Archetypal Symbolism in Alice Walker's Possessing the Secret of Joy

Alice Walker's fifth novel, Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), marks a new beginning for an author/activist who explicitly appropriates Carl Jung's archetypal patterns of the ego, the shadow, the anima/animus, and the Self in a psychological process that promises individual harmony and wholeness for those earnestly seeking self-knowledge and well-being. It is worth noting that at the beginning of her writing career, Walker embraced the national ethos of protest, resistance, and liberation that defined the revolutionary 1960s, and her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, especially in the segregated South, was a sign of her profound commitment to changing society and to being a viable part of the struggle for African American liberation and women's freedom from the exterior forces of oppression. With the political assassinations of the 1960s, however, Walker, as made clear in Meridian (1976), experienced the pathos of a somewhat successful but now aborted movement. Significantly, then, Walker shifted her authorial emphasis from the external conditions of society to the internal psychological development of the individual, and in Possessing the Secret of Joy, she turned specifically to Carl Jung, who has written extensively about the individuation process with its aims of bringing the questing individual to a state of spiritual maturity and peace.

Carl Jung's well-documented break with Sigmund Freud occurred because of Jung's inability and unwillingness to accept Freud's restricted view of the libido as the sexual drive of fulfillment. Believing that the libido, or the urge towards life, extended beyond mere sexuality to a hypothetical elan vital, or life energy itself, Jung stressed a widened consciousness whereby the individual seeks to reconcile the opposites of his or her nature that dwell in the conscious as well as the personal and collective unconscious. Jung defines the conscious as the center of the ego; the personal unconscious as a repository of repressed personal experiences or complexes that must be made conscious; and the collective unconscious as an archive of symbolic archetypes of a hereditary nature. These archetypes, which can express themselves in one's dreams, fantasies, and actions, must be made conscious also; that is, these archetypal patterns must be integrated into the world of the ego, which is then forced to acknowledge that the ego-centered consciousness is not really self-sufficient and does not exist independently and alone but is "guided by an integrating factor" not of its own making (Campbell 229).

Jung identifies these archetypes as the persona or mask, or the false wrappings of the society acquired by the individual; the shadow, or the dark side of the duality, like a Mr. Hyde within Dr. Jekyl; the anima/ animus, or maternal Eros, or feminine spirit, in the man and the paternal Logos, or masculine soul, in the woman; and, finally, the Self, or the essence of human wholeness, the individual par excellence. These archetypal symbols can be experienced through the individuation process, or the path to wholeness. The individual who endures considerable struggle in this process is awarded the Self, the inner sacredness and uniqueness of the individual who finds the god within his or her Self. For Jung, the individuation process has a religious function, whether or not one is a believer, for there is no creed to be espoused, but rather a belief in each individual's uniqueness. Crystallizing the preciousness of the Self, the religiosity of the process is symbolized by the Self's feelings of harmony and peace and by such objects as the mandala, or magical circle of being, and the philosopher's stone.

Possessing the Secret of Joy is most clearly Jungian, for even in the afterword of the book, Walker acknowledges reading Jung in her own "self-therapy" (287). Her reliance on Jungian archetypes is obvious throughout the novel, which critically examines and interrogates the African tradition of female "genital mutilation." If "individuation" means the...