Listening to melancholia: Alice Walker's Meridian
Alice Walker's second novel, Meridian (1976), explores both the ways in which racist societies initiate and exacerbate melancholia and how this psychological dynamic can and must be overcome. The novel posits not a simple 'cure' but rather a process of questioning and learning from
the past and one's painful attachments to it. In this way it negotiates scholarly concerns about psychoanalytic theory, as manifest particularly in literary criticism and critical race studies. Far from normalizing a form of identity focused on the past, this experimental novel depicts psychological
transformation as an effort that requires the willingness to untangle the relationships involved in one's present, one's past and broader systems of social injustice.
Keywords: African American fiction; Alice Walker; American literature; Meridian; contemporary African American women's literature; melancholia; psychoanalysis; race; racism; time in narrative; womanist fiction
Document Type: Research Article
Publication date: 01 September 2008
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