L & T Keep A Good Woman Down Herein Analysis

Short Stories by Alice Walker with a concentration on sexism and racism

Alice Walker was born in 1944 and was the youngest of eight children. She and her family lived in Georgia where they were black sharecroppers. Walker was scarred and lost sight in one eye at the age of eight due to a BB gun accident. In a Contemporary Literary Criticism excerpt under biographical information, it states the disfigurement made Walker shy and self-conscious, leading her to try writing to express herself. (Contemporary, Gale) After graduating first in her high school class, Walker went on to college pursing her writing career. Walker’s first book was published in 1968, and since then she has had books published from the following genres: short
Walker has also won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Color Purple. Among the different genres, “Walker writes about her roots in rural Georgia, her experiences as a black woman, and the political ferment of the 1960s and 1970s.” (David) Walker published two books comprised of short stories. There titles: In Love and Trouble herein (L&T) and You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down herein (Good Woman). Many of the main characters in these stories are left unnamed; this offers the reader the opinion that the unnamed character is Alice Walker herself. Critic Alice Hall Petry discusses the differences between the short stories in Walkers L&T and her stories in Good Woman, asserting that the stories in the first collection are much stronger that those in the second. (Petry) The works contained in L&T, are stories of 13 women who were mad, raging, loving, resentful, hateful, strong, ugly, weak, pitiful and magnificent, trying to live with the loyalty to black men that characterizes all of their lives. (Winchell) I am focusing my paper around several stories that are in L&T. The theme throughout these stories is; women persevered from the violent
Jerome Franklin Washington III, who is very large and not very lovely to look at. She owns a small beauty shop in the South, located at the back of her father’s funeral home, so people refer to them as “colored folks with money”. (Walker, L&T pp. 25) She spots Mr. Jerome Franklin Washington III one day, immediately falls in love and is determined to marry him. Jerome was a schoolteacher, ten years younger than her, and was very involved in the study of revolution. Jerome is very abusive, and beat her even before they married; all along she is blinded by her love for him. Jerome would spend his evenings away from home with the stylish and politically correct black women he taught school with. Jerome always talks down to his wife and ridicules her. Jerome makes the agreement with her that if he stays home she could not talk or touch him. Jerome not staying home drove Mrs. Washington mad and she begin frequenting the neighborhood with axes, pistols, and knives in search for who Jerome was having an affair with. While searching his clothes and their bedroom for some answers, it unfolds. She locates behind the bed a pile of books. ““Black” was the one word that appeared consistently on each cover.” (Walker, L&T pp. 33) She realized that another woman was not her rival it was a cause. So in anger she piled the books on the bed and lit them on fire. While staying in the