Big Mama and the Whistlin' Woman: a Theory of African

BIG MAMA AND THE WHISTLIN’ WOMAN: A THEORY OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN ARCHETYPES A DISSERTATION SUBMHTED TO THE FACULTY OF CLARK ATLANTA UNIVERSITY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIRMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF ARTS IN HUMANITIES BY JAN ALEXIA HOLSTON DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH ATLANTA, GEORGIA DECEMBER 2010 ABSTRACT ENGLISH HOLSTON, JAN A. B.S. GA SOUTHERN UNIVERSITY, 1998 M.ED. MERCER UNIVERSITY, 2005 BIG MAMA AND THE WHISTLIN’ WOMAN: A THEORY OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN ARCHETYPES Committee Chair: Georgene Bess-Montgomery, Ph.D. Dissertation dated December 2010 This study introduces a literary Theory of African-American Archetypes, which is an outgrowth of two parent theories, Archetypal Criticism and African-American Literary Criticism. The theory posits that the folklore of Africana peoples created and inform culturally specific archetypes, which are deeply seeded in the collective unconscious of many African Americans. As in life, such archetypes are prevalent in African-American literature, which is momentous because they are both historic and perpetual within the community. The African-American Archetypal Big Mama is the character that will be used to demonstrate the theory as a viable form of literary criticism, using Gloria Naylor’s Mama ~y. Examination of her opposite, the Whistlin’ Woman, in Tina McElroy Ansa’s Ugly Ways and Taking After Mudear will substantiate and define the African-American Archetypal Big Mama by negation. Elucidation and application of the theory to African American literature are significant because they widen the criticism particularly for texts I by and for African Americans. Additionally, the application opens the doors for critics of multi-ethnic literature to examine their own cultural idiosyncrasies and subsequent lore for archetypes explicit to their literary traditions. © 2010 JAN ALEXIA HOLSTON All Rights Reserved ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my deepest appreciation to my husband, Dwight Hoiston, who is my greatest supporter and best friend. Without his encouragement and support, this journey would have been impossible. I owe sincere thanks to my children, Jaylen and Jana Rose Hoiston, whose innocent sense of wonder with the world and love of learning continue to inspire me. I wish to extend heartfelt gratitude to Dr. Georgene Bess Montgomery and Dr. Mary Arnold Twining, whose matchless intellectual prowess planted the seeds of thought for this project. Dr. Alma Vinyard’s loving, patient manner acted as my rock of peace throughout my career as a student, and now professor, at Bethune-Cookman University. More than just my professors or committee members, these women provided me with the extraordinary academic environment that I will forever call home; they have inspired me much more than they will ever know. I wish to thank my parents, Mr. and Mrs. Frank Boulware, for being proud of me, my siblings, especially Mrs. Wendy Benton, whose listening ear was tireless, and my best friends, Mrs. Ahsaki Scharpon and Mrs. Tamala Rigby-Simmons, whose warm words of encouragement flowed frequently throughout the tedious process of writing, allowing me to see the finish line ahead. Finally, to my Big Mama, Mrs. Rachel Ford Brown, your memory and your presence was the gentle, loving voice that saw me through to the end. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ii Chapter 1. Introduction 1-10 Chapter 2. “The Big Mama Panel: Big Mama (Proper) 11 -47 in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day” Chapter 3. “The Whistlin’ Woman Panel: Big Mama’s Opposite 48- 123 in Tina McElroy Ansa’s Ugly Ways and Taking After Mudear” Chapter 4. Conclusion 124-134 Appendices 135-1 44 Bibliography 145-152 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION The Theory of African-American Archetypes is the combination of two widely accepted forms of literary criticism, Archetypal Criticism and African-American Literary Criticism. Its purpose is to analyze and interpret literature by and for African Americans through the identification of archetypes, or patterns of behavior, specific to the African- American experience, as evidenced through Africana folklore. The primary questions that this work seeks to answer are as follows: 1) What makes an archetype particularly African American? 2) How and why do African-American Archetypes present a fuller understanding of African-American literature and culture? To that end and for demonstrative purposes of the theory, the African-American Archetypal character Big Mama will be explored in this dissertation. Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day presents the African-American Archetypal Big Mama in her purest form; thus criticism of the novel will serve as justification for the theory. Big Mama’s opposite, the Whistlin’ Woman, will also be examined in two works by Tina McElroy Ansa: Ugly Ways and Taking After Mudear. Surveying Big Mama’s opposite will substantiate her existence in life and literature because as such a powerful African-American Archetype, she can also be defined by negation. The pronounced dichotomy that this juxtaposition will present is significant because it converges the imperfections of archetypes in life to the literature. While the Theory of African-American Archetypes is a novel theoretical approach to literature, many influential works informed the formulation of the Theory of African- 2 American Archetypes, the most notable of which are Carl Jung’s Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious and The Spirit in Man. Art, and Literature, Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, Henry Louis Gate’s The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism and Georgene Bess-Montgomery’s The Spirit and the Word: A Theory of Spirituality in Africana Literary Criticism. Also significant to this work are Robert Ferris Thompson’s Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy and Africanisms in American Culture, edited by Joseph E. Holloway, as both texts provide an explicit cultural bridge between Africans in America and their predecessors in West and Central Africa. Primary texts which support the value of Africana lore are Zora Neale Hurston’s Folklore. Memoirs and Other Writings, Daryl Cumber Dance’s From My People: 400 Years of African-American Folklore, Isidore Okpewho’s African Oral Literature: Backgrounds. Character. Continuity, Roger Abraham’s African Folktales, Harold Courlander’s A Treasury of Afro-American Folklore, A.B. Ellis’s Yoruba-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa: Their Religion. Manners. Customs, Laws. Language. Etc., Mary Granger’s Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies Among the Georgia Coastal Negroes, Bessie Jones and Bess Lomax Hawes’s Step it Down: Games, Plays. Songs and Stories From the Afro-American Heritage, and Geneva Smitherman’s Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner. Each of the aforementioned texts provide support for the Theory of African-American Archetypes in that they connect the study of Africana folklore, which generated the archetypes, to theory and literary criticism. Many other scholars have posited that certain archetypes are especially prevalent in African-American literature. For example, Ikenna Dieke’s dissertation, entitled Archetypal Patterns in African, Afro- American and Caribbean Literature, explores the African-American writer’s attempt to 3 fit a distinctive culture into the mainstream archetypal world of literature (as a symbolic form of returning “home” to that which was forgotten in African culture). She implies that certain archetypes are informed by a figurative home in the folklore of African culture, which were redefined by the deplorable conditions of Africans in America. Similarly, Alma Jean Billingslea Brown’s dissertation, The Folk Aesthetic in Contemporary African-American Women’s Fiction and Visual Art, analyzes the use and transformation of folkloric elements in the fiction of African-American women during the decade of the 1970’s and the early 1980’s in conjunction with visual art by women of the same era. However, while Billingslea-Brown makes the connection between literature and what is in essence lore, she deals primarily with artistic expression and falls short of creating a theory of archetypes to support that association. Additionally, Angelita Reyes’s Crossing the Bridge: The Great Mother in Selected Novels of Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall. Simone Schwartz-Bart and Mariama ~ is a dissertation that presents a cross-cultural literary analysis of the meaning of the “Great Mother” in four novels by contemporary Black women writers throughout the African Diaspora. In the work, Reyes examines the representations of the “Great Mother,” identif~’ing quite a range and combination of attributes and what amounts to an archetype. While she identifies archetypes specific to Africana motherhood, she fits such literature into the archetype, without making them specifically relevant in terms of the Diasporic Africana experience. This work, by contrast, represents the gaps in the discourse of literary criticism that fails to give credence to what are particularly culturally explicit African-American Archetypes found within the specialized collective unconscious of African Americans. Archetypal images are generally ascribed to Carl Jung’s notion of humanity’s 4 “collective unconscious” the part of the human mind that stores all of the knowledge, experiences, and images of the entire human race: “According to Jung, people from all over the world respond to certain myths or stories in the same way, not because everyone knows and appreciates the same story but because lying deep in our collective unconscious

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