Term Paper on "African-American Literature - Alice Walker"

Term Paper 4 pages (1439 words) Sources: 1

[EXCERPT] . . . .

African-American Literature - Alice Walker

In Alice Walker's short story, "Her Sweet Jerome," the title is ironic, since readers learn on page 26, three pages into the story, that "dapper" Jerome was "beating her black and blue even then, so that every time you saw her she was sporting her 'shades.'

Actually, in the descriptive literary techniques used by Walker, readers get a feeling for the narrator right away; for example, why would a woman who is having a normal relationship and for whom life is good be hurling herself again and again in the closet? That's the first sentence of the short story.

And we also learn - through Walker's characterization - that the narrator is "a big awkward woman, with big bones and hard rubbery flesh" (25). Walker uses metaphors very effectively, throughout all her writing; and on page 25 readers find out that her brow was a "mountain" and her eyes were "nervous."

What kind of a relationship works well when the woman - who pursued the man - thinks, on first seeing him walk by, "...if he was hers the first thing she would get him was a sweet little red car to drive"? And then when it didn't like it - "it was only a Chevy" - she began to save "so she could make a down payment on a brand-new white Buick deluxe, with automatic drive and whitewall tires."

This has all the earmarks of a one-sided relationship to begin with, and Walker sets the reader up coyly prior to giving away the fact that this husband named Jerome is a wife-beater, a bad guy who is totally taking advantage of his wife. What kind of husband can't stand it when his wife opens up her mouth? What kind of husband knocks her "out of the room to keep her from talking to him"? And when she tries to kiss him while she walks out the door on the way to church, he curses her - how solid does that kind of marriage sound? Not very solid at all, obviously.

When her customers in her beauty shop began telling her that her husband was fooling around on her, she begins searching all over town trying to catch him at his evil deeds. And Walker uses understatement effectively in this instance, to set up the conflict. First, she juxtaposes "whorehouses" and "prayer meetings," saying that the wife was buying "axes and pistols and knives of all descriptions." Amazingly out of the blue comes those weapons, and this is from a woman who was being regularly beaten up by her husband, and didn't do anything about it but hide it behind sunglasses?

She turned "the whole town upside down" and began to get up in the middle of the night on a frantic search for what? To catch her husband? She began to smell bad "from mouth and underarms and elsewhere," Walker writes (29), and began grabbing innocent women "by the chin in a headlock with a long knife pressed against their necks below the ear."

She terrified the town, and meantime, the absurd part of her search was that her "sweet Jerome" just kept reading all his books and telling her "don't interrupt me" while shaking his finger at her. This paranoia of the protagonist in the story gets deeper and deeper, and Jerome is using up her money, and she's more and more frantic, looking under the bed, and finally, incredibly, she looks at all the books that her husband has been reading.

The reader sees clearly on page 34 what the conflict really was about, beyond her obvious obsession that he was cheating on her, the paranoid fantasies: she was nearly illiterate. She didn't know what "revolution" meant, unless it meant "to go round and round, the way her head was going." This woman was a loser from the beginning, a sad and desperate women who wanted a man for the wrong reasons, put up with bad violent behavior from him, and in the end, she stabs a knife through the books she didn't understand read by a man she didn't really have a relationship with, in spite of their marriage. Walker has painted a picture of pathos through her use of characterization and conflict.

In Walker's "The Welcome Table" there is… READ MORE

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