The Rhythms of Power in Paule Marshall's Fiction
TL;DR: Paule Marshall's major works include Brown Girl Brownstones (1959), The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969), and a quartet of novellas, Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1961).
Abstract: Apart from the usual review notices in the usual periodicals, there has been no noteworthy discussion of Paule Marshall's major works-the novels, Brown Girl Brownstones (1959) and The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969), and a quartet of novellas, Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1961). This neglect is unfortunate, because Paule Marshall's major themes are both significant and timely. Her West Indian background (Barbadian parentage) enables Paule Marshall to invest her North American materials with a Caribbean perspective, and in the process she invokes that Pan-African sensibility which has become so important in contemporary definitions of Black identity. Secondly, her treatment of the Black woman links her ethnic themes with the current feminist revolt. Finally, the ethnic and sexual themes are integrated with the novelist's interest in the subject of power. This interest is the logical outcome of her preoccupation with groups-women and Blacks-whose roles have been defined by powerlessness. But her treatment of this subject is complex and innovative because she analyses power not only as the political goal of ethnic and feminist movements, but also as social and psychological phenomena which simultaneously affect racial and sexual roles, shape cultural traditions, and mould the individual psyche. Indeed, Paule Marshall's style invariably includes images of power-asexperience. She is a good example, in this regard, of those novelists in whom the recurrence of major themes imposes a distinctive iconography on their narrative forms. We can trace throughout her fiction rhythms of movement and sound which symbolically dramatize the dynamics of power in several forms-physical force, will power, political and sexual power, and so on. This power symbolism imparts a distinctive rhythm to her fictional forms as a whole: the narrative opens and closes with identical or similar symbols of power; or her themes present certain forms of power, such as death and the life-force, as alternating cycles in the cosmos. Paule Marshall's style therefore defines her themes. It fulfils the concept of fictional style not merely as a "mode of dramatic delimitation, but more precisely, of thematic definition."' One of her short-stories, "To Da-duh, In Memoriam," is typical of her rhythmic use of symbols for "thematic definition." Briefly, this is the auto-biographical story of a young girl from Brooklyn on her first visit to her parents' family in Barbados. During the visit her spirited clashes with her grandmother, Da-duh, dramatize the conflict of two life-styles: the rural traditions of the old woman's pre-technological society versus the young Brooklynite's machine culture. After
Citations
More filters
21 Dec 2010
9 citations
Journal Article•
TL;DR: Brown Girl, Brownstones, Praisesong for the Widow, Daughters as mentioned in this paper is one of the most famous works of African-American and Caribbean-American women's literature.
Abstract: As the titles of many of her writings (Brown Girl, Brownstones, Praisesong for the Widow, Daughters) might suggest, Paule Marshall's career has been preoccupied with the concerns and difficulties that women, particularly non-white women, face in American society. Her books have been published by The Feminist Press, lauded in feminist and postcolonial journals, and she has rightly taken her place among the important voices in the fiction of African-American and Caribbean-American women. (1) By her own admission, her work is "interested in discovering and unearthing what was [and is] positive and inspiring about [the] experience" of marginalized peoples, and in pursuing "the unique opportunity to create, to reinvent" ("Interview" 5) cultural and individual understandings of those peoples. As such, her first and most famous work, Brown Girl, Brownstones, has been praised for constructing black female characters who are "unquestionably strong, capable, independent, assertive" (Denniston 16) and who embody a "determination to resist" (Christol 150) homogenized cultural formations. In a basic sense, such assessments of Brown Girl are valid. The novel frequently focuses on a kind of gendered struggle that demands a certain amount of wilfulness and drive. The protagonist's mother, Silla Boyce, is undeniably strong and capable, yet the suggestion that the novel depicts a "determination to resist" stereotypical ideas of racial and gender identity is tough to swallow. Most of the novel's characters (with Silla as their leading example) relentlessly pursue property and money in a way that mimics rather than analyzes Western capitalist and masculinist ideas of value. The novel itself, I think, critiques such acquisitiveness, yet most criticism of the novel fails to contend with the conflicted relationship between "resistance" and "struggle" that Marshall presents. Mary Helen Washington's idea that Silla acts as "the avatar of the community's deepest values and needs" (315), for example, fails to recognize the degree to which Silla is in fact an agent of the community's desire for cultural self-destruction. Further, what is important is the degree to which her desires and ideals work to undercut notions of identity that depart from white masculinist norms. Here, I would like to consider how Marshall, a writer usually considered exclusively in terms of feminist thought, handles the concept of masculinity. I will also illustrate some significant, and frequently disturbing, connections between certain types of feminist discourse and some of the more destructive aspects of hegemonic masculinity. (2) Bluntly, I would like to examine feminist treatments of Brown Girl, Brownstones in light of emerging discourses on masculinities and to suggest that many versions of the "unquestionably strong, capable, independent, assertive" (Denniston 16) woman might in fact be subtle re-articulations of conventional masculine norms. The struggle Marshall depicts in Brown Girl might not be a struggle to resist, but rather a struggle to dissolve racial and sexual difference into something very like the universalized male experience feminist discourse generally seeks to deconstruct. The result is a dubious kind of feminist victory whereby Marshall's women are considered strong, powerful and good only insofar as they conform to the dictates of a visibly performed hegemonic masculinity. In most contemporary studies of masculinities, hegemonic masculinity is conceived in terms of an emphasis on external factors and a suppression of interior signals. In Manhood in the Making, David Gilmore imagines a "quasi-global" notion of hegemonic masculinity in terms of an identity focused on "visible, concrete accomplishments" (36), an identity formation aimed at attaining "approbation and admiration in the judgmental eyes of others" (37). (3) As such, the discourse of "the Real Man" marginalizes feelings and thoughts, and feminizes what Roger Horrocks calls "inner space" (40). …
2 citations