Mary Sue Prangley

Professor David Holper

English 1B

23 Nov. 2005

Manifestations of the Creative Spirit

“How was the creativity of the Black woman kept alive, year after year and century after century, when for most of the years Black people have been in America, it was a punishable crime for a Black person to read or write?  And the freedom to paint, to sculpt, to expand the mind with action, did not exist” (925).  This is the question at the core of Alice Walker’s essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens”.  In answering this question, Walker refers to a passage from Virginia Woolf’s essay “A Room of One’s Own”, in which Woolf suggests that “genius of a sort must have existed among women” (2439) but that it “never got itself on to paper.”  She contemplates the idea that “Anon, who wrote so many poems without singing them was often a woman.”  Walker expands on Woolf’s idea, combining “historical analysis, literary criticism, and autobiography to explore the ‘creative spirit’ of generations of African American women” (Walker 928).  She concludes that “our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see:  or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read” (929).  Although Walker is referring only to African American mothers and grandmothers in these lines and Woolf appears to be alluding only to some women (as she claims this “genius of a sort” exists “among” women), it is possible to expand the ideas of these two authors’ to include all women.  Upon sampling some of the short stories penned by female authors—in search of evidence to support these ideas—one’s attention may become captured by three stories in particular—Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use”, Eudora Welty’s “A Worn Path”, and Katherine Anne Porter’s “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall”—that seem to be connected, somehow, with each other.  All three of the stories are about women who exhibit inner strength and manage to achieve their goals despite the hardships they encounter, and, in considering the histories of the women who wrote these stories, it is apparent that the three authors are of the same caliber as their protagonists.  So, by drawing from both the above short stories and their authors’ biographies, it may be possible to illustrate the notion that women are possessed of not only a capacity for creativity but an inner strength that enables them to express and proliferate this “creative spirit” through whatever means are available to them.

Both Walker and Woolf refer to the idea that the various roles to which women have been subjected throughout history frustrate a woman who possesses the creative spirit.  She may become “crazed with the torture her gift ha[s] put her to” (Woolf 2439), or, in attempting to suppress her creativity, she may force it to “pop out in wild and unlikely places” (Walker 929).  In addition, one may argue that, when the need arises, a woman may also manifest her creativity through a deliberate, unwavering focus of her creative energy onto whatever obstacle may hinder her in reaching her goal.  There is evidence of one or the other, and sometimes both, of these last two alternate manifestations of the creative spirit in each of the three stories under consideration.  In Walker’s “Everyday Use”, the narrator is a hard-working, self-sufficient Black woman, who lives in a tin-roofed shack with her youngest daughter, Maggie.  When the woman’s other daughter, Dee, comes to visit and lays claim to some of the handmade family quilts, we learn that, despite her “rough, man-working hands” (87), the narrator has helped in the making of these quilts, a clear indication of her creative spirit shining through her labor-filled, wearying days.  In another passage, the narrator mentions that she (along with the church) raised the money to send Dee away to school in Augusta (87) despite the fact that she herself “never had an education” (88).  Obviously, the narrator is capable of focusing her creative energy in order to overcome an obstacle.   Both of these instances serve to illustrate the fact that this humble narrator is imbued with a creative spirit that she expresses in whatever methods are available to her and, equally importantly, only in ways that would benefit her family.

 In Welty’s “A Worn Path”, we are introduced to Phoenix Jackson, an old Black woman, who also personifies the strength and ingenuity of the oppressed creative woman.  Half-blind and senile, her slight body fragile with age, she totters unsteadily over mountains, through woods, and across fields, tapping with her umbrella-cane, feeling her way to town where she can get the “soothing medicine” (143) that keeps her little grandson alive.  She must use her creativity to convince herself that undertaking such a journey is even a possibility for her.  Her vision is so poor that she cannot find her way using her eyes.  Something else must guide her.  When she has to cross the stream on a log, she closes her eyes and does not open them until she is “safe on the other side” (139).  When she thinks she sees a “ghost” (140) in the cornfield, she has to “shut her eyes” in order to realize that it is just a scarecrow.  Her eyes fool her at other times as well.  It is when she has her eyes “opened their widest” (139) that she gets her dress caught on a thorny bush, and she remarks, “Old eyes thought you was a pretty little green bush” (139).  When the old woman finally gets to town, the author states that Phoenix “would have been lost if she had not distrusted her eyesight and depended on her feet to know where to take her” (141).  And one could argue that what is guiding her feet is her creative eye that sees, internally, every step of her journey and knows how it should be accomplished. 

