right on

Susannah Bartlow
Dissertation Prospectus

‘VULNERABILITY AS ARMOR’:
HEALING, LANGUAGE, AND POLITICAL ACTION
IN WALKER, LORDE, BAMBARA AND RICH

“The world is ill. The question these novels raise is how we as a human community will work together to bring it to health.” --Ann Powell Stanford

We never are sure how the medicina is going to work. What it will call forth. If you maintain respect for the medicina and for the sacred space of healing and also for the story you are hearing, all will be well. –Alice Walker, Now is the Time to Open Your Heart (144)


At the 2007 National Council for Research on Women conference, womanist scholar Layli Phillips proposed that the next era of feminist scholarship lies in spirituality. American feminism’s major roadblocks—the relative isolation of feminist academic intellectuals and a hostile political environment—will be resolved by taking healing and spiritual advancement as the guiding metaphor and practice of women’s education and action. Phillips’ diagnosis echoed the recent theories of other emerging women scholars: Hershini Bhana Young’s Haunting Capital (2006), Judylyn Ryan’s Spirituality as Ideology in Black Women’s Film and Literature (2004), Gay Wilentz’s Healing Narratives (2000), and the introduction of This Bridge Called My Home (a 2004 update of This Bridge Called My Back) explored ghostly and spiritual forces as the source of women’s strength.
This scholarly trend is the delayed appearance of spiritual development as a significant presence in academic feminist discourse. Church community and spiritual advancement were, respectively, the context and narrative of American women’s activism ; in the 1970s and 80s, religiously-based community action took on the rhetoric of both New Age spiritualism and woman-centered theology. Yet the master narrative of feminist scholarship, from the perspective of literary studies, emphasizes the sectarian politics of the “second wave;” the institutionalization of women’s studies into the corporate university, and feminism’s turn to liberal reform (in the political sphere) and postmodern theory (in academic circles).
This dissertation counters that strategy, using primary texts and social movement history to argue that spiritual healing through language, especially as written by African diaspora women and their allies, must be read back into feminist literary studies as the defining metaphor of late-twentieth century women’s movements. The complete picture must be broadened to include the rush of cross-disciplinary, woman-centered scholarship since the 1970s addressing issues of healing, spiritual development, theology, and religious community. Even popular self-help discourses, which now dominate the capitalist marketplace, contain elements of the feminist New Age rhetoric that originated in consciousness-raising, community organizing, and spiritual recovery movements.
I argue that the work of Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich is essentially spiritual and activist in nature. By constructing what Gay Wilentz has termed “wellness narratives,” stories of emotional healing or lived experience that link these intimate tales with context and consequences, each writer explores how creative commitment can heal a political wound. I build on Wilentz’s definition to show how poetic imagination works as a social and political tool through the author’s conscious engagement with the healing power of language. As a community role, the persona of the visionary or healing artist also depends upon a realistic, materialist involvement with contemporary politics.
Through a series of blended chapters, I hope to respect as well as to bridge the divide between “feminism” and “womanism.” I return to Walker, Lorde, Rich and Bambara as icons of late 20th century justice movements to try to understand the visions they advanced, the work their poetry performed, and what their choices can teach us. Feminism and womanism—though both invested in the advancement of women’s rights and perspectives—are vastly different ontologically. The commonly accepted definitions of feminism—middle-class women’s civil rights activism leading to cultural and professional advancements—do not graze the surface of women-organized social and artistic movements of our living history. Feminist theory most often advances a middle-class analysis that fails to account for the thematic or political interests of a majority of women. Global feminist theory, in turn, focuses on women’s coalition building and political action to the detriment of a long-term vision for creative and spiritual empowerment. Womanism often emphasizes Christian theology, or the lived experience of black women; white feminist theorists mistake this for a genre distinction when, as the chapter on Lorde and Rich will illustrate, these theories originated together in the discourse of socially informed, spiritual healing.
The three dominant spiritual strains present in this work are New Age or mystic secular spirituality, Christian womanist ethics, and transatlantic African recovery. These religious paths were, and are, consciously practiced as tools of empowerment. The ideology advanced in the works of Bambara and Lorde emerges from specific African cosmologies that, as Judylyn Ryan argues, consider body, mind and spirit as integrated tools of spiritual and political practice. Hershini Bhana Young argues, from a similar metaphysics, that the haunting presence of ancestors provides the connective tissue for global women’s empowerment. As Phillips’ womanist invocation suggests, the perspective dominating this dissertation is simultaneously grounded in African diaspora traditions and available across cultures. Alice Walker, for instance, uncovers this connectivity most richly in her work influenced by Native American and American Buddhist thought. The dissertation begins by exploring the iconic Walker and her artistic and spiritual transformations.













