Telling a Critical Story: Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens

Since the 1970s, the personal voice has been brought to bear more and more often on literary criticism, leading Nancy Miller to describe the 1990s as a time of "confessional culture" that manifested itself in academia with "personal criticism and other autobiographical acts" (But Enough xiv, 1-2).¹ Though we have now entered a new century, the trend does not appear to be waning, yet autobiographical criticism is still often greeted with hesitation. While many scholars using personal writing in their criticism claim with Ruth Behar that such work is well-suited to addressing "serious social issues" (B2), critics point out that the personal voice does not actually effect change. Daphne Patai, for example, announces that "personal disclosures" and "self-reflexivity [do] not change reality. [Such approaches do] not redistribute income, gain political rights for the powerless, create housing for the homeless, or improve health" (A52). Despite the clear lack of direct political intervention wrought by personal criticism, however, I am not willing to dismiss it as completely irrelevant to questions of social justice. Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (1983) is one text that shows how self-conscious autobiography can be a useful tool to wield in a politically-motivated critical practice. Three of Walker's essays in particular—"Beyond the Peacock," "Looking for Zora," and "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens"—demonstrate how personal criticism can use performative elements to increase its effectiveness. Walker's particular style of performance involves the use of story narratives that emphasize the highly constructed and textually mediated qualities of her self-representation. Readers are thus encouraged to interpret Walker's writing on multiple levels—not only as personal testimony but also as literary criticism and allegory—effectively bringing the personal voice into criticism without falling into traps of essentialism. As it renegotiates readings of the past, then, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens demonstrates the way literary criticism can use performative autobiography to influence cultural practices and potentially change material lives.

The Debate Over Personal Criticism

i. The pros

Although the reasons why critics choose to write autobiographically vary enormously, three factors are central to the use of personal criticism in Alice Walker and other writers who are committed to literary criticism as a vehicle for social change. First, autobiography allows scholars writing from traditionally marginalized positions to simultaneously assert the legitimacy of their viewpoints and challenge perspectives that have been presented as disinterested and universal. Pamela Klass Mittlefehldt thus claims the personal voice as a way "to assume the validity and authority of one's voice, the significance of one's experience, and the implicit value of one's insight and perspective" (197). Such a gesture is political in itself on occasions when it challenges ideas about who is allowed to speak. At the same time, autobiographical criticism has the power to change dominant discourses by raising awareness of views outside of the mainstream. Many black feminist critics especially prize the disruptive power of scholarship: Barbara Smith proposes a "highly innovative" literary criticism that the black feminist critic "would think and write out of her own identity" (137), while scholars such as Deborah McDowell and Valerie Smith believe that attention to the experiences of black women may potentially radicalize discourses of race and gender. When followed to its logical outcome, the wariness of false universals and the valuing of multiple viewpoints lead to a vision of literary criticism that perpetually attends to issues of difference. Mae Henderson thus calls for "a multiplicity of 'interested readings' which resists the totalizing character of much theory and criticism" (162). Such a vision may be at least partially realized through autobiographical criticism as it focuses on the local and the particular.

Autobiographical criticism may do political work not only by acting as an antidote to universalizing tendencies but also by affirming the value of personal writing, a genre long devalued in its associations with both women and African Americans. The slogan connecting the personal and the political in the Women's Liberation Movement implicitly points to a long tradition of women's writing...