61 pages • 2 hours read
Praisesong For The Widow
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Themes
The Demoralizing Effects of Materialism
Marshall works to portray materialism in excess as corrupting and demoralizing to an individual’s sense of self through the transformations—and ultimate unhappiness—of Avey and Jerome. By emphasizing Avey’s preoccupation with her belongings and demonstrating how their economic advancement meant the forfeiture of their cultural and individual identities, Marshall suggests that Avey and Jerome’s success came at such a great cost. The novel also accomplishes this by establishing a tone of excess and waste on the cruise ship, particularly in the description of the ship itself: “Of the three dining rooms on board, the Versailles with its Louis XIV decor and wealth of silver and crystal on the damask-covered tables was the most formal” (46). The opulence is shown to be ultimately empty and meaningless because while Avey, Thomasina, and Clarice join their white passengers in these great rooms, they are still treated as though they do not belong.
Aside from representing how pursuing financial success causes Avey to neglect the things she loved and her sense of self, the novel emphasizes Avey’s corruption through her dream of her great-aunt. During the dream, her great-aunt Cuney attempts to drag Avey to Ibo Landing, but Avey resists, not wanting to get her clothing dirty. In response, her great-aunt attacks her, specifically targeting her clothing. Avey’s subconscious is recognizing her own failure to uphold her family’s legacy. Cuney attacks her clothing because they are a marker of the materialism she chose over her cultural inheritance.
Most of all, the novel reveals the ways materialism destroyed Avey and Jerome’s marriage by destroying their respective sense of self. This loss occurs because the only way for Jerome to achieve the success he wants in a racial hierarchy designed to his disadvantage is to work relentlessly and stop nurturing his identity and his family. Avey only recognizes the true cost of their success with hindsight, realizing that the material success they desired was never as valuable as who they were: “They had behaved, she and Jay, as if there had been nothing about themselves worth honoring!” (139).
Only when she stops caring about her appearance and possessions is Avey able to begin her spiritual and cultural awakening. As Lebert Joseph pushes Avey to join him on an excursion of cultural homage to Carriacou, her thoughts go to the belongings she doesn’t have with her: “springing back from the face crowding hers, she was scrabbling in her lap for a pocketbook […] she failed to find her watch [and] cried in a sudden panic” (180). When confronted with the reality of her possible cultural growth, a part of Avey wants to seek the comfort of materials. However, when Avey is on the schooner to Carriacou, these materials are removed by the church mothers: “Reaching up, they removed her hat—doing it with such delicacy she scarcely felt it leave her head—and placed it on top of the pocketbook” (194). These older women unburden Avey of her awareness of her possessions. After this purging, Avey—nor the novel—never acknowledges her pocketbook, hat, or watch, indicating that she has been cleansed of her materialism and, in this way, regenerated.
Cultural Significance of Language
Language is significant to the novel because of its direct role in Avey’s cultural regeneration. When she hears Patois in Martinique earlier in her cruise, it is a catalyst for her reawakening, causing forgotten memories of her childhood to resurface. Patois “had fleetingly called to mind the way people spoke in Tatem long ago” (67) and therefore nagged at Avey’s deep, subconscious desire to rediscover her cultural sense of self.
Language is also very present because of its significance to cultural identity. As Avey stands on the wharf, surrounded by the familiar but undecipherable sounds of Patois, she is further isolated by her inability to understand or be understood. Her panic as she begins to fully grasp the weight of her inability to communicate is indicative of her separation from her cultural self. The novel works to cultivate a sense of isolation in Avey because of her disconnection from her heritage and does so particularly through the cultural significance of language.
The novel demonstrates the cultural significance of language explicitly with the Carriacou excursion. As the taxi driver first explains the excursion to Avey, he states that the “out-islanders” are the only ones who still speak Patois in Grenada: “They can speak the King’s English good as me and you, but the minute they set foot on the wharf for the excursion is only Patois cross their lips” (76). This quote accomplishes two things in conveying the importance of language. First, the driver’s statement serves as another reminder of the legacy of colonialism. Patois, he describes, as “just some African mix-up something” (75), the result of French and English imperial forces on African languages. Furthermore, the driver’s insistence that the islanders can speak “the King’s English” is presented as a comfort to Avey, as though hearing Patois could corrupt her impression of the island. This demonstrates the lasting impact of colonialism and associates it in some respect to tourism. Secondly, the driver’s declaration demonstrates the ways language keeps an individual, or groups of individuals, connected to their cultures and to one another. Therefore, though the driver attempts to paint Patois as obsolete or useless, the language enables the out-islanders to maintain and strengthen the ties they have to their heritage. The novel uses this example—of the out-islanders honoring their ancestral past—to contrast Avey’s neglect of her own. For Avey, Patois serves as a profound example of the lasting cultural bonds transferred and preserved through language.
