ABSTRACT
Gwendolyn Brooks's tone as she describes the sequel to Maud Martha - so freewheeling and aggressive and self-assured - reveals by comparison the uncertainties and tensions of the 1953 version. In 1953, no one seemed prepared to call Maud Martha a novel about bitterness, rage, self-hatred and the silence that results from suppressed anger. Rereading Maud Martha is a necessary step in revising the male-dominated Afro-American canon not only because unusual text requires a different set of interpretative strategies but because it suggests a different set of rituals and symbols for Afro-American literature and a different set of progenitors. The real significance of Maud Martha for the literary canon is that its discontinuous and truncated chapters, its short, angry sentences, its lack of ornamentation and freeze-frame endings represent structurally the entrapment of women expressed thematically in the earlier narratives of black women like Nella Larsen, Zora Hurston, Ann Petry, Dorothy West and Harriet Jacobs.
