The Widow's Journey to Self and Roots: Aging and Society in Paule Marshall's "Praisesong for the Widow"

Abstract

Widowhood, despite the pain of loss and stress of adjustment to being alone, frequently offers positive opportunities for reacquaintance with oneself and for selfdevelopment. After reassessing her past, the widow is enabled to reroute her life toward fuller future. For the young-old woman, woman in her sixties or seventies, the opportunities for self-reaffirmation and growth arise out of rekindled relationships with larger community and larger collective past. These mature women often face and resolve what Erik Erikson has called crisis of integrity, characteristic of the final stages of individual development,' by carving out their place in the larger community and by forging stronger, prouder link to their ancestral past. Contemporary fiction by women, including such diverse authors as Gail Godwin, Alice Adams, Margaret Laurence, Elizabeth Taylor, and Doris Lessing, has increasingly focused on the widowed heroine and her opportunities for growth through new relationships. These authors' enthusiastic portrayals of older widowhood create in their readers what Frank Lentricchia calls a collective will for change2 by challenging western culture's fear of aging and antipathy toward the single older woman. Paule Marshall joins these authors in depicting the adventures of an older widow who attempts to create for herself viable place in her racial community. Praisesong for the Widow, Marshall's novel about sixty-four-yearold widowed Avey Johnson, dramatically charts journey toward integration of body and spirit and selfreaffirmation through identification with her racial heritage. aging Avey, ready for retirement from her job in the white world of the state Motor Vehicle Bureau, is not ready to retire from life's journey. She mentally travels backward and forward in time as she travels southward in space to embrace her southern black, Caribbean, and African ancestry with reawakening ardor that restores her to health of body unified with spirit, and empowers her to redefine her mission in life. Eugenia Collier aptly sums up the journey: The movement of the novel is ... the achievement of linkages in time and place, linkages of the disparate elements of the individual self as it merges with the collective self.3 Readers who accompany Avey on her rejuvenating journey must critically reexamine their own feelings about aging women as they observe the complex interactions of age, gender, race, and middle-class status in Marshall's novel. In Praisesong for the Widow, readers see Avey courageously leave behind her hard-won middle-class security and status, the assimilated world of North White Plains, New York, as she fights against peculiar clogged and bloated feeling associated with her artificial self. She has buried her natural ethnicity over the years, has cut herself off from her racial community. She gradually purges this artificial self through dreams of her familial past, which allow her to recollect some mythical tales of her ancestors. She dreams of her great-aunt Cuney's life on Tatem Island, off the South Carolina coast, and afterwards recalls her aunt's stories about their African kinfolk, the Ibos, who came to the Landing at Tatem. These dreams initiate Avey's confrontation with Aunt Cuney and all that Cuney represents about Avey's ethnic heritage.