Chapter One
Something’s telling me to open my heart:
Spiritual Development in Alice Walker’s Work

Womanist. 1. From womanish. (Opp. Of “girlish,” i.e., frivolous, irresponsible, not serious.) A black feminist or woman of color. From the black folk expression of mothers to female children … Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willfull behavior…
2. Also: A woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers women’s culture, women’s emotional flexibility (values tears as a natural counter-balance of laughter), and women’s strength. (Mother’s Gardens xi)

Alice Walker popularized the term “womanism” through the above definition in her 1984 collection In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens. Walker is an icon and ambassador for the black women’s literary renaissance of the late 20th century. Her best-known work, The Color Purple, offered a liberating vision for oppressed black women through its honesty about sexual abuse and healing and its reimagining of southern Baptist spiritual life. However, Walker has shifted from being read as a visionary advocate to, among some harsher critics, a New Age hack; her 2004 novel Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart was reviewed as a text that wasted her literary gifts and her community affiliations on spiritual parable: an unfortunate addendum to a stellar career.
Yet Walker considers her spiritual and literary practices to be complementary; in 1992, she noted that “spiritual preparation” allows her to create characters “from a state of grace” (Ms. Interview). I argue that Walker’s shift is distasteful to critics because of her original position as a pioneer among politically engaged black women writers of the 1970s. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, after a period that she identifies as “hibernation” (qtd. in Simcikova x), Walker began to take spiritual experience as the primary reality that would resolve both personal drama and political crisis.
This chapter revises the critical narrative on Walker by looking at what her works share: spiritual coming-of-age or consciousness-awakening that reckons with the legacy of the civil rights movement through an individual character’s participation in a spiritual, rather than a political or material, reality. This spiritual consciousness is often cited as Walker’s greatest flaw, but I argue that it is a continuation of her early work on black women’s social and emotional healing. This reading will also contextualize Walker’s growth in the New Age spiritual perspective pervading feminist discourse communities.
I explore 1984’s The Color Purple and 2004’s Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart to learn from the fall Walker’s critics perceive. In Now Is the Time, an authoress and her partner embark on separate vacations; Kate’s adventures are consciously chosen spiritual quests to Colorado and South America, whereas Yolo’s relaxing trip to Hawaii is interrupted by native Hawaiians who ask him, at first mistaking him for a native, to stand guard over a body. The message of Yolo’s adventure is clear: there is no vacation from spiritual growth and political brotherhood. Kate is an unsympathetic character, though her consciousness and biography shadow Walker’s own; Walker places her on the level of the spiritual leaders, quickly and implausibly, attributing her status as a spiritual elder to the vaguely defined instructions Kate receives from Grandmother, the universal woman-spirit she meets in her visions.
This sort of jargon—womanspirit; spiritual vision—permeates the novel; the New Age terminology cuts corners in Walker’s prose. I read Now Is the Time as a New Age parable, rather than a novel—an open-hearted gift to the reader to explore her own spirituality. Now Is the Time is supposed to illustrate a spiritual point; it illuminates Walker’s theology, rather than provoking the reader’s spiritual questioning.
By contrast, a healing narrative works to develop a relationship with the reader by establishing a spiritual connection across the text; the story itself becomes the healing, by transporting the reader into an affective state. In The Color Purple, the epistolary form involves the reader in the Celie’s interiority, requiring that we experience her gradual, painful healing and independence. The novel ultimately proposes that the most sacred experience of the divine is personal—Celie’s pleasure in the color purple, the evidence of God in the natural environment. Walker also suggests, without arguing overtly, that the greatest spiritual experience is the healing power of love: the novel treats Celie and Shug’s sexual relationship as a consecration, another expression of God-Spirit, that also serves as the major turning point in Celie’s development. The natural theology expressed in The Color Purple will provide a forum to discuss Walker’s transition into New Age spiritualism. Since Walker advocates continuously for trivial experiences of the sacred, I will clarify how The Color Purple is distinguished from her later work by its representation of the characters’ interiority and the details of Celie’s daily faith.
There are two key problems with Walker’s later works: first, her spiritual vision is expressed in New Age terms. Although Walker has been engaged in this theology for most of the time spanning between these two books, and although the basic message of her Christian revisions and her New Age spirituality is the same, the rhetoric of New Age is utterly discredited by most critics; I will discuss why. Second, Walker has shifted from writing healing narratives to writing spiritual allegory, which is a form that only works if the reader shares the author’s investment in the specific faith. I argue that spiritual parable, while less successful than a healing narrative, has always been a component of Walker’s work; she has developed away from writing healing narrative, but her later work should be contextualized as part of a lifelong theme. To clarify the distinction between healing narrative and spiritual allegory, I go on to discuss Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt-Eaters and Walker’s Meridian.





