ABSTRACT
Paule Marshall’s Praise song for the Widow reinforces the themes and explores the sense of loss that in Marshall’s mind accompanies the substitution of material success for spiritual connection to ancestral roots. Praise song for the Widow presents the reader with a family that by most definitions would be the all-American family. Adopting the individualistic perspective of a white success story, Jay Johnson fatally divorces himself from the very racial identity that sustained him through hardship and embraces the white American dream as the whole of his vision. The Johnsons’ tragic mistake was having embraced the American dream as the whole of their vision while ignoring the cultural price it would exact. Praise song focuses on an urban family steeped in middle-class values, one that achieves a piece of the American dream, but ironically, the protagonist Avey, feels just as isolated as the downtrodden Celie in rural Georgia.
