Paule Marshall

Marshall, Paule (b. 1929), journalist, short fiction writer, novelist, essayist, lecturer, and educator. Paule Marshall (née Burke) is the daughter of second-generation Barbadian immigrant parents Samuel and Ada Burke. Although Marshall was born in Brooklyn, the influence of her West Indian ancestry has been profound in her writing. Even as a little girl, before her “formal” introduction to the world of African American literature, the sounds, the smells, the sights, the entire culture of the West Indies were a part of her future training as a world-renowned novelist, especially through the daily gatherings of her mother and her female West Indian friends around the kitchen table to discuss, in the language of a kind of folk poetry, personal, neighborhood, and world events. Paule Marshall has lovingly deemed her mother and her neighbor-friends kitchen poets. According to her, they are the foundation for all the beauty and skill with which she employs the often colorful and irreverent language of the “Bajan” (Barbadian) community in her novels.

As a young girl, Paule Marshall was a voracious reader. She grew up reading the sweeping English novels of Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Henry Fielding. However, it was not until her discovery of the great African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar that she became aware of another type of literature, one that spoke to her like no other that she had read before and that expressed to her the possibility that she, too, might someday become a great writer.

The road to becoming the kind of writer who would inspire others to follow in her footsteps was long and hard. After graduating cum laude from Brooklyn College in 1953, she worked at various jobs to make ends meet. Even with her high degree of accomplishment, the prospects for a woman, especially an African American, for finding gainful employment were almost nonexistent. As would characterize the remainder of her career as a writer, Paule Marshall was the exception to the rule. She worked as a librarian for the New York Public Library and then, at first as a research assistant and later as a full-time journalist, for the once very influential African American magazine Our World (1955–1956). Her writing assignments would take her to parts of the Caribbean and South America, experiences she would later use to write her collection of short stories Soul Clap Hands and Sing.

Marshall ended up leaving Our World and married her first husband, Kenneth Marshall, in 1957. In 1958, she gave birth to her first and only child, Evan-Keith. Still, Marshall was not satisfied with the role deemed appropriate for her and most other women of the 1950s, that is, wife and mother exclusively; she needed more. A novel was slowly but surely forming in her consciousness, but because of her marriage and the birth of her child, she had very little free time for her writing. She needed, paraphrasing Virginia Woolf, a room of her own. Against the wishes of her husband, she enlisted someone to help with Evan-Keith and rented a small apartment in order to devote more time to her fledgling novel. Two years later, in 1959, her first novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones, was published.

At the time of its publication, few African American women were writing, had written, or had works still in print. There were, of course, Zora Neale Hurston's seminal novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), which would later serve as a model for Marshall's novel Praisesong for the Widow, Dorothy West's novel The Living Is Easy (1948), and Gwendolyn Brooks's singular novel Maud Martha (1953). According to Paule Marshall, Brooks's novel had the most influence upon her as a beginning writer.

Although critically acclaimed, Maud Martha, like many of the works by African American women writers during the 1940s and 1950s, was ignored commercially and quickly went out of print. Still, it had a profound influence upon Marshall and her work because for the first time since Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, a novel focused on the interior life of an African American female protagonist. It went well beyond the stereotypes of African American women portrayed in the literature of the dominant culture. With the publication of Brown Girl, Brownstones, Paule Marshall took up the reigns passed down from Zora Neale Hurston to Dorothy West and Ann Petry and finally to Gwendolyn Brooks.

Brown Girl, Brownstones is a milestone in African American fiction not only because it goes against stereotype in its portrayal of African Americans but also because for the first time since Claude McKay, another West Indian immigrant writer, a connection had been made in literature between African American people and their West Indian counterparts. For both writers, the accurate depiction of language is vital for expressing the similarities and differences between the two cultures. The language of Brown Girl, Brown-stones is exquisitely rendered. The feel and flavor of the West Indies is beautifully expressed through the language of protagonist Selina Boyce's parents, especially her mother, Silla. Words like “c'dear” (dear), “lady-folks,” and “wunna” (you) are sprinkled liberally and lovingly throughout the text. It is testimony to Paule Marshall's power as a writer to have been able to evoke such genuinely oral magic on paper.

