Rage and outrage: African-American women novelists in the 1970s (Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Octavia Butler, Gayl Jones)

Rage, defined as “violent and uncontrolled anger,” and outrage, defined as “the anger and resentment aroused by injury or insult,” are the thematic foci of this discussion of four African-American women novelists who began their novel writing careers in the 1970s. Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Octavia Butler and Gayl Jones all published first novels in the decade defined by its connections to the post Civil Rights Movement years and to the re-emergence of the Feminist Movement. The realization by African-American women that their needs, desires, literatures and histories were primarily being ignored by African-American men and white women prompted an angry and frustrated response in the novels written in this ten year period. Black women, generally, and black women writers, specifically, saw the continued silencing of black women's voices and resolved to write themselves into history. The suppressed and repressed anger—initiated by years of interracial and intraracial violence and antagonism—, the renewed desire for self-definition, the exposure of crippling self-hatred, and the re-examination of the intersections of classism, heterosexism, racism, and sexism propel the actions of The Bluest Eye, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Sula, Corregidora, Eva's Man, and Kindred. The texts are analyzed thematically from Womanist/Feminist, New Historicist, and Reader Response critical literary perspectives. The narratives are read within socio-historical contexts that unmask the racist and sexist mythologies, about black women, that flourish in black and white American communities. Morrison, Walker, Butler, and Jones deconstruct the ubiquitous stereotypes and reconstruct definitions of self that demand recognition of the power and potential of African-American women. The themes of rage and outrage, in the context of womanist theory, (specifically the works of bell hooks and Audre Lorde) are shown as paths to either physical and psychic destruction or to empowerment and autonomy.