Critical Review of Alice Walker’s Novels
The protagonist of the novel is Meridian. Her dreams are about the releasing of her mother from the burden that motherhood has been.as a result brings out of the initiatory experiences that Meridian undergoes in an effort to find her identity and her own moral center where she tries to develop completeness of being. Meridian, The title character, is a college-educated woman who confronts in her life with aiding southern blacks in gaining political and social equality. For the process of the social changes, Meridian goes backward in time to move forward to seek the connection between her personal history and communal history.
Meridian is as a female protagonist, awakens from her dependent status as a black female, daughter, wife and mother to her own self and tries to become the maternal provider of the larger black community. Meridian is like an artist in the sense she wants to expand her mind with action. Meridian resorts to into a bloodless revolution with an idea of loving the enemy and a non-violent approach to confrontation. Meridian commits herself to the empowerment of women. Meridian after giving birth to Eddie Jr, she understands and learns what it is to be a woman and mother and more importantly to be a poor black woman. While do so, Meridian regards her mother as a ‘willing know nothing, a woman of ignorance’ (p.17), who blindly holds to tradition in its most sacrosanct form. Her mother has been critically victimized by the European gift of Christianity as a narcotic to the black slave, a comforting myth that dimmed the brutalities of oppression. She has relinquished all responsibilities for her own welfare to God and she wants Meridian to do so as well. Meridian refuses to submit herself to the Christian beliefs of her mother and she challenges her mother’s blind devotion to religion, also she challenges her blind and passive acceptance of the overlapping constraints of marriage and motherhood. Meridian sees sex as a “sanctuary” (p.57), and in this Meridian ‘look out at the male world with something approaching equanimity, even charity; even friendship’ (p.57). She, after experiencing motherhood in the initial stages of her life, decides to seek admission in a college to find out her own path and identity. This new way of continuing life for finding identity enables her to achieve, the highest point of power, prosperity, health, etc. Deborah E. McDowell in “The Self in Bloom; Alice Walker’s Meridian” says that as a result, she develops ‘a completeness of being’ (McDowell 262). Hers is a journey from the most ordinary position as a high school dropout to a self-illuminated person who has achieved her selfhood and she knows what is the purpose and mission of one’s own life. She wants to begin as an ordinary black female and to end as a self-assured person while is not an easy development. To understand herself, she has had to undergo innumerable trials and tests to find the answers of the questions in her mind. As a result, she is evolved ‘from a woman raped by racial and sexual oppression to a revolutionary figure affecting action and strategy to bring freedom to herself and other poor disenfranchised blacks in the south’ (Washington 148).
In fact Christian Barbara in Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition says: ‘Meridian’s quest for wholeness and her involvement in the civil rights movement is initiated by her feelings of inadequacy in living up to the standards of black motherhood’ (Christian 47-48). Meridian wants to give some meaning to her life as an individual. She is awakened to her true self, the moment she knows about the Civil Rights Movement.The moment her marriage to Eddie has dissolved and Meridian has joined Civil Rights Movement. Meridian’s mother detests her radical political activities. To Meridian’s involvement in the civil rights movement, her mother responds: ‘As far as I’m concerned…you’ve wasted a year of your life fooling around with those people (Civil rights movements). The papers say they’re crazy. God separated the sheep from the goats and the black folks from the white’ (p. 83). Meridian commits herself to the civil rights struggle, earns a scholarship to Saxon college. In the early days of the movement, Meridian, as a volunteer in the Civil Rights Movement, confronts with the feeling of union and absolute commitment. She protests with the other volunteers against the town’s divided hospital facilities and she participates in the freedom march to the church. She joins the Civil Rights Movement finds her power to raise her voice against segregation. Deborah. E. McDowell in “The Changing Same: Generational Connections and Black Women Novelists” says ‘Meridian challenges her mother’s unquestioning acceptance of her secondary citizenship’ (Mc Dowell 267). In turmoil, the police knock her down and she is trampled by people running back and forth. The sheriff grabs her by the hair and begins to punch her and kick her in the back. She does not even scream except in her own mind. She is untainted by contradictory claims: as she is being arrested and beaten and she realizes that ‘they were at a time and place in History that forced the trivial to fall away and they were absolutely together’ (p. 81). Along with Meridian, Truman and Lynne have also paid high prices for their roles and their activities in the movement and they have lost what people consider the focus of private life: children, parents, personal love. Meridian by her involvement in the movement, forgets the events in her personal past that once kept her from the larger historical context of her life. Walker In an interview with Claudia C. Tate discusses the structure and significance of Meridian and she speaks of her fears about ‘how much of the past, especially of our past, get forgotten’ (p.185). Meridian becomes a model of a resilient woman by her college education. She begins to explore the possibilities for her own growth through the beginning of her education which Wade Gaylein The Black Women in the Novels of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison observes:
‘Without the Movement and without the education, Meridian could have become like Mrs. Hill, a woman who knows suffocation is all deliberate, but who lives nonetheless a life of blind sacrifice’ (Ophr 58).