Marshall's next literary project, published in 1961, is a collection of short fiction entitled Soul Clap Hands and Sing. The collection of four novellas, called “Barbados,” “British Guiana,” “Brooklyn,” and “Brazil” concerns an overall theme heretofore unexplored in African American fiction, that is, the elderly in literature. The central characters in each of the four novellas are aged men who have consciously given up genuine human feeling for materialism and greed. The novellas explore the consequences of renouncing one's humanity for the seeming quiet and comfort of old age.

Because Marshall is an extremely meticulous writer and because of other demands upon her time, such as raising a family and teaching, eight years elapsed between the publication of Soul Clap Hands and Sing and Marshall's second novel, The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969). The pressure of being both wife and mother as well as career woman proved to be too much for her marriage, and she was divorced during the writing of this second novel.

The Chosen Place, the Timeless People is a culmination of all the themes and concerns that Marshall had heretofore explored in her fiction. Through the characterization of its unforgettable protagonist, Merle Kimbona, the novel explores the search for and reconciliation of the self with an African diasporic historical past as well as the themes of ageism, sexism, Western hegemony, and nuclear proliferation. After the publication of this novel, Marshall married Nourry Menard in 1970.

The year 1983 was very important to Paule Marshall's career. It marked not only the publication of her third novel, Praisesong for the Widow, but also of another collection of short stories entitled Reena and Other Stories, which included her most anthologized short story, “To Da-duh, in Memoriam.” In Praisesong for the Widow, Marshall returns to familiar themes. The story centers around Avatara “Avey” Johnson, a rather prim and proper middle-aged, middle-class, sixty-two-year-old African American woman who journeys on a Caribbean cruise only to find herself in a kind of psychic distress. Almost mystically forced to abandon her cruise, she finds herself drawn into a kind of reverse middle passage to the island of Carriacou, where she will undergo a reintegration of that part of her African heritage that she has allowed to lie dormant within her for so many years.

Marshall's Daughters (1991) is also about self-actualization. Marshall was inspired to write this particular novel by an epigraph on a program to an Alvin Ailey Dance Company recital that she attended in 1983. It read, “Little girl of all the daughters, / You ain't no more slave, / You's a woman now.” The novel centers upon a young woman, Ursa Beatrice Mackenzie, the only child born to an American mother, Estell, and a West Indian politician father, Primus. She has been almost smothered by the sheer forcefulness of her father's personality, a pattern that continues well into her adult life. Through the course of the novel, Ursa must not only wrest herself from the controlling nature of her father, she must also bring him back to being the sort of decent man he was before he became involved in the corrupt politics of the island of Triunion.

Paule Marshall is without a doubt one of the major and most influential African American writers. She is a pioneer in the exploration of themes such as ageism, sexual harassment, and nuclear proliferation. With a career that spans almost half a century, she continues to garner both critical raves as well as literary success. In 1992 she was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Prize Fellowship for lifetime achievement. Paule Marshall continues to be a writer's writer, both steady and enduring.

Bibliography

• Paule Marshall, “Shaping the World of My Art,” New Letters 40 (Autumn 1973): 97–112.
• Helen Ruth Houston, “Paule Marshall,” in The Afro-American Novel 1965–1975, 1977, pp. 117–122.
• Paule Marshall, “The Making of a Writer: From the Poets in the Kitchen,” New York Times Book Review, 9 Jan. 1983, 3, 34–35.
• Barbara Christian, “Paule Marshall,” in DLB, vol. 33, Afro-American Fiction Writers after 1955, eds. Thadious M. Davis and Trudier Harris, 1984, pp. 103–117.
• Daryl Dance, “An Interview with Paule Marshall,” in Southern Review, 28 Jan. 1992, pp. 1–20.
• Gavin Jones, “‘The Sea Ain't Got No Back Door’: The Problems of Black Consciousness in Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones” African American Review 32:4 (Winter 1998): 597–606.
• Martin Japtok, “Paule Marshall Brown Girl, Brownstones: Reconciling Ethnicity and Individualism,” African American Review 32:2 (Summer 1998): 305–315.
• Alma Jean Billingslea-Brown, Crossing Borders through Folklore: African-American Women's Fiction and Art, 1999

Keith Bernard Mitchell

For more information on Paule Marshall, visit Britannica.com.

