Alice Walker and Ralph Ellison

Alice Walker and Ralph Ellison work toward different ends in their essays "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens" and "An Extravagance of Laughter." Walker urges African American women to identify their own creativity. She refers to Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own" in relationship to the experience of these women. Ellison discusses the virtues of adopting a second self, for African Americans and those of other races alike. His inspiration comes from W.B. Yeats. The main difference in the approach of Walker and Ellison is that Walker advocates a stripping away of personality layers while Ellison advocates putting on personality layers.

Walker would disagree with Ellison about putting on layers because Walker contends that African American women have had to assume layers of personality all their lives. Walker discusses black women in the South during the early twenties. The creative spirit of these women was so repressed that they were virtually sleepwalkers through life. Their only means of survival was to adopt a second self: "They forced their minds to desert their bodies and their striving spirits sought to rise, like frail whirlwinds from the hard red clay" (Walker 640). They went through the motions of raising families, working alongside their husbands in the sharecropping fields, and enduring the insults of life in a racist society.

The only socially acceptable outlet for African American women in the early twentieth century was the church, and thus ma

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rom suffering the same fate as Phillis Wheatley. In "A Room of One's Own" Virginia Woolf talks about the lost novelist, the anonymous creative spirits who must have existed among women in past generations. Woolf finds these creative geniuses among women and the working class. Walker finds them among slaves and wives and daughters of sharecroppers. She urges African American women to identify the creative genius in their own mothers and grandmothers. Walker found her own mother's genius in her gift for gardening. By finding their ancestors' gifts, African American women can attune themselves to the strain of genius within them that has been handed down from generation to generation. The identification of creative genius helps African American women cope with the contrary instincts of society that hinder their progress. Ellison advocates a totally different coping strategy than Walker. Ellison, too, has been the victim of contrary instincts, from the blatant racism of the South to the subtle racism of the North. As a recent arrival to New York City, Ellison had a difficult time adjusting to the interracial social norms. On one hand, he experienced that New York City phenomenon, the subway system, where a salad bowl of h

Category: Arts - A