Woman's Inferiority

The same mixed swearing/blessing of the trunk exists in Hurston. The automobile trunk is a marking of experience: "The years took all the fight out of Janie's face. For a while she thought it was gone from her soul" (Hurston 92). But the consistence is also vessel for the soul that transcends the body's suffering:

The day of the gun, and the bloody body . . . came and com menced to sing a sobbing sigh out of every corner of the room. . . . Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon similar a great fish-net. . . . So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see (Hurston 231).

Janie is defined by her body, desired by men and resented by women (Hurston 4-5). She is shocked to assure in a photograph that she is "colored" (Hurston 13). Yet thither is a transcendent, spiritual, even mystical effect from the encounter of the body and the world of experience and matter: "This singing . . . followed her . . . and connected itself with former(a) vaguely felt matters that . . . buried themselves in her flesh" (Hurston 15). Janie, want Kingston, wins her identity, her consciousness, her character, even her salvation, through her body---the same body that brings her suffering as it marks her as a woman and a minority. The body in both novels, for both protagonists, is both prison and savior: "The women come to work whether sick or well. 'I can't die,' they say, 'I'm supporting fifty'" (Kingston 206). The qualification of the female body sustains the fami

Walker, Alice. The twist Purple. New York: Pocket, 1985.

The speaker of the poem goes on to recount want for all things American, all things "white": language, clothes, hair, styles, food, but especially fleshly appearance. This longing to be other than she is, other than Asian, other than herself, brings her pain, daunt and anger: "I know now that once I longed to be white/ How many more ways? you ask./ Haven't I told you enough?" (Wong 152).

Smith, Valerie. "Black Feminist Theory and the Representation of the 'Other.'" The charr That I Am. Ed. D. Soyini Madison. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994. 671-687.

Ronyoung, Kim. Clay Walls. Sag Harbor, N.Y.: Permanent Press, N.D.

Kingston, Maxine Hong. The cleaning lady Warrior. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1989.

Both Walker and Smith see men as at least potential enemies in the shinny for female, and especially black female, liberation. From the perspective of these writers, even good-intentioned men cannot be entirely trusted, because they have for so long been habituated to treating women---especially black women---as inferiors to be controlled, if not abused.

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