Paule Burke Marshall (born 1929) was an American author whose works reflected her Bajan background and twin themes of the need to confront the past and the need to change the present.

Paule Marshall was born April 9, 1929, in Brooklyn, New York, to Samuel and Ada Burke, who had immigrated separately from Barbados after World War I. At 18 her mother paid her passage with money inherited from an older brother. This money, called "Panama money," was the legacy of a man who had died, like thousands of other West Indian migrant laborers, digging the Panama Canal.

Marshall grew up in a bicultural environment rich with the language and folklore of Barbados. Her parents admired Franklin Roosevelt but were far more enthusiastic about Marcus Garvey. Marshall did not visit Barbados until she was nine years old, but island culture was made real to her by the lively conversations of her mother's friends around the kitchen table. Their metaphoric, often ironic language inspired her own attempts to find a narrative voice and to seek a literary career.

Marshall attended Brooklyn College and graduated cum laude in 1953. She pursued a job in the publishing world of New York but was unable to find a job with a major company. She began working for Our World, a small African-American magazine, as the food and fashion editor. While working there between 1953 and 1956, she began writing her first and best known work, Brown Girl, Brownstones. She married Kenneth E. Marshall in 1957 and soon afterwards completed her novel (1959).

The novel Brown Girl, Brownstones chronicled the coming of age of Selina Boyce, a first generation American whose Bajan parents fight each other for her allegiance and love. The mother, Silla, was a hard-working, cruelly honest woman who singlemindedly pursued her vision of the American Dream but feels thwarted by her husband, Deighton, whose Walter Mitty fantasies of instant success alternate with dreams of returning home. Selina rejected her mother's seemingly heartless materialism even as she subconsciously admired her strength. She was very much her father's daughter but had regrets about his passive and delusional approach to life. Although much of the drama of the novel was fueled by the struggle between Silla and Deighton, Selina's personality and identity were shaped by other feminine forces. One such was Miss Thompson, a hairdresser from the South, who educated her about love, sacrifice, and the history of African people in America. In Brown Girl, Brownstones Selina also experienced her first love affair and confronted American racism. A gem of a novel which explored the intersections of race, class, and culture, Brown Girl, Brownstones has been rediscovered by scholars in African-American, Caribbean, and feminist criticisms.

Marshall's second book-length publication was Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1961), a collection of four short stories entitled "Barbados," "Brooklyn," "British Guiana," and "Brazil." This collection was completed after the birth of her only child, Eran-Keith, and without the approval of her husband, who doubted she could fulfill the duties of wife, mother and creative writer. Each story focused on an elderly man - a Bajan who returns home after years in America, a radical Jewish professor, a middle-class Guyanese, and a retired comedian in Brazil - who recognized his life has been spent in the pursuit of goals which leave him empty and unloved as death approaches. Marshall contended the confrontation with "the past, both in personal and historical terms," was a key theme in all of her works. An equally important idea was "the necessity of reversing the present order."

These two themes served as key elements in Marshall's subsequent works. The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969) explored the attempts of Merle Kinbona to come to grips with the many contradictions of her own life after she returns to Bournehills, a fictional West Indian island. In the plot Western values confronted the African peasant past, white meets black, and Africans of the Western Hemisphere meet Africans of the homeland. In Praisesong for the Widow (1983) Avey Johnson, a widow whose middle-class existence has been disrupted by the death of her husband and reoccurring dreams about her childhood, discovered the significance of her African past and the need for self-identification on a cruise in the Caribbean. In the novel Marshall made use of the famous folk story "Iboes' Landing," which told of a group of African slaves who walk into the ocean to return to Africa. Marshall's childhood identification with Africa through the Marcus Garvey movement was intensified after visits in 1977 and 1980 to Africa. Here she was welcomed by the people of Nigeria, Kenya, and Uganda as a long-lost daughter returning home. In 1983 Marshall's published short stories were collected in a book entitled Reena and Other Stories. Her novel Daughters, published in 1991, was a story of an African-American female executive.

