s canonical
text into her own critical production is a strategy which Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
defined as “Signifyin(g)” – “generated from within the black tradition itself [...]
a metaphor for formal revision, or intertextuality, within the Afro-American literary
tradition” 31 . In other words, Walker’s essay might be understood as a translation, or
a repetition with a difference, of Woolf ’s text, with which it has a lot in common,
and through/against which Walker asserts herself. This strategy can be illustrated
on the basis of the following passage as an example:
Virginia Woolf wrote further, speaking of course not of our Phillis [Wheatley],
that ‘any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century [insert
‘eighteenth century’, insert ‘black woman’, insert ‘born or made a slave’]
would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some
lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard [insert ‘Saint’],
feared and mocked at’ [...] 32 .
In the fragment Walker fills in the gaps in Woolf ’s text to broaden its appeal;
thus, by inserting the historical context of slavery and racism that shaped African
American women’s history she seems to criticize the feminist icon’s Eurocentric
vision that excluded colored women from her text. Consequently, this gesture could
be treated as pointing to Woolf ’s sins of omission on the one hand; on the other
hand, paradoxically, Walker re-writes fragments of A Room of One’s Own precisely
to express herself and the African American tradition that shaped her as an artist
through this text. She does it by inserting Black womanhood in the spaces of the
white woman’s text, and thus making room for her own voice.
In order to find herself in the white woman’s canonical text, the colored woman
has to make this text speak to her, which she achieves by the strategic application
of the traditional African American trope defined by Gates as the Talking Book.
Gates associates the first occurrence of the Talking Book trope in one of the
very first narratives of enslavement, written by Gronniosaw, An African Prince,
30
A. Walker: In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, op.cit., p. xi.
31
H. L. Gates, Jr.: The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York
and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988, p. xx, xxi.
32
A. Walker: In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. In: In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose,
op.cit., p. 235.