Praisesong for the Widow: Crossing Location and Space toward Female Consciousness and Wholeness

Abstract

Larsen’s quoted passage above in many ways articulates and suggests a main idea of the Transient Woman model: finding locations where black women can realize female wholeness. Having been silenced and made invisible on the border of hegemonic society, blackwomen, as does Helga Crane in Quicksand, find strength in looking toward a “change” in their role and status in dominant society. Along with freedom to express and “visualize” themselves in safe communities “where [they] could be appreciated, and understood” (57), finding spaces for culmination where transformation is possible is a continuing theme, dream, and aspiration of African American women and black women writers alike.

She began to make plans and to dream delightful dreams of change, of life somewhere else. Some place where at last she would be permanently satisfied. Her anticipatory thoughts waltzed and eddied about to the sweet silent music of change. With rapture almost, she let herself drop into the blissful sensation of visualizing herself in different, strange places, among approving and admiring people, where she would be appreciated, and understood.

—Nella Larsen¹

The warmth, the stinging sensation that was both pleasure and pain passed up through the emptiness at her center. Until finally they reached her heart. And as they encircled her heart and it responded, there was the sense of a chord being struck. All the tendons, nerves and muscles which strung her together had been struck a powerful chord, and the reverberation could be heard in the remotest corners of her body.

—Paule Marshall²