The Essentiality of Cultural Regeneration
Avey’s cultural regeneration—the rediscovery and rebirth of her cultural sense of self—is depicted as essential to her pursuit of spiritual and emotional fulfillment. This is first alluded to through Avey’s indescribable sensations on the cruise ship; she feels physically ill and pulled by an unrecognizable force to the leave the ship. These sensations are her subconscious, evinced by her symbolic dreams and the inexplicable physicality of her feelings. Avey’s desire to rediscover her ancestral ties is foreshadowed by the taxi driver’s description of the Carriacou excursion: “No matter how long they been living over this side, even when they’s born here, come time for the excursion they gone” (75). The excursion is an example of tending to one’s cultural connections and honoring one’s heritage. Its pervasive presence in the novel while Avey is on the island is a reminder of the inescapability of ancestral bonds and represents Avey’s subconscious desire to explore them.
Only once she is free from the opulence and noise of the cruise ship can Avey hear the call of her cultural sense of self. This represented by the resurfacing of memories—both her own and ones that appear to have been passed down through her bloodline: “A hint of the angry, deep-throated cry she might have uttered as she rushed forth slashing and slaying like some Dahomey woman warrior of old” (130) and “her mind flickered on briefly of other bodies lying crowded in with her in the hot, airless dark […] their moans, rising and falling with each rise and plunge of the schooner” (209). These memories manifest as physical sensations—as an angry scream, as the impression of not being alone—to convey her body’s cultural memory.
As Avey grows closer to her cultural regeneration, she remembers more from her own past and taps into feelings of an ancestral shared past. With this, the novel claims the body has a memory as much as the mind, and the only way for Avey to access her ancestral consciousness is to be freed of the false and corrupting values of her American identity.
This is represented through the purging and cleansing Avey endures—her tabula rasa, or “the empty slate of her mind” (225). After the painful and humiliating acts of vomiting and soiling herself, Avey reverts to a childlike state; she is cared for and cleaned. Through her purging and cleansing, Avey returns to what the novel depicts as the purest state of beings—one without the taint of materialism and false values. Being unburdened of these, Avey can freely pursue her cultural regeneration, which fully occurs through her dancing at the Big Drum. In joining the dance, Avey is freed of her previous inhibitions, embraces her duty to honor her ancestors, and rediscovers her true sense of self. The novel conveys this complete transformation twofold—first, when Avey introduces herself as “Avey, short for Avatara,” to honor her great-grandmother and namesake; then in her resolve to tell the story of Ibo Landing, thus upholding her cultural inheritance. Through Avey’s journey, the novel posits that one’s cultural regeneration is essential in reaching self-actualization.
Loss
Loss is portrayed in various ways throughout the novel; though the most obvious representation is the recent death of Avey’s husband, the novel emphasizes the small yet substantial losses she suffers over time, culminating in her greatest loss of all: the loss of her cultural sense of self. Avey and Jerome begin losing their cultural identity as they doggedly pursue material success simply because there is not time to spend on “the small rituals” that kept them grounded in themselves and in their marriage (124). When they stopped playing records, reciting poetry, and dancing, Avey and Jerome lost sight of who they are.
Avey only recognizes this decades later while on Grenada: “Perhaps he had left after all […] Jay might have slipped quietly out of the room […] leaving Jerome Johnson to do what he perhaps felt he had neither the strength nor the heart for” (136). In discovering that she had lost her husband long before he died, Avey realizes that she lost herself along the way as well.
Avey’s loss of her cultural identity is represented by how she turned her back on the events of the civil rights movement because they reminded her of the identity she left behind in pursuit of material success. Jerome, on the other hand, expresses blatant internalized racism so he can reconciliate his same choice—cruelly disparaging his race for failing and denying the very obstacles and prejudice her overcame. In their inability to understand—or unwillingness to accept—that their sense of self and cultural ties are more important than superfluous possessions, Avey and Jerome lose everything that truly mattered to them.
Additionally, the novel portrays Avey loss of cultural identity as the most substantial loss she suffered. This is increasingly alluded to, culminating with the encounter Avey has with Lebert Joseph in the rum shop. As he lists off the nations of origin for black people, asking which one she belongs to, Avey is confronted with the truth of her disconnection, and the realization that she cannot lay claim to a nation emphasizes her loss of her ancestral bonds. Through Lebert, Marshall stresses the significance of honoring one’s ancestors through ritual and tradition, which Avey has failed to do: “People who can’t call their nation […] I has all like you in mind. ‘Cause you all so that don’ know your nation can’t take part when the Beg Pardon or the nation dances is going on” (175). Lebert’s dedication—and that of the others who embark upon the excursion—juxtaposes Avey’s inability to name her ancestry, emphasizing her loss. Furthermore, his commitment to dancing for all those who cannot “call their nation” is both indicative of the lasting impact of the African diaspora and power of community; though Avey did not know it before, her bonds were being nurtured until she was ready to do it herself. This exchange, and then Avey’s subsequent recovery of her cultural sense of self, serves as the novel’s assertion that one’s lost identity can be recovered. Therefore, though every loss Avey suffered cannot not be regained, her cultural identity—because it was preserved for her and within her, waiting for her to reclaim it—can.
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