ABSTRACT
The uses of music, singing, dance and the figure of the musician, singer, and dancer in Alice Walker’s fiction before The Temple of My Familiar (1989) have been frequently discussed by Walker critics.1 However, aside from a few general observations about music and song in individual works, no study has examined the thematic interactions of Walker’s music with the traditional images of music and the musician in Western culture. Some critics, however, point to the central role music plays in Walker’s themes and characterization. In “Novels of Everyday Use” (1993) Barbara Christian observes that in Meridian (1976) “the image of music connects the motifs of wholeness that Walker uses throughout the novel” (81). Similarly, John Callahan, in In The African-American Grain (1988), realizes the crucial role music plays in Meridian’s spiritual and political consciousness: “Music, as the people in the church have shown her, is both a healing balm and a companion to action in these days and in days to come as it was in the days of slavery and also the civil rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s” (247). Though Callahan hints at the humanizing power of music in Meridian, he does not fully explore the impact of that power on the protagonist’s search for voice and identity. In his study of
the development of selfhood in Meridian, Alan Nadel (1993) emphasizes the implicit conflict between political activism and the arts, including music and singing (161).