She understands the power of education which makes the woman confident, self-supporting, and understands that nothing can stop her from achieving her goal. The exercises in the College have a great influence on her life. Meridian always confronts with the question, “Is there a community which can support them?” The struggle of Meridian in her personal transformation and in finding her identity echoes June Jordan’s definition of her duties as a feminist:
I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect…and… I am entering my soul into a struggle that will most certainly transform the experience of all peoples of the earth, as no other movement can,…because the movement in to self-love, self-respect, and self-determination is…now galvanizing…the unarguable majority of human beings everywhere. ( Hernton 58)
Meridian, in her development, depends on her movement for going backward in order to move forward, and backward is the South. Deborah E. McDowell in “The Self in Bloom; Alice Walker’s Meridian” observes:
It is significant that much of the novel is set in coastal Georgia, where the `survival of Africanism particularly of the oral, religious, and musical traditions is said to be most salient. Echoing Jean Toomer, Walker sees the South, despite it’s the history of racism and oppression, as regenerative, for it is the South that is the cradle of the black man’s experience in the New World, and the South that has continued to shape his experience in this country. (p.272)
Meridian notices that the black girls who did leave home and come back are successful secretaries, schoolteachers, and all of them had one thing in common:
‘They all had altered their appearance so that they might look more like white women. They straightened and bleached their hair, wore make-up, and made other things, all under the guise of self-improvement (p.111).
Meridian too becomes aware of herself as an adventurer and she thinks that she belongs to the people who had led troops in battle like Harriet Tubman, Thus, Meridian starts to claim the black woman’s history and tries to reconnect herself with that positive and inspiring history of black women.
Meridian’s commitment to justice embraces her own people and her oppressors. By choosing the female community Meridian not only underscores her commitment to justice but also affirms the feminist credo in which she realizes that the personal is the political. Finally, she reveals a “ neo-feminist consciousness” that enables her to recognize that the ‘dignity and value of a person are to be found in the degree of inner growth achieved, in compassion, in the affirmation and acting out of humanistic values over and against the in Specifics of one’s condition’ (Koppelman Cornillon 186).
Meridian’s quest is for personal space where she can define herself as she chooses to. Meridian’s task would essentially be to borrow a term from feminist epistemology, one of “consciousness-raising”. Through the Meridian, Walker wants to bring out who seeks identity and the right to become an independent person. Throughout American history, Blacks were struggling to gain the Civil Rights: ‘The Civil Rights Movement in the South was considered one of America’s most important movements of political and social readjustment in the 20th century’ (Bulton 3). The movement was the due to the major efforts of the Blacks since Reconstruction. Walker in this novel tries to describe Meridian’s development through some points such as the possibility of vision, the emptiness of a premature marriage. McDowell in The American Kaleidoscope: Race, Ethnicity, the Civic Culture says that Meridian’s character is ‘a prototype for psychic wholeness and individual autonomy’ (McDowell 102). In the tradition of Bildungsroman, the book is a series of initiatory experiences that Meridian undergoes to find her identity and develops completeness of being. At the beginning of the novel, Meridian is in a state of decay. At the end of the novel, she flourishes and strengthened.
The novel depicts decay and growth through Meridian. For Meridian it becomes clear that political and economic and social empowerment is necessary for the development of women. Throughout the African Cultural tradition, Meridian moves towards her emancipation and progress and gains her identity through the Civil Rights Movement. Meridian completes her journey of knowing herself and she creates herself in her own image and not as a preconceived one because in spite of Meridian’s painful private experiences, she comes to know a new self. Meridian realizes that she must overcome the idea of “a woman’s place” and for fulfilling this mission, she must go away from two institutions that have traditionally sheltered women: the family and church. They have offered comfort but they have contributed to a restrictive belief in the proper role of women. Walker in her novel Meridian over-signifies black feminine identity to an extreme. Walker uses the novel as a contemplative and analytical tool in our own individual search, and Walker gives flesh to the novel because of the questions, and questions are rooted in this country’s past, and persist in the present.