Ellen—Porter’s Granny Weatherall—is also a representative of the creative woman whose creative ability has become altered by her life experiences, but, in Ellen’s case, her creative expression may be even more distorted than what we have noted in the other stories being examined, for, at times, she appears to be obsessed with creating order in her life.  In one scene, Ellen is resting in bed after the doctor and her daughter have finally left her alone, and she contemplates all the things that will need to be done “tomorrow” (414), thanking God that, even though there is “so much to be done,” there is “always a little margin over for peace,” and a person can “spread out the plan of life and tuck in the edges orderly.”  She ruminates that it is “good to have everything clean and folded away, with the hair brushes and tonic bottles sitting straight on the white embroidered linen: the day started without fuss and the pantry shelves laid out with rows of jelly glasses and brown jugs and white stone-china jars with blue whirligigs and words painted on them: coffee, tea, sugar, ginger, cinnamon, allspice.”  From these lines, it is clear that Ellen has channeled all her creative ability into creating order.  But her creative expression is not so altered that her focus is limited to the trivial orderings of her household, for she has also been driven to care for and order the lives of her children and everyone else around her as well.  At one point, Ellen is wishing “the good old days were back again” (415).  She considers “all the food” she has cooked, and “all the clothes” she has “cut and sewed,” and “all the gardens” she has made and decides that her children “show” it.  Later, she thinks about how she “fenced in a hundred acres once, digging the post holes herself and clamping the wires with just a negro boy to help.”  Both of these reminiscences point out the fact that Ellen has poured her vitality into creating order for her children.  She continues to reminisce in the following lines:  “Digging post holes changed a woman.  Riding country roads in the winter when women had their babies was another thing: sitting up nights with sick horses and sick negroes and sick children and hardly ever losing one” (415).  In Ellen’s thoughts here, we begin to recognize that her capacity for caring and creating order extends beyond her children to include anyone who needs her.

In addition to expressing their “creative spirit,” our three protagonists also appear to be dedicated to passing down this gift to their children; the narrator of “Everyday Use” is a wonderful example of this notion, for, in her story, there is evidence that the creative spirit within her family has been passed down—verbally and materially—from mother to daughter through several generations.  In one passage, the narrator’s eldest daughter, Dee, tells her mother that she has changed her name to Wangero, and the two engage in a verbal sparring match which proves to be exasperating for the daughter but entertaining—and enlightening—for the reader:  when her mother asks, “’What happened to “Dee”?’” (89).  the daughter replies, “She’s dead […] I couldn’t bear it any longer, being named after the people who oppress me.” “You know as well as me you was named after your aunt Dicie.”  “But who was she named after?”  “I guess after Grandma Dee.”  “And who was she named after?”  “Her mother.”  At this point, the narrator realizes her daughter is “getting tired,” and she concedes the contest, stating, “That’s about as far back as I can trace it,” even though she knows she “probably could have carried it back beyond the Civil War through the branches.”  This exchange between mother and daughter is more than just a humorous moment in the story, for it hints at an important aspect of the narrator’s history, the familial stories that have been added to and handed down from generation to generation since “back beyond the Civil War.”  Further proof that we are meant to interpret this passage as evidence of generations of women handing down the creative spirit can be found in an essay written by this story’s author.  In her essay, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” (which has been referred to previously), Walker uses her own mother as an example of a woman “hand[ing} on the creative spark” (929).  In one section, she states:

