Identity, family, and folklore in African-American literature

This dissertation is a study of how personal and family identity has been presented in African-American literature, primarily in fiction, from the nineteenth century to the present. The thematic role that African-American folklore has played in defining personal, familial, and community identity is a major concern.;This study examines the literary documentation of the break up of black families, beginning with depictions of slavery as presented in William Wells Brown's Clotel, slave narratives, and Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman and "The Wife of His Youth." Rarely seen as cohesive, The Conjure Woman is revealed as having the unifying theme of family love and devotion--as did the slave narratives which emphasized slavery's role in destroying the black families, thereby undercutting Christian family values and the sanctity of motherhood.;Harriet Jacobs' slave narrative Incidents, which helped establish a literary record of self-sacrificing African-American mothers, is compared to Ann Petry's The Street and Alice Walker's Meridian, works in which the good-mother tradition is overturned.;The Color Purple is examined for Walker's use of folklore sources to draw her characters Sofia and Harpo, Celie, and Shug. Walker, it is argued, despite her use of folklore, often tries to overturn the cultural and sexual limitations folklore assigns women and men. Walker's use of recurrent motifs, especially trees, is discussed.;Morrison's The Bluest Eye is discussed in terms of the literary record of family abandonment by men in twentieth century African-American literature. It then examines Morrison's use of the blues to define her characters' cultural rootedness. Using the blues as a standard to measure character, this chapter concludes that Cholly is less guilty of causing Pecola's madness than her mother's seduction by white standards of beauty.;The chapter on Sula argues that past critical arguments claiming that Sula is "evil" can be dismissed if Sula is seen as a paradigm of the blues. Equating Sula's improvisational nature with the blues, the demise of the Bottom is shown to be the result of the Bottom's failure to recognize Sula for what she is--the physical incarnation of the folk blues tradition.