Jacqueline Fulmer’s Folk Women and Indirection in Morrison, Ní Dhuibhne, Hurston, and Lavin is an exploration of the ways in which these four women writers interrogate social issues impacting the physical and material lives of women. In each writer’s home country, America or Ireland, laws and culturally-sanctioned standards have acted to minimize the social presence and actions of women. These authors’ works examine and disrupt, through the dismantling of what Fulmer calls the above/below binary in Western literature, the realities of twentieth- and twenty-first century women. Fulmer presents comparative points of lineage among the sets of American (Hurston and Morrison) and Irish (Lavin and Ní Dhuibhne) writers. She reveals correlatives between each writer in the creation of female characters who subvert patriarchal hierarchies that have relegated woman outside of her humanity and locked her into the function of symbolic entity.
Fulmer’s examination begins with an overview of the methodology behind how these four women writers are reclaiming the folk traditions of their African American and Irish cultures, traditions that were previously captured by the dominant power structure in the midst of creating its nation and cultural state. It is through this reclamation process that Zora Neale Hurston, Mary Lavin, Toni Morrison, and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne employ the women of their respective national, social, and religious traditions. This engagement is seated in what Fulmer terms indirection, a rhetorical model delaying or obstructing the “audience’s comprehension of their position on a subject, which may contradict that of the audience” and uses the language of the dominating class in the service of these new ideas (12).
In the examination of the history of indirection in oral tradition, Fulmer calls forth biblical, New Testament parables as examples to demonstrate the long and successful evidence of this strategy along with her comparison of related African American and Irish techniques of sly-civility, masking (as it relates to Homi Bhabha’s use of mimicry), the grotesque (as it relates to Bakhtin), and Henry Louis Gates’ discussion of signifying. Here, Fulmer lays a solid foundation of information by which to move through her extensive analysis of the works of Morrison, Ní Dhuibhne, Lavin, and Hurston. Fulmer sets forth the parallels between the African American and Irish women writers whose works she has chosen to explore to demonstrate that each is a product of long-standing cultural and political oppression impacting verbal and cultural expression. As a result, each writer has developed a style enriched by rhetorical indirection.
Fulmer examines the female characters of Hurston, Lavin, Ní Dhuibhne, and Morrison through the lens of two folk women categories: wise woman and Otherworld beings. Fulmer posits that as early twentieth-century foremothers both Zora Neale Hurston and Mary Lavin present characterizations, through Hurston’s Nanny and Erzulie and Lavin’s Mary O’Grady and Onny, who defy societal classifications of angelic, subservient women and introduce censored topics relating to issues of reproduction and religion. With Nanny and Mary O’Grady, both writers also refrain from embodying these female characters as wise women who possess “oracle status” (50). Christened by Fulmer as anti-Marys, Hurston’s Erzulie and Lavin’s Mary O’Grady represent early manifestations of the reinterpretation of the Virgin Mary, disrupting long-held ideas of the Virgin Mother (in Lavin’s case, woman as Mother Ireland) as static, passive, and in the case of Irish culture, woman as nation-state.
In the late twentieth/early twenty-first century literary model of African American and Irish rhetorical indirection, Fulmer offers the works of Toni Morrison and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne. These latter-day writers build upon the tradition set forth by Hurston and Lavin. Morrison’s wise women characters like Consolata, Thérèse, Celestial, and L, and Ní Dhuibhne’s Jenny, the midwife, pub Mermaid, and the Otherworld sí and bean sí, or fairy people and fairy woman, operate as mechanisms to disrupt static binaries, the happily-ever-after fairy tale model, and, using the physical and relational othering of the fairy people, female expectations and the impact of such on their lives.
Fulmer points out that in their portrayals of Mary O’Grady and Erzulie, Lavin and Hurston dismiss and/or disown the marker of mother- and woman-hood represented by the Virgin Mary figure, thereby rejecting the role of the older woman through disruption of their socially-sanctioned belief systems, in their move to shine light on realities of women in what, for Lavin specifically, is the magna mater, “the identification of Irish women as the Virgin Mary, and the Virgin Mary as Mother Ireland” (132). This rejection in Lavin’s and Hurston’s works advances with the presentation of a future that rests in younger women. As Lavin and Hurston look to the future for a hope in the younger woman, Fulmer demonstrates how Ní Dhuibhne and Morrison reclaim the Virgin Mother, the figure of the midwife, and the older, wise woman. Ní Dhuibhne and Morrison likewise repossess beneficial, forgotten traditions, simultaneously refashioning notions of legitimacy in their endeavor. They infuse the folk woman’s presence with ambiguity. The use of folklore as a tool of indirection forces uncertainty into the above/below, angel/monster binary.
Fulmer effectively demonstrates that indirection acts as a veil allowing topics of political, reproductive, religious, and social implications to slide under the radar of censorship boards or acts of unofficial censorship. Her book will serve as a beneficial addition to the literature on the writers examined and on the intersections of folklore and literature.
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[Review length: 881 words • Review posted on May 18, 2010]