Only recently did I fully realize this: that through years of listening to my mother’s stories of her life, I have absorbed not only the stories themselves, but something of the manner in which she spoke, something of the urgency that involves the knowledge that her stories—like her life—must be recorded.  It is probably for this reason that so much of what I have written is about characters whose counterparts in real life are so much older than I am. (929)   

In these lines, we may recognize that Walker values her mother’s stories not only because they are a record of her mother’s life but also because they are manifestations of the creative spirit, and she considers them to be a means by which her mother passed on this gift to her.  So, remembering that Walker is also the author of our short story, it is easy to apply this same reasoning to the scene between Dee and her mother to come to a deeper understanding of its significance to our subject.  Before leaving Walker’s essay, though, we should also note another passage, in which the author offers a historical example of an African American woman “feeding the creative spirit” in the only way open to her.  She writes that she has seen a quilt hanging in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. that is “unlike any other in the world.  In fanciful, inspired, and yet simple and identifiable figures, it portrays the story of the Crucifixion.  It is considered rare, beyond price.  Though it follows no known pattern of quiltmaking, and though it is made of bits and pieces of worthless rags, it is obviously the work of a person of powerful imagination and deep spiritual feelings” (929).  Walker concludes the passage by revealing that below the quilt is “a note that says it was made by ‘an anonymous Black woman in Alabama, a hundred years ago.’”  This idea is important to our inquiry into “Everyday Use” because it is a pair of handmade quilts that provides not only the crux of the climactic moment of the story but also another example of a means by which the creative spirit has been handed down through the narrator’s family.  In the climax of the story, Dee comes out of the bedroom carrying the quilts, and the narrator describes them, stating that they both contain “scraps of dresses Grandma Dee had worn fifty and more years ago.  Bits and pieces of Grandpa Jarrell’s Paisley shirts.  And one teeny faded blue piece, about the size of a penny matchbox, that was from Great Grandpa Ezra’s uniform that he wore in the Civil War” (90).  The significance of the materials chosen to create these quilts is not lost on us, and when the narrator finally takes the quilts away from Dee and gives them to her youngest daughter, Maggie, we may understand this action to be symbolic of her handing down the creative spirit to the one daughter who appreciates and has already accepted the gift.

            Although evidence suggesting the notion that the creative spirit is handed down from mother to child—or grandmother to grandchild, as in this next instance—is more subtle in Welty’s “The Worn Path” than in the story we have just been considering, it is present, nonetheless.  The simple fact of the old woman’s consistency in making the long, arduous journeys to town and back—something that Welty refers to as the “deep-grained habit of love” (Phillips, Jr.)—embraces the notion of passing on the creative spirit, for, by insuring her grandson’s survival, Old Phoenix is also insuring the continuation of the creative spirit, for, as she explains to the nurse at the clinic, she and her grandson are “the only two left in the world” (143).  Another example of this notion has to do with the two nickels the old woman receives during her journey.  Over the course of the story, Phoenix acquires two nickels—one from the hunter in the woods and another from the receptionist at the medical clinic.  The circumstances surrounding both of these instances are a source of humiliation for Phoenix, but, in each case, she stoically stands up to the task and receives the nickel.  When she tells the nurses that she is going to use the money to buy her grandson a paper windmill and states, “He going to find it hard to believe there such a thing in the world” (143), we may recognize that this is also an attempt to pass on the creative spirit, for, by giving him such a gift, the old woman will be sparking his imagination, supplying him with a small wonder in which he can marvel.  And this may not be just a solitary incident with her either, for her stubborn and selfless collecting of the coins as well as her intention to buy the paper windmill may indicate that passing on the creative spark to her grandson is simply another “deep-grained habit of love” with Old Phoenix.