Chapter Two
“Are You Sure, Sweetheart, that You Want to Be Well?”:
The body and accountability in The Salt Eaters and Meridian

Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters (1979) and Walker’s Meridian (1976) both address the legacy of civil rights and the relationship between the black woman’s body and the struggle for community. Meridian Hill and Velma Henry both occupy central roles in the texts; their physical struggles suggest that civil rights and justice in America are painful, possible and necessary. Most importantly, however, the texts address the legacy of civil rights as directly related to the experience of spiritual, physical, and psychological transformation: both Velma and Meridian must choose to be well. Meridian cannot make the choice; Velma is offered the choice and the book narrates her struggle to commit to the demands of healing.
Walker’s Meridian is a religious martyr figure whose mental and physical illness cause her to retreat from active political involvement. She experiences seizures and religious ecstasy; she describes herself, and is described by others, as possessing an otherworldly quality, a consciousness that is always slightly apart. Like Jesus, she devotes her time to walking among the poor and downtrodden, returning to the rural black South. Her human defensiveness and fragility are cast as divine, and her delicate mental and physical health are sacrificed for moments of spiritual ecstasy and communion. Her seizures and collapses are never explained, but the political implications are clear from the novel’s opening scene: she collapses in the face of a military tank, beside a racially segregated sideshow at the town square.
In The Salt Eaters, although Velma Henry is delicate and self-sacrificing, her illness is represented as painfully human, not divine: she is brought to Minnie Ransom, the town healer, after trying to commit suicide. Minnie—who works in concert with a spirit guide and with the supervision of Afro-centric spiritual elders—confronts Velma, and the reader, with the direct question: “Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?” Velma’s practical and efficient justice work has served everyone but herself, and now her self-martyrdom has brought her life to a standstill. Bambara addresses this crisis cinematically, casting every member of Claybourne, Georgia at a crossroads: choose to be well mentally and physically, or continue to suffer and bring suffering to the community (including African ancestors, who are present throughout Bambara’s novel as spiritual guides and harbingers of social health). Bambara’s absolutist vision—in which, as Wilentz argues, “lies are as destructive as radioactive waste” (73)—means that healing becomes a personal and community responsibility.
Bambara’s intentionally holistic narrative mirrors the inclusivity that Walker fails to achieve in her later work, although Walker implies that this lack of unity is the reason for Meridian’s ill health. Both texts, in their blunt engagement with the injustices within the social justice movement, attempt to right the wrongs of the past in order to move ahead with the struggle for black and women’s liberation. Bambara sought to address this need intentionally, declaring in “Salvation Is the Issue”: “that is what I work to do: to produce stories that save our lives” (Evans 42). Wilentz reads Bambara’s work as a ritual that “(re)creates an audience with the ancestors as part of a continuum of being” in the African diaspora (78). Walker’s efforts to promote an activist agenda from within a spiritual framework suggest that both authors sought not only to depict spiritual development, but to provoke it in the reader in a ritualistic way.
Chapter Three
Erotic Commitment:
Audre Lorde’s artistic maturation as a model of healing language

