Pygmalion Reversed
SHAPIRO, PAULA MEINETZ
Pygmalion Reversed The Third Life of Grange Copeland By Alice Walker Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 247 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by Paula Meinetz Shapiro Alice Walker's graphic first novel delivers a...
...Shortly before taking in Ruth, Grange had married Brownfield's whore, Josie, to gain some property and an easier existence...
...Miss Walker deftly sculpts her people and delineates their relationships...
...Fortunately, it does not detract significantly from an otherwise compelling novel that emphasizes the humanity we share rather than the horrors of dehumanizing experiences...
...Grange tries to convince Brownfield of the need for reforming, telling him not to blame the crackers for everything...
...He had survived...
...Boesman and Lena...
...But to survive whole was what he wanted for Ruth...
...In despair, his wife poisons herself and their infant, leaving their 16-year-old son Brownfield to fend for himself...
...He was her Pygmalion in reverse...
...Reviewed by Paula Meinetz Shapiro Alice Walker's graphic first novel delivers a powerful statement by letting the narrative, characters and episodes speak for themselves...
...Miss Walker's haunting tale of three generations of a sharecropper's family attempting to overcome white oppression is candid, sensitive and tragic...
...While he is in jail, his youngest daughter, Ruth, is adopted by her grandfather Grange...
...But it is from his relationship with his granddaughter, from his struggle to educate her, that he derives satisfaction...
...He wanted her to sound like a woman who deserved him...
...The son lives with Josie, an aging whore, then marries her educated niece, with whom he has three children...
...Brownfield eventually kills his wife with a shotgun...
...Indeed, since they generally transcend the plot, the one episode involving civil rights workers seems an intrusion that neither advances the story nor enhances our understanding of the characters...
...Sentenced to seven years in prison, he blames the whites for his predicament...
...Thus in old age, after years as a sharecropper and a brief stay in the North, begins the third and only happy life of Grange Cope-land...
...Inevitably, one wonders how much of it is drawn from her own experiences as the youngest of a Georgia sharecropper's eight children...
...A man has his own soul and his own will, he insists, and must maintain his own inner dignity and sense of manliness in spite of adversity...
...His drunken rages and brutal behavior slowly smother what little comfort the members of his family could have given each other: "The tender woman he married he set out to destroy and before he destroyed her he was determined to change her...
...They confide in each other and form stabilizing bonds of love and trust that open a better life to Ruth and enable Grange to find repentance and purpose: "Surviving was not everything...
...In describing the lives of black sharecroppers from 1920 through the 1960s, the 26-year-old black novelist--author of a book of poems, Once, as well as a quartet of stories on insanity--could have taken the easy, tiresome way out by haranguing for militancy, revenge and separatism...
...He wanted her to talk, but to talk like what she was, a hopeless nigger woman who got her ass beat every Saturday night...
...Following his release from jail, Brownfield again takes up with Josie, now his stepmother...
...Pygmalion Reversed The Third Life of Grange Copeland By Alice Walker Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 247 pp...
...In both works the black wives, constantly forced to move their few tattered possessions from one makeshift home to another, are tormented mainly by their husbands rather than the world...
...In a climactic confrontation...
...In both, the characters are castoffs lurking on the fringes of an oppressive white society, who see life as a perpetual cycle of hope and despair...
...For that much I could have done--and I believe she would have seen the man in me...
...And change her he did...
...Miss Walker's novel--infused with poetic images that unfold visually as though performed on stage --is remarkably similar to Athol Fugard's excellent play...
...If I had my life to live over," Grange says, "your ma and me would maybe have starved to death in some cracker's gutter, but she would have died with me holding her hand...
...At the outset, Grange Copeland, the protagonist, deserts his wife and two sons to try his luck in the North...
...The first thing he started on was her speech...
...Instead, she allows the reader to make his own assessment of Southern conditions and the desperate need for change...
...When his daughters grow up and begin working in the fields, Brown-field feels overwhelmed by hopelessness, by increasingly unbearable frustrations of a dismal life...
Vol. 54 • January 1971 • No. 2