Marshall supplemented her income from writing and grants with teaching positions. She served as a writer-in-residence at Oxford University, Columbia, Cornell, Washington State, Lake Forest University, and lowa. Divorced from her first husband in 1963, she married Nourry Menard in 1970 and spent time living in both New York and the West Indies. Marshall was the recipient of a Guggenheim award (1960), a Rosenthal award from the National Institute for Arts and Letters (1962), a Ford Foundation grant (1964-1965), and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (1967-1968). In 1984 Praisesong for the Widow was awarded the Before Columbus American Book Award. Other works included Early Short Fiction of Paule Marshall, Callaloo, Spring 1984, and The Fiction of Paule Marshall: Reconstructing History, Culture and Gender, University of Tennessee Press, October 1995.

Since 1991, besides writing, Marshall has held several conferences and become a well-known keynote speaker. The Institute for African American Affairs at New York University was the host for Marshall's keynote address at NYU in March, 1996. She read passages for The North Country American Conversation: A Community Alliance, a series based at St. Lawrence University which aimed to further discussions of how Americans feel about their ethnic identities and about being Americans.

In 1990, she was an honoree of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, and in 1992, she was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. Marshall has taught at several universities, and in 1997 was a Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at New York University.

Further Reading

For more biographical information on Paule Marshall see Marshall, "Black Immigrant Women in Brown Girl, Brownstones" in Female Immigrants to the United States (1981). For critical analysis, see Leela Kapai, "Dominant Themes and Techniques in Paule Marshall's Fiction," in CLA Journal (September 1972); Mari Evans, Black Women Writers (1950-1980) (1984); Hortense Spillers, "Chosen Place, Timeless People…" in Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction and Literary Tradition (1985).

novelist; essayist; educator

Personal Information

Born Valenza Pauline Burke, April 9, 1929, in Brooklyn, NY; daughter of Samuel and Ada (Clement) Burke; married Kenneth E. Marshall, 1957 (divorced, 1963); married Nourry Menard, 1970; children: (first marriage) Eran-Keith.
Education: Attended Hunter College (now of the City University of New York), 1948 and 1955; Brooklyn College (now of the City University of New York), B.A. (cum laude), 1953.
Memberships: Phi Beta Kappa, Association of Artists for Freedom.

Career

Researcher and staff writer, Our World magazine; first novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones, published, 1959; lecturer on creative writing, Yale University, 1970--; lecturer on black literature at colleges and universities, including Oxford University, Columbia University, Michigan State University, Lake Forrest College, and Cornell University.

Life's Work

In her autobiographical essay, "From the Poets in the Kitchen," novelist Paule Marshall describes the aesthetic roots of her fiction. "The group of women around the table long ago. They taught me my first lessons in the narrative art," she recalls. "They trained my ear. They set a standard of excellence. This is why the best of my work must be attributed to them; it stands as a testimony to the rich legacy of language and culture they so freely passed on to me in the wordshop of the kitchen." This "legacy of language and culture" forms the matrix of Marshall's major works of fiction, for, as Barbara Christian observed in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, her novels "present a black woman's search for personhood within the context of a specific black community rather than in reaction to a hostile white society. As such, they acknowledge the existence of a rich black culture."

Marshall's positioning of her characters within the context of their culture led critics to see her first novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones, as a pivotal work in twentieth-century black American women's literary history. The 1959 novel formed a bridge between the novels of earlier writers, such as Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, and writers who emerged in the seventies, such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. But, more than an interesting historical link between two generations of writers, the novels Marshall has written over a 30-year period deserve careful examination as powerful narratives on the complexity of the power of black women.

Marshall was born Valenza Pauline Burke in Brooklyn, New York, in 1929, at the start of the Depression. Her parents, Ada and Samuel Burke, had immigrated to New York from Barbados, West Indies, only ten years earlier. When Marshall was nine years old, she paid an extended visit to Barbados, capturing her impressions of her cultural roots in a series of poems and, later, in such autobiographical short stories as "To Da-duh, in Memoriam" and her novel, Daughters.

