footnotes = an official draft beginning

OUTLINE
1. African American radical spiritual narrative traditions

Beginning with autobiographical texts by Zilpha Elaw, Jarena Lee, and (more famously) Maria Stewart, African American women preachers and evangelists argued for a radical redefinition of themselves through their spiritual revelations.

Radical black women authors re-wrote both Anglo literary traditions (such as Puritan conversion narratives) and African American traditions (especially church rhetoric). This is a dual revision or a double-tradition that Walker steps into.

Kimberly Rae Connor argues that twentieth century black women’s literature has evolved directly out of a religious consciousness that is at the center of African American culture. This evolution is conversational and dialogic; it enters into an already existing conversation, adding women’s voices and calling up, for those in the know, the voices of radical women spiritual leaders of the previous century.

One of the existing conditions of this dialogue is the continuing presence of ancestors, the spiritual if not literal presence of the past; Walker’s work evolved out of a tradition that held its intellectual & spiritual foremothers as present inspirations. These previous authors are still around to be respected and cherished and honored and grappled with.

The way that Walker treats her literary ancestors parallels the belief sytem that she demonstrates in her work: a faith in the living presence of ancestors and of the responsible stewardship of the present by people who are part of a timeless spiritual continuity of being. This treatment of the ancestors is not unique to Walker, but Walker’s work is at the center of debates about which account of black women’s literary history and recovery is most effective, and which version of black women’s contribution to African American literature is most accurate. Pryse, for instance, proposes its centrality to the discussion of literary authority; Christian suggests a gradual process of increased autonomy in self-definition; McDowell suggests what? Bakeer suggests what? Gates suggests what?

Walker’s texts posit healing through transgression, through excess and love. Walker’s texts integrate these different traditions—literary authority, women’s radical embodiment, and religious consciousness. Walker’s status within literature and black feminism makes it especially pertinent that her work both analyzes and represents the spiritual continuity of the present and the past.

Arguing a similar continuity from a cultural perspective, Marjorie Pryse links Walker with Zora Neale Hurston (a ubiquitous comparison, though innovative in Pryse’s early essay), arguing a teleology among black women writers. As an American literary field, African American women’s writing is a genre obsessed with literary authority , and its trajectory achieved its full flower in Hurston and Walker because their work actually writes down the traditions that were, previously, only in folk or oral incarnations. Walker’s contemporary and radical revisions of genre and women’s autonomy in her texts have opened the path for an explosion of black women writers.

In 2004, Joycelyn Moody argues that that radical women’s texts of the nineteenth century—far from being incipient or predictive—were fully realized theological and literary works. Moody argues that Rebecca Jackson, Zilpha Elaw, Jarena Lee, and others wrote self-liberation narratives whose sentimental qualities and religious fervor were moments of “excess” that allowed the writers to imagine new possibilities for their spiritual and intellectual work. Moody’s interest in the “excessive” elements of these women’s work illustrates precisely the precedent for the radical erotic spirituality that Walker advocates in The Color Purple. Celie learns to revise her sense of herself and her own capability in light of the profound love she experiences with Shug and in her extended family community. The transgressive nature of these connections—her lesbian affair with Shug, the marital role reversal between Sofia and Celie’s brother whose name I can’t remember, and the ultimately polyamorous family arrangement with which the book concludes—suggests that it is only by loving and praying outside the conventional family and religious structure that Celie can find her true enlightenment and contentment.

Walker continues to enact this “excessive” and unconventional portrait in her novels—beginning even with Meridian’s triangulation and transgression of the relationship with Lynne and Truman—and her essentially rebellious aesthetic suggests that breaking the bounds of dogmatism and or doctrine is basically the only sure thing. In Possessing the Secret of Joy, these unconventional family relationships form a part of Tashi’s healing—though there is no sanctifying all-consuming healing, ultimately, it is the product of Adam and Lisette’s relationship, the biracial bisexual intellectual Pierre, who unlocks the secret to her pain. This is an old point about Walker’s novel, but what’s interesting to me about it is how closely this transgression relates to the self-recovery and re-discovery suggested in 19th century women’s sermons.

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footnote: In Walker’s case, the authority comes from re-inscribing or contributing some new imaginative element to the tradition, rather than breaking free or rebelling (as is often ascribed to white male American revisions to literary authority).