Visions of the goddess: Self-affirmation and contemporary African-American women writers: A womanist reading

African-American women writers emerge from a particular historical context, a context when examined from the perspective of the dominant American culture can accurately be described as oppressive. Through their writings the contemporary African-American women authors who are the subject of this study, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, Toni Cade Bambara, and Gloria Naylor, create self-affirming protagonist; protagonists who are able through their own self-definition to discover their inherent divinity. This spiritual awakening enables these characters to emerge from the context of oppression and at least begin to assert, if not achieve their innate potential. These women characters as they become themselves present the reader with a vision of an African-American goddess.; Through a close reading of texts, this study demonstrates the prevalence of self-affirmation and of the goddess-figure in the selected novels. The first section of the study, chapters one and two contextualize the novels examined and asserts the necessity of placing them within both a historical and a literary context. This introductory section also discusses womanism as a critical paradigm and explains why womanism is a particularly appropriate critical approach for the analysis of these texts.; Section two of this study consists of the in-depth examinations of the texts themselves. The texts are examined chronologically which emphasizes the progressive emergence of the goddess throughout the period 1970-1990.; The third section of this study integrates the individual exegeses and also connects the first and second sections of the dissertation by again reasserting the significance of historical and literary contexts.; Although the concept I identify as self-affirmation raises some disturbing and problematic issues, this dissertation does not attempt to explore the implications of self-affirmation; rather, it is intended to document the presence and importance of the concept as a significant thematic thread in contemporary African-American literature. The goddess becomes an objective correlative for the power inherent available to an African-American character when she is able through self-affirmation to transcend the confines of oppression.