"To Da-duh, in Memoriam" is considered one of Marshall's most acclaimed short stories. Written in 1966, it clearly conveys her experiences on that first trip to Barbados. As Eugenia Collier explained in Black Women Writers, "We see a little girl discovering that her New York world is not her only world, that her roots in Barbados, which she is visiting for the first time, also define her and influence her in a way which she cannot see clearly and also cannot escape." Marshall uses contrasts between the little girl's two worlds as a way to image the child's growing experience. For instance, Da-duh reveals her secret pine tree, which the girl contrasts to the Empire State Building. Both structures function as meaningful symbols of the two worlds the little girl now experiences and learns to integrate.

Dorothy Denniston noted in Callaloo that Marshall's "artistic vision evolves in a clear progression as she moves, through her creations, from an American to an African- American/African-Caribbean and, finally, a Pan-African sensibility. Indeed, the chronological order of her publications suggests an underlying design to follow the 'middle passage' in reverse. That is, she examines the experience of blacks not in transit from Africa to the New World, but from the New World toward Africa.... Throughout her fiction, Marshall is preoccupied with black cultural history, and she insists that African peoples take a 'journey back' through time to understand the political, social, and economic structures upon which contemporary societies are based."

Brown Girl, Brownstones sets the stage for Marshall's preoccupation with the "journey back." The novel is set in the Brooklyn Bajun community of Marshall's own childhood, among immigrants like her parents and their friends who work hard, often cleaning houses, scrimping, and saving their money to "buy house" as a way to become fully adjusted to their adopted country. But the roots of the culture they create and perpetuate in the United States are firmly rooted in the Caribbean rituals and traditions that they left behind. The title of the novel represents the major conflict: "Brownstones" signifies the overriding desire of the community of her parents' generation to assimilate into the white culture, while the "Brown Girl" is the young woman protagonist, Selena Boyce, who learns one of life's first lessons, the integration of the self and community.

Selena's parents represent two opposite responses to life in the New World. Her mother, Silla, is industrious, works hard in the Barbadian Association of her community, and yearns to own the brownstone that is the ultimate fulfillment of her dreams for herself and her family. In contrast, Selena's father, Deighton, dreams of the tropical paradise of his youth. He stands outside the tightly-knit family and community group and is eventually alienated forever.

Selena learns many lessons throughout the course of the novel, among them her face-to-face confrontation with racism at the home of one of her white high school friends. At the novel's conclusion, she understands what Collier believed to be one of the novel's most important messages: "She is one with all the Black people of her world." With this understanding, she can now leave her community and begin her travels, which will bring self-knowledge of another kind. Collier remarked that the novel's final scene, which depicts Selena wandering through her neighborhood for the last time, allows the young woman to sense "physically the presence of all the people whose selves were a part of the creation of her self. She leaves something of her self behind and takes something of the place forever with her."

Marshall was 30 years old when she finished writing Brown Girl, Brownstones. She had been attending Hunter College, married her first husband, Kenneth Marshall, and was a journalist for Our World, a small black periodical. She wrote the book during the evenings when she returned home from work. Marshall considered writing her first novel her "most exhilarating writing experience," according to Collier, and understood herself as now "having to be a writer of fiction."

The novel received positive reviews: Carol Field described it in the New York Herald Tribune Book Review as "unforgettable" and the "work of a highly gifted writer." However, the book did not sell well. Christian believed it was because "publishing houses, journals, the literary establishment [were unable to see] the Bildungsroman of a black woman as having as much human and literary value as, say, D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers or James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man."

Marshall's travels to the Caribbean and South America as a journalist for Our World provided the setting for her next significant work, a collection of novellas called Soul Clap Hands and Sing. Taking its title from William Butler Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium," the collection is divided into four novellas: "Barbados," "Brooklyn," "British Guiana," and "Brazil." Each of the settings allows Marshall to examine "the complexities of race, nationality, and gender relationships," noted Christian, "and in so doing traces the complexity of black cultures as they reshape themselves from North to South America." Christian described the West Indies setting "as the pivotal landscape [Marshall] would use in her [future] work."

Marshall published Soul Clap Hands and Sing in 1961. During this decade she divorced her first husband, noting, according to Essence contributor Alexis De Veaux, that he objected to her hiring a baby-sitter so that she could go and write in a friend's apartment every day--even though he was proud of her writing. Christian believed that Marshall's persistence in writing, "despite strains on her familial relationships ... indicates her strong determination to be her own woman and to do what she needed to do."