Expanding on the African-centered spiritual healing of The Salt-Eaters, and the intra-movement struggles in Meridian, I turn to Audre Lorde’s mid-career poetry and epistemology, which used the presence of African goddesses to expand her poetic vision. Lorde’s relationship to the spiritual and political quest was uniquely literary, trusting in the singular power of language to generate a woman-centered authority she termed “the erotic.” Based on trips to Africa, as well as a generally growing interest in her racial identity, the substance of Lorde’s work changed significantly in the 1970s. I will review Lorde’s early work and her conscious effort to establish herself as a visionary poet; although she sought to form this identity, she lacked a cohesive vision. The metaphors and feminist spirituality she found in West Africa also cemented her status as a feminist icon, since both black arts and feminist communities were emphasizing archaeology of African roots and goddess-centered cultures.
The Black Unicorn (1978) recast Lorde’s existing narrative of political, spiritual, and artistic empowerment in mythological terms, as a struggle emerging from and supported by the presence of goddesses. Combining reflective and self-referential work with a complex cosmology (including a glossary of goddesses), The Black Unicorn marks Lorde’s artistic maturation: for the first time, her erotic poetics merged with a spiritual universe that linked her with feminine and African origins. Not only did The Black Unicorn resolve, to some extent, Lorde’s need for a connection with female African roots, it alluded to her awakening interest in a “transatlantic tradition” (Stepto qtd in DeVeaux 214). I argue that Lorde was able to achieve this precisely because the spiritual narratives she discovered (and sometimes invented) allowed her to combine the healing power of language with her political aims. This synergy defined the remainder of her career and culminated in her concept of the erotic.
In her theorizations in “Uses of the Erotic” and “Poetry Is Not A Luxury,” Lorde offers over a hundred definitions and redefinitions of the erotic and its uses. It is both a nourishing and challenging sense, a tool of our physical, intellectual and emotional lives that should be used in balance with rationality. Lorde has attained bumper-sticker status among feminists (e.g. “your silence will not protect you”) through her concepts of self-creation and –articulation. These artistic developments were grounded in difficult spiritual commitments that have been glossed over by feminist critics—although, to be fair, womanist critics engage with them routinely. In the following chapter, I address Lorde’s second moment of commitment, following her second diagnosis, when she chose to use her stature to explore the connection between her immediate experience, her poetry, and global women’s activism. This commitment was shaped in part by her poetic ethics, which was heavily influenced by another feminist icon, Adrienne Rich.


Chapter Four
The Arithmetics of Loyalty: Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and poetic justice

“We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it … It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.” (Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider, 37-38)