Meridian completes her journey of knowing herself to the extent that she creates herself in her own image, and she succeeds in evolving a new self. She realizes that she must overcome the idea of “a woman’s place” and to fulfill this mission she must go away from the church and her family which have traditionally sheltered women. Meridian propelled on a search for spiritual and political health. She has sinned against biological motherhood. She becomes a mother who expands her mind in which she is directed towards the preservation of all life.
In the novel Meridian, the main character grows up through the eyes of the reader.Her emotional, physical and psychological stages of resistance were fully depicted. Meridian is bold enough to reject religion at a very early stage despite the fact that her mother is a devout Christian. In school Meridian is unable to finish a speech because she knows that there is no truth in the words she speaks (p. 121). Her defiance is also seen in how she becomes a non-conformist when she gives up family life and motherhood to attend college (p.91). Her decision to work as a volunteer for voter registration foreshadows further her individuality. Her determination to give the wild child a chance and, later after his tragic death, a proper funeral despite being denied by the authorities further shows Meridian’s prowess: Meridian leading “the students sang through tears that slipped like melting pellets of sleet down their grieved and angered checks: we shall overcome…’ (p. 37).She actively gets involved in the Civil Rights Movement but conceals it from the university. She encourages others to join the movement, and they go from door to door trying to convince others to have the courage to vote.
Despite the disappointing relationship with Truman Held, Meridian is strong enough to carry on having lost a child, lover and her friend Anne-Marion, Meridian moves into her next stage of life after overcoming a severe illness at the college. She becomes a mediator between her people and the mayor when Black people are not allowed to swim in the public swimming pool, and the mayor refuses to build them theirs. Meridian leads the Blacks in a peaceful demonstration to the mayor’s office bearing the corpse of a dead five-year-old boy who had been struck in the sewer for two days:
“It was Meridian who had led them to the mayor’s office, bearing in her arms the bloated figure of the five-year-old boy who had been struck in the sewer for two days before he was rake out with a graphing hook” (p. 93).
That is after several children were drowned in floods while swimming in ditches that serves as make-shift pools. The women sit with the mother of the lost child, recall their own lost children, stare at their cursing husbands who could not look back at them and shake their heads.
Throughout the novel, Meridian is depicted as having a positive sense of herself as a Black woman: strong, independent, and adventurous. She lives among the poorest Blacks in the rural South, becoming like them, leading them in non-violent protest marches to improve conditions in their communities:
While other students dreaded confrontation with police she welcomed it, and was capable of an inner gaiety, a sense of freedom, as she saw the clubs slashing down on her from above only once was she beaten into unconsciousness, and it was not the damage done to her body that she remembered.(p.230).
Walker celebrates her as a Black woman for these qualities. The Writer also makes an array of powerful black mothers to show her identification with Black motherhood. Walker traces Meridian’s foremothers back several generations. One was a slave who slowly starved to death to keep her children and to feed them; another a slave artist who buys her family’s freedom with her earning from the paintings decorating people’s bans. Walker brings alive the slaves’ past in the story of the slave woman Louvinie a storyteller. The slave artist and the storyteller represent Walker’s concern with the creativity of the African-American women.
Walker’s The Temple of My Familiarvenerates mothers, grandmothers and their own women. She asserts in her novel, The Temple of My Familiar Martikke observes this“ that only by looking towards their ancestors as role models as well as remembering their kinship to all creation, can they become whole” (Martikke 175).
The aim of Alice walker is to pass on their cultural traditions to future generations and reflect and reform their culture. Walker explains the new age quality in her writings and her ideas in the following manners:
What I’m doing is literarily trying to reconnect us to our ancestors, all of us. I m really to do that because I see that ancient past as the future, t6hat the connection that was original is a connection if we can affirm it in the present, it will make a different future. Because it is really fatal to see yourself as separate. You have to feed. I think, more or less equal and valid in order for the whole organism to fell healthy.(p.31).
Walker’s fiction is about the recovery of women, family, community, spirituality, stressing balance and aiming for collective and personal transformation. As a writer, activist and womanist, Walker has directed her energies to the exposure the richness in the Black community, particularly in relation to its women; moreover, she has emphasized the necessity of understanding one’s past so as to be able to pass it on to future generations. All her beliefs about memory and one’s relationship to the past seem to converge in The Temple of My Familiar. Memory is a means which allows every individual to turn towards his or her own past in order to reevaluate it. As Susanne Martikke states:
Templepostulates a comprehensive concept of memory that sets out to alter giving in to the desire of forgetting historical or personal catastrophes. In real life, as in the protagonists’ lives, the decision between wanting to forget and the duty to remember should always favour the latter in order to guarantee that all versions of historical experience can become parts of the discourse. (p.183).