While raising her son, Marshall spent the 1960s writing three important short stories, 1962's "Reena," "To Da-duh, in Memoriam," published two years later, and "Some Get Wasted," which she published in 1968. In addition, she drafted her second novel, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, which was published in 1969. Support from a Rosenthal Foundation award, a Ford Foundation grant, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship enabled Marshall to spend a good bit of time on her writing during the decade.

The Chosen Place, The Timeless People was originally entitled "Ceremonies in the Guest House." The work focuses on "one of the most pervasive problems of the contemporary world, neocolonialism, and about the reverberation of past actions in the present," according to Christian. "It carefully explores the ways in which people's relationships are critical to historical process," the interaction between society and human choices.

Merle Kinbona, the novel's protagonist, is considered one of Marshall's most beloved characters. Having left her native Bournehills--a fictional Caribbean island--to study in London, marry an African, and bear a child, she gives up everything to return to Bournehills. In confronting her community's history, Merle is able to make sense of her own personal history. The New York Times Book Review called The Chosen Place, The Timeless People "one of the four or five most impressive novels ever written by a black American."

During the 1970s, Marshall married Nourry Menard, a Haitian businessman, and alternated her time between the United States and the Caribbean. She has referred to her second marriage as "open and innovative." Because of the scarcity of grants and fellowships during the 1970s, Marshall began teaching at various universities in the United States, including Columbia and Yale. She didn't publish another novel in the seventies, but her earlier work began to generate interest in the academic community, causing the Feminist Press to reissue Brown Girl in 1981, release a paperback version of The Chosen Place in 1982, and publish her anthology Reena, and Other Short Stories in 1983.

Praisesong for the Widow, winner of the 1984 Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award, has been called Marshall's "most widely reviewed work." Like Brown Girl, Brownstones, Praisesong charts a black woman's search for self-identity. The main character, Avatar "Avey" Johnson, has achieved the American dream, but as Anne Tyler commented in the New York Times Book Review, "secure in her middle class life, her civil service job, her house full of crystal and silver, Avey has become sealed away from her true self."

On a luxury cruise through the West Indies, however, Avey's dreams recall a long-forgotten childhood memory and she journeys back to the island of her ancestors where she "undergoes a spiritual rebirth." Christian viewed the journey back in "response to the call of her elders" as "an antidote, as a source of healing for the disease of materialism so rampant in this modern world."

Marshall told interviewer Sylvia Baer in the Women's Review of Books that the emotional center of her 1991 novel Daughters is a father-daughter relationship that resembles the relationship she had with her own father. "The father figure in Daughters is physically different from my father, or the work he does, or the places he lives. Yet in terms of his relationship with his daughter, that whole emotional nexus reflects feelings and emotions that I have had." In Daughters, the central character, Ursa Beatrice Mackenzie, has a traditional Marshall beginning--living in New York City, far removed from her childhood on the Caribbean island of Triunion, absorbed in typical American middle-class problems: education, career, a love affair. She dreads returning to Triunion for an obligatory visit, but does, and her visit, like that of so many of Marshall's characters who "journey back," disrupts the very fiber of her life and spirit.

Daughters derives its name from the four women who revolve around the powerful father-figure known as P.M. (Primus Mackenzie): Estelle Harrison, his wife and Ursa's mother; Celestine, P.M. and Ursa's Creole "nanny"; Astral Ford, his long-time mistress and manager of his resort; and Ursa herself. Sherley Anne Williams pointed out in Belles Lettres that the names of the four women "have to do with the heavens." This is intentional, she believed, because the father, Primus, is the "'polestar' around whom they all gravitate--the lover and father so large that his shoulders, in their eyes, blot out the sun."

Many significant themes resound throughout the novel, including Marshall's use of an abortion as a symbol of the need to "cut away those dependencies that can be so crippling." Also, the theme of "daughters" itself is crucial, as it is in all of Marshall's works. As Marshall told Baer, "The characters are all daughters who are in some way connected with the other, back to the slave woman who figures as a symbol in the novel." The statues of slave woman Congo Jane and her lover, Will Cudjoe, are among Ursa's earliest memories. Their recurrence throughout the novel links the immediate history of Ursa, her father, and the other women who nurture him back to a larger history of shared struggle and resistance.

