Ethnicity and Cultural Perspectives in Paule Marshall's Short Fiction

Abstract

Paula Marshall has gained literary recognition for her novels Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969) and Praisesong for the Widow (1983), but her short fiction, especially those of the collections Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1961) and Reena (1983), have also helped to create her reputation. Marshall's stories have been praised most conspicuously for their humanism and universality, and they appear to have satisfied well the prevailing aesthetic requirements of organic unity and the companionship of the whole. Reviews spoke of the stories as compassionate... written with artistry and a sure knowledge of the human heart, as exhibiting authentic feeling for real men, women and life, and as having expanded a private sense of race and color into an enormously wide... sense of mixed moods and human destinies.1 The stories' communicating of general truths, their presenting of emotions common to all, and their competent use of traditional narrative patterns were the characteristics to which the reviewers seemed most sensitive. These