Pryse, Marjorie.

Pryse, Marjorie. “Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and the ‘Ancient Power’ of Black Women.” Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985.

Pryse’s 1985 introduction to Conjuring praises a black women’s literary tradition in the making. She argues that Hurston is its first full appearance and Walker its second coming. Praising the “folk experience” and creative expression of 19th century evangelical preachers, slave narratives, and artistic traditions (like Celie’s activities; like in “Mother’s Gardens”), but argues that the true marker of a literary tradition is when it is written down. She urges black women critics to “[speak] with each others tongues in our mouths” (22), serving as “mediums” for the tradition that Walker invokes at the beginning of The Color Purple: so that women’s experience can be “illuminated” by conjuring one another as allies in the further flowering of the now-established field.

Pryse’s central arguments—the “conjuring” and recovery of black women’s literature and its centrality to American literary history as a genre of literary authority—are great. Disturbingly, she traces a more “authentic” tradition as it evolves from white-skinned black women in the late 19th century to the black lesbian folk hero Celie (20). Her uncomplicated vision of racial identity is contradicted even within TCP, since the rainbow of characters and orientations are united by love, not skin tone. Further, Pryse undercuts her own argument: black women’s fiction is a noble tradition that “conjures” its strength precisely because it derives from “folk” and oral traditions that have mutated into exciting new written forms. Not because, as she argues, it is a relatively new tradition finding its roots at the end of the century.

Cynically, then, I say unto thee: right on to the tradition and place in literary history, no way to the authenticity debate and the need to authenticate via writing only. This may be a question of time period, also—this was one of the groundbreaking black womanist critical texts. But it is precisely this sort of argument that grounds Walker as the second mother of black women’s fiction and marks her drift (post-1985) into New Age and more inclusive paths as a betrayal. There is a legitimate argument to be raised: can one still be considered a womanist if her work has drifted so far afield of womanist thought and tradition? But the revisionism has always been present in Walker and, I think, suggested by the liberation theology individualism of the 19th century icons.