Angelou, Maya - Christine Froula (essay date summer 1986)

Christine Froula (essay date summer 1986)

SOURCE: Froula, Christine. “The Daughter's Seduction: Sexual Violence and Literary History.” Signs 11, no. 4 (summer 1986): 621–44.

[In the following essay, Froula considers the impact of female autobiographies—such as I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Alice Walker's The Color Purple—on literary tradition and modern culture.]

A still, small voice has warned me again to postpone the description of hysteria.1

[Freud to Fliess, January 1, 1896]

I felt sorry for mama. Trying to believe his story kilt her.2

[Alice Walker's Celie]

In her speech before the London/National Society for Women's Service on January 21, 1931, Virginia Woolf figured the woman novelist as a fisherwoman who lets the hook of her imagination down into the depths “of the world that lies submerged in our...

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