Spirals of Consciousness: Rose Guy's "Friends" Trilogy

Abstract

Spirals of Consciousness:Rose Guy's "Friends" Trilogy Nancy Tillman Romalov (bio) Black women writers and critics have been recoding the language used to discuss the experience of growing up female in America. Critics Bell Hooks, Barbara Smith and Mary Helen Washington, for example, question whether white feminist discourse can be meaningfully applied to the lives of African-American women. By focusing on the commonality of all women, these critics contend, white feminists ignore the particulars of oppression; they fail to account for the differences in the quality of life created by class and race. If feminist literary criticism is to incorporate the black voice, then, it must be prepared to see the politics of gender, race and class as interlocking factors in the writings of black women. The impulse toward unity and homogeneity of experience, of which white feminists have been accused, also mars our work with children's and adolescent literature. The problem arises when we begin to theorize about the phenomenon of childhood. Calling upon the schema of Piaget, Erikson, Elkind and others, children's literature critics often ghettoize children into clearly delineated stages of cognitive and linguistic development, needs and interests. We talk about the "adolescent experience" or the "female experience," as though such experience were uniform across cultures and classes. In discussing the Young Adult novel, for instance, critics will focus on thematic consistencies of this "coming-of-age" genre: emerging sexuality, concepts of self-worth and identity; the search for love and acceptance by peers and the subsequent breaking away from family; or they will apply Erik Erikson's concept of "identity crisis" to describe the adolescent search for autonomy with little or no regard to how these concepts are embedded in the dominant white culture, reflecting that culture's values and history. Such perspectives on childhood are further reduced in credibility when the male adolescent experience is assumed to be the universal human pattern. The need to broaden the definitions of the "adolescent experience" and the "adolescent novel" to include both a feminist and a black perspective comes into closer focus with the emergence of works by black women authors. Virginia Hamilton, Mildred Taylor, Joyce Carol Thomas, June Jordan, Sharon Bell Mathis, Eloise Greenfield or Rosa Guy, to name a [End Page 27] few, deal with the conflicts experienced by many young adults—identity vs. fusion, separation vs. autonomy, conformity vs. individuality—but they do so with a clear focus on the cultural and gender specifics of these conflicts. One author who has written powerfully and eloquently on the experiences of young black women in contemporary urban society is award-winning author Rosa Guy, whose trilogy, The Friends (1973), Ruby (1976), Edith Jackson (1978) I will examine in this paper. Writing in an identifiable tradition of black women writers, Guy has created with these three works a collective picture of black girls' journey toward womanhood. The journey motif is not new to Young Adult literature, nor is it absent from the works of black male writers. Mary Helen Washington identifies a difference, however, when she describes the female odyssey as a personal, psychological one. Female characters in many works by black women, she writes, are in a state of becoming "part of an evolutionary spiral, moving from victimization to consciousness" (43). Much of the fiction by black women is concerned with finding new voices with which to reclaim and reshape the self. This often requires stripping off the layers of restrictions which have been laid on them by history, myths and literary traditions. Once described as "mules of the world," black women are choosing new images for themselves. Mary Helen Washington uses the terms "black-eyed susans" and "midnight birds" as metaphors to convey the hardiness and resilience, as well as the yearning and impatience of African-American women in both fiction and life. These are heroic images of women who refuse to be victims as they struggle for reconciliation with self, community and history. It is this tradition of renaming and finally celebrating the black experience which Guy forwards in her work, in the process adding new and valuable dimensions to the genre of adolescent fiction. Guy's first novel for Young...