Ultimately, the novel questions and probes the roles that black men and women play in each other's lives. Marshall's message is clear, claimed Carol Ascher in Women's Review of Books: "Although Daughters promises to be about the connections between generations of females, it strikes one more strongly as being about the variety of ties between African American men and women--between lovers, husband and wife, and even father and daughter." When Ursa shows her best friend Viney the statues of Congo Jane and Will Cudjoe, she speaks the message that Marshall wishes to convey, the necessity to remember a time "when black men and women had it together, were together, stood together." Susan Fromberg Schaeffer added in the New York Times Book Review that the moral imperative of the novel is "that to be human, one must be of use."

"I realize that it is fashionable now to dismiss the traditional novel as something of an anachronism," Marshall explained to De Veaux in Essence, "but to me it is still a vital form. Not only does it allow for the kind of full-blown, richly detailed writing that I love (I want the reader to see the people and places about which I am writing), but it permits me to operate on many levels and to explore both the inner state of my characters as well as the worlds beyond them." Christian believed "it is this aesthetic that permeates the work of Paule Marshall.... At the heart of her work is the love of people, their speech, gestures, and thought which she expresses in her skillful and often tender characterizations. Underlying her aesthetic is a faith in the ability of human beings to transcend themselves, to change their condition, that is at the core of much Afro-American literature. Paule Marshall's contribution to that tradition is not only her ability to render complex women characters within the context of equally complex societies but also her creation of worlds in which the necessity of actively confronting one's personal and historical past is the foundation for a genuine revolutionary process."

Awards

Guggenheim fellow, 1960; Rosenthal Foundation award, National Institute of Arts and Letters, 1962, for Soul Clap Hands and Sing; Ford Foundation grant, 1964-65; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1967-68; Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award, 1984, for Praisesong for the Widow.

Works

Writings

• Brown Girl, Brownstones, Random House, 1959, The Feminist Press, 1981.
• Soul Clap Hands and Sing (novellas), Atheneum, 1961.
• The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, Harcourt, 1969.
• Reena, and Other Short Stories, The Feminist Press, 1983, reprinted as Merle: A Novella, and Other Stories, Virago Press, 1985.
• Praisesong for the Widow, Putnam, 1983.
• Daughters, Atheneum, 1991.
• Contributor to numerous periodicals and to anthologies, including The Woman That I Am: The Literature and Culture of Contemporary Women of Color, edited by D. Soyini Madison, St. Martin's, 1994.

Further Reading

Books

• Black Literature Criticism, Gale, 1992.
• Black Writers, Gale, 2nd edition, 1994.
• Black Writers of America: A Comprehensive Anthology, edited by Richard Barksdale and Keneth Kinnamon, Macmillan, 1972.
• Busia, Abena P. A., "What Is Your Nation?: Reconnecting Africa and Her Diaspora through Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow," in Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women, edited by Cheryl A. Wall, Rutgers University Press, 1989, pp. 196-211.
• Byerman, Keith E., "Gender, Culture, and Identity in Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones," in Redefining Autobiography in Twentieth-Century Women's Fiction: An Essay Collection, edited by Janice Morgan and Colette T. Hall, Garland, 1991, pp. 135-47.
• Christian, Barbara, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976, Greenwood, 1980.
• Christian, Barbara, "Paule Marshall," in African American Writers, edited by Valerie Smith, Scribner's, 1991, pp. 289-304.
• Christian, Barbara, "Paule Marshall: A Literary Biography (1982)," in Black Feminist Criticism, Pergamon Press, 1985, pp. 103-117.
• Christian, Barbara, "Ritualistic Process and the Structure of Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow (1983)," in Black Feminist Criticism, Pergamon Press, 1985, pp. 149-158.
• Christian, Barbara, "Trajectories of Self-Definition: Placing Contemporary Afro-American Women's Fiction," in Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, edited by Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers, Indiana University Press, 1985, pp. 233-248.
• Collier, Eugenia, "The Closing of the Circle: Movement from Division to Wholeness in Paule Marshall's Fiction," in Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984, pp. 295-315.
• Denniston, Dorothy, "Paule Marshall," in Heath Anthology of American Literature, Volume 2, edited by Paul Lauter and others, Heath, 1990, pp. 1969-71.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 33: Afro-American Fiction Writers after 1955, Gale, 1984.
• Kubitschek, Missy Dehn, "Paule Marshall's Witness to History," in Claiming the Heritage: African American Women Novelists and History, University Press of Mississippi, 1991, pp. 68-89.
• McCluskey, John, Jr., "And Called Every Generation Blessed: Theme, Setting, and Ritual in the Works of Paule Marshall," in Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984, pp. 316-334.
• Russell, Sandi, Render Me My Song: African American Women Writers From Slavery to the Present, St. Martin's Press, 1990.
• Spillers, Hortense J., "Chosen Place, Timeless People: Some Figurations on the New World," in Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, edited by Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers, Indiana University Press, 1985, pp. 151-175.
• Willis, Susan, "Describing Arcs of Recovery: Paule Marshall's Relationship to Afro-American Culture," in Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience, University of Wisconsin Press, 1987, pp. 53-82.