            Porter’s “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” also depicts the handing down of the creative spirit in subtle tones.  In one passage, the old woman reminisces about “lighting the lamps” (416) when the children were small.  She remembers them huddling up to her and their eyes following the match and watching “the flame rise and settle in a blue curve” (416).  After the flame is lit, she remembers the children moving “away from her.”  Perhaps this scene symbolizes the fact that, throughout the years she is raising her children, Ellen is also passing down to them a part of herself, her creative “light” that, once it is shining in their eyes, they may move away from her, carrying the light within themselves.  Another, more concrete, representation of Ellen’s creative spark may be the love letters tied up inside a “box in the attic” (414).  These letters—“George’s letters and John’s letters and her letters to them both”—were written before Ellen’s experiences had distorted her creative ability.  Although the old woman professes a desire to get rid of the letters so that the children will not find them “afterward” (414) and “know how silly she had been once,” it is odd that she has not done so prior to this point in her life, especially since she had already “spent so much time preparing for death” when “she was sixty” (415).  It is a rather revealing oversight when such an orderly woman has made all the appropriate preparations for her death yet still neglects to dispose of a batch of letters she does not want her children to read.  Therefore, it is possible that Ellen really wants her children to find the letters.  In adding to this idea, we should refer to one passage from the old woman’s remembrances, in which she decides that it is “good to be strong enough for everything, even if all you made melted and changed and slipped under your hands, so that by the time you finished you almost forgot what you were working for” (emphasis added) (415-16).  Perhaps, in some part of herself not hardened by loss, Ellen hopes that, if the children read her letters, they will discover the woman their mother had been before life had warped and altered her expression of the creative spirit.  Maybe then she will have passed on a purer image of her creative “light.”

            In all three of the stories we have been considering, there is evidence that each one of the protagonists has handed down the creative spirit to either her children or, in one case, her grandchild, and, interestingly, in the biographies of the three authors who wrote these stories, there is evidence that suggests that each one’s spirit of creativity has been handed down to her either by her mother or, in one case, her grandmother.  We have already discussed the storytelling ability of Alice Walker’s mother and what effect it has had on the author’s life and on her craft, but Walker also writes that the telling of stories is “not the only way [her] mother show[s] herself as an artist” (930), for her mother “adorned with flowers whatever shabby house [they] were forced to live in.”  Walker goes on to write that it is only when her “mother is working in her flowers that she is radiant, almost to the point of being invisible—except as Creator: hand and eye. […] Her face, as she prepares the Art that is her gift, is a legacy of respect […] for all that illuminates and cherishes life.  She [has] handed down respect for the possibilities—and the will to grasp them” (930).   In these lines, we discover that Walker’s mother is so possessed of the creative spirit that it emanates as a radiance from her face.  Walker recognizes this light and understands that her mother has handed it down to her.

 Eudora Welty also writes about her mother’s influence in an excerpt from her autobiography, One Writer’s Beginnings, which contains some passages that suggest that her mother has passed along the creative spirit to her.  The excerpt is from the chapter entitled “Listening,” in which Welty describes how her ability to listen has aided her in her development as a writer.  She writes about her mother reading to her as a child.  The excerpt begins with these lines:  “…I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or to be read to” (48).  In the last complete paragraph included in this excerpt, Welty writes these lines: 

Ever since I was first read to, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn’t hear.  As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me.  It isn’t my mother’s voice, or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own.  It is human, but inward, and it is inwardly that I listen to it. […] I have supposed that this is the case with […] all writers, to write as listeners.  It may be part of the desire to write.  The sound of what falls on the page begins the process of testing it for truth, for me. (52)

  It is not difficult to recognize a connection between Welty’s mother reading to her as a child and the writer’s acquiring an “inward” voice that still aids her in creating her stories now.  Perhaps this “inward” voice is simply another manifestation of the creative spirit. 