As discussed in Chapter 3, Audre Lorde believed that poetry was an expression of erotic possibility, an essential means to power. Lorde asserts this process as one of self-articulation, while her colleague Adrienne Rich understands it as a process of reaching out from personal necessity to tap into or impact an other. Both women believed that poetry was an empowering means to an end, a divine tool. This chapter will compare Lorde’s transcribed determination in The Cancer Journals (1980) and A Burst of Light (1986) with Rich’s key aesthetic and political transformation in the 1970s, leading up to 1973’s Diving Into the Wreck and 1978’s “Disloyal to Civilization”. I will end by discussing why Lorde’s decision to focus on her community as a localized relation embedded in a worldwide network was more successful than Rich’s attempt to maintain status as a public intellectual. Like Walker, Rich’s political relevance was ultimately weakened by her own prominence.
In The Cancer Journals, A Burst of Light, and The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance, Lorde describes a healing path that is embodied, spiritual, and materially connected to her immediate life while remaining in sync with the global activist community in which she took part. Her illness brought a new resonance to her earlier claim that words generate freedom; the imminent threat of death stimulated a choice to directly confront mortality. I will explore this later commitment and its implications for healing language and effective politics.
I will also discuss Lorde’s literary relationship with Rich and their mutually reinforcing efforts to bring conscience to bear on feminist activities. They shared a productive literary and personal friendship, challenging and supporting each other in a struggle to advance a woman-centered culture. I argue that Lorde’s commitment to her compound aesthetic—healing language and social action—is the same commitment Rich made in transforming her poetic practice.
Rich’s early success depended upon her poetic form and its relationship to the white male lyric tradition. In the 1960s, her work outlined the limits of middle-class feminine subjectivity, its controlled practice and desperation. In 1964, she reflected that her first two books represented a more “absolutist approach to the universe” and that, as long as her primary pleasure in writing was to “create this kind of formal order,” she felt her poems were “queerly limited.” Beginning with 1973’s Diving Into the Wreck, she developed a more independent poetic voice; in the title poem, the androgynous diver discovers half-worn instruments that can be rehabilitated. The metaphor of diving evokes both feminist process (discovering the submerged power of womanhood) and Rich’s own artistic development, in which she rehabilitates her craft to find a more lively and honest poetry. “In the more recent poems,” Rich said, “something is happening, something has happened to me and, if I have been a good parent to the poem, something will happen to you who read it” (Gelpi 89). The significance of this transition lies not in Rich’s political beliefs, which were consistently feminist from her earliest work, but in her artistic and political commitments. In the years between her nomination for the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, and her collective refusal (with Lorde and Walker) of the 1973 National Book Award, Rich chose to become “disloyal to civilization.” This choice was reflected in her poetic practice and her public statements; she began to explore her Jewish identity and advocate for a radical, woman-centered consciousness (most often associated with her “Compulsory Heterosexuality” essay of 1980).
Her 1979 “Disloyal to Civilization” describes the foundation of this evolving politics. She writes that “It is far easier, especially for academically trained white women, to get an intellectual/political ‘fix’ on the idea of racism, than to identify with black female experience: to explore it emotionally as part of our own” (On Lies 281). Emphasizing the importance of action rather than guilt, self-loathing, or “hierarchies of oppression,” Rich’s foundation is a commitment to transform society and relationships (279), to explore in a serious way how white women have been “instrumental” in the structures of oppression. Rich articulates, within the collaborative climate of 1970s feminism, what work needs to take place in order for the past mistakes to be transcended.
For Rich (and Lorde), as a form of sublime or sacred communication, poetry bridged what women wanted and failed to grasp—precisely these efforts to construct community—with what they could achieve once they articulated their own empowerment. As Rich writes in the foreword to The Fact of A Doorframe:
Over the years it has seemed to me just that—the desire to be heard, to
resound in another’s soul—that is the impulse behind writing poems, for me.
Increasingly, this has meant hearing and listening to others, taking into myself
the language of experience different from my own. (xvi)
Rich’s poetry requires not simply an audience or reader but a responsive listener ready to receive the poem at a deep level. Rich’s work calls readers to respect and incorporate difference as difference, to understand poetry as part of an effort in a social relationship: as a social work. This process is affective and narrative: each poem enacts an event and stimulates a response; the poem writes a new awareness.
Lorde and Rich’s differing commitments to a woman-centered artistic community refine the question haunting my work: How is it possible for a creative commitment to heal a political wound? This is the central question of the dissertation, and I will conclude by exploring how Lorde and Rich arrived at their respective answers, in dialogue and independently.

Final Thoughts and Debates
As suggested in Chapter Four, I will explore the relationship between healing language, activism, and artistic efforts. As I work to develop the chapters above, I would like to articulate the contrast between healing narrative and spiritual allegory more fully. I also want to explore theories of trauma, the body, and healing as a means to discuss the central mechanism or strategy of healing language.
As a project, this dissertation explores several different fields. Its primary contribution, however, will be to redirect feminist theoretical debates on subjectivity, healing, and personal growth. There is a relationship between personal healing and political growth that transcends postmodern debates about the nature of the self. I hope to better articulate that mechanism. I also hope to contribute to the increasing volumes of scholarship revisiting the “second wave” and attempting to create a more accurate and useful discussion of women’s living history. Finally, the dissertation explores both iconic and less well-known figures of women’s writing. I hope to contribute a more inclusive portrait of women’s literature in the late twentieth century.

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