• Belles Lettres, winter 1991-92, pp. 2-4.
• Black World, August 1974, pp. 10-18.
• Callaloo, spring/summer 1983, pp. 31-45, 57-67, 74-84.
• CLA Journal, September 1972, pp. 49-71.
• Essence, May 1979, p. 70; May 1980, pp. 123-34.
• Journal of Black Studies, December 1970, pp. 225-38.
• Negro American Literature Forum, fall 1975, pp. 67-76.
• New American Literature Forum, fall 1975, pp. 67-70.
• New Letters, autumn 1973, pp. 116-31.
• New York Herald Tribune Book Review, August 16, 1959, p. 5.
• New York Post, December 6, 1969.
• New York Times Book Review, October 1, 1961; November 30, 1969, p. 24; January 9, 1983, p. 3; February 20, 1983, p. 7; October 27, 1991, p. 3.
• Novel: A Forum on Fiction, winter 1974, pp. 159-67.
• Obsidian: Black Literature in Review, summer/winter 1982, pp. 57-67.
• Obsidian II: Black Literature in Review, winter 1986, pp. 119-29.
• Tribune Books (Chicago), October 6, 1991, p. 3.
• Village Voice, October 8, 1970, pp. 6-8.
• Women's Review of Books, July 1991, pp. 24-25; November 1991, p. 7.

— Mary Katherine Wainwright

Cover of Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959)

Paule Marshall (born April 9, 1929) is an American author. She was born Valenza Pauline Burke in Brooklyn to Barbadian parents and educated at Brooklyn College (1953) and Hunter College (1955). Early in her career, she wrote poetry, but later returned to prose. She was chosen by Langston Hughes to accompany him on a world tour in which they both read their work, which was a boon to her career.^{[citation needed]}

Marshall has taught at Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of California, Berkeley, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and Yale University before holding the Helen Gould Sheppard Chair of Literature and Culture at New York University. In 1993 she received an honorary L.H.D. from Bates College. She lives in Richmond, Va.

She is a MacArthur Fellow and is a past winner of the Dos Passos Prize for Literature. She was designated as a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library in 1994.

Marshall was inducted into the Celebrity Path at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in 2001.

Contents 1 Works 2 Quote 3 References 4 External links

Works

• Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959)
• Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1961)
• The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969)
• Reena and Other Stories (1983)
• Praisesong for the Widow (1983)
• Daughters (1991)
• The Fisher King: A Novel (2001)
• Triangular Road (2009)

Quote

"I realise that it is fashionable now to dismiss the traditional novel as something of an anachronism, but to me it is still a vital form. Not only does it allow for the kind of full-blown, richly detailed writing that I love… but it permits me to operate on many levels and to explore both the inner state of my characters as well as the worlds beyond them."

References

• http://cwp.fas.nyu.edu/page/faculty
• http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Marshall.html
• http://www.nndb.com/people/404/000048260/

External links

• 1991 interview with Paule Marshall at Wired for Books.org by Don Swaim

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