Abstract
Alice Walker’s ‘Mississippi Winter IV’ opens with the proverbial warning, from parents to daughter, that ‘a whistling woman and a crowing hen’ are bound to come ‘to / no good end’.1 Ruefully, the daughter concedes they may be right. Yet she has no choice. Whatever proverbs and parents may say, and whatever her own self-doubts, her fate must be to whistle, like a woman, till she reaches wherever her music takes her. A woman in search of a new place must start with a resolute claim for the right to determine her own voice.
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© 1991 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Birkett, J. (1991). Whistling like a Woman: the Novels of Alice Walker. In: Birkett, J., Harvey, E. (eds) Determined Women. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21292-7_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21292-7_6
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