In considering Katherine Anne Porter, though, it is her paternal grandmother who has had the most influence over her during her formative years, and she is the woman most likely to have imbued this author with the creative spirit.   Porter’s mother died when she was only two-years-old, so, “from her second to her eleventh year” (Unrue), she lived with her paternal grandmother, a strong-willed woman, who told “romantic stories about her affluent, slaveholding family in ante-bellum Kentucky and unvarnished accounts of the hard-times in Texas during the Civil War and Reconstruction” (Unrue).  Her grandmother died when Porter was eleven-years-old, and thirty-five years later, this author published stories and short novels “inspired” (Unrue) not only by her own history but also by “her grandmother’s tales.”  Porter’s grandmother had had such a powerful influence over her that, when she was an adult, she changed her name (she had been christened Callie Russell Porter) to Katherine Anne Porter, thus identifying herself with her grandmother, Catharine Ann Skaggs Porter.  Her grandmother’s influence may have extended beyond these examples, for it is possible to find traces of some of her grandmother’s more defining characteristics in at least one of Porter’s fictional characters.  Descriptions of Porter’s grandmother seem to invariably include adjectives such as “strict” (Vande Kieft), “strong-willed” (Unrue), and “indomitable.”  These words may remind us of another formidable woman whose story we have recently been considering—Ellen, Porter’s Granny Weatherall.  From these examples, we can recognize that Porter’s writings—and even her own identity—were influenced by her grandmother.  When asked, once, if she thought style could be cultivated, Porter replied, “You do not create a style.  You work, and develop yourself; your style is an emanation from your own being” (“Giving Good Advice: How to Write”).  Perhaps the emanations from Porter’s “own being” began with a spark of creativity handed down to her from her grandmother.

The common bond between these three female authors may be more than just the fact that each of them seems to have received her creative spark from the closest maternal figure in her family or even that each of them is a wonderful writer who has managed to—to borrow Virginia Woolf’s phrase—“get her genius expressed whole and entire” (2451).  Yet the most striking connection between them may be that they have all been inspired to write stories that illuminate, in some way, the idea that the creative spark is passed down, generation to generation, by the women in a family—a fact that not only suggests that they are intimately acquainted with this idea but also that they consider this notion to be a common truth among women.                 

             

          

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bibliography

Phillips, Jr., Robert L. “A Structural Approach to Myth in the Fiction of Eudora Welty”  Gale Literary Databases:  Contemporary Literary Criticism. 11 Nov. 2005. <http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/GLD/hits?r=d&origSearch=true&o=DataType&n=1>

Porter, Katherine Anne. “Giving Good Advice: How to Write” The Arlington Reader:  Canons and Contexts.  Ed. John Sullivan.  Boston:  Bedford/St. Martin, 2003. 116. 

---. “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall”  Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing.  Ed. Edgar V. Roberts and Henry E. Jacobs. 7th ed.  Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2004. 413-19.

Unrue, Darlene Harbour. University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “Porter, Katherine Anne” The Literary Encyclopedia.  4 Feb. 2004.  The Literary Dictionary Company. 6 Nov. 2005. <http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3608>

Vande Kieft, Ruth M. “The Love Ethos of Porter, Welty, and McCullers” Gale Literary Databases:  Contemporary Literary Criticism. 11 Nov. 2005.  <http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/GLD/hits?r=d&origSearch=true&o=DataType&n=1>

Walker, Alice.  “Everyday Use” Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing.  Ed. Edgar V. Roberts and Henry E. Jacobs. 7th ed.  Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2004. 86-91. 

---. “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” The Arlington Reader:  Canons and Contexts.  Ed. John Sullivan.  Boston:  Bedford/St. Martin, 2003.  923-31.

Welty, Eudora.  “A Worn Path” Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing.  Ed. Edgar V. Roberts and Henry E. Jacobs. 7th ed.  Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2004. 138-43.

---.  “Listening.”  The Arlington Reader:  Canons and Contexts.  Ed. John Sullivan.  Boston:  Bedford/St. Martin, 2003.  48-52.  

Woolf, Virginia.  “A Room of One’s Own”.  The Norton Anthology of English Literature:  The Major Authors.  Ed. M.H. Abrams.  7th ed. New York & London.  W.W. Norton. 2001.  2414-75.