Critical Overview
Shange began her literary career as a poet and performer. Strongly influenced by jazz, she sometimes performed improvisational poetry at bars in New York and San Francisco. One such piece, a collection of twenty poems performed with dance and music by a group of seven women, impressed a New York theater director so much that he worked with Shange to develop it into an off- Broadway production in 1975. For colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf quickly became a controversial sensation. The “choreopoem,” as Shange terms this experimental work, was shocking to audiences not only for its unusual theatrical form, but for its outspoken message about the double oppression of black women. The play addresses rape, wife-beating, and single motherhood in the most raw and personal terms. “The work speaks of the physical and emotional abuse that black women experience at the hands of insensitive black men,” writes Elizabeth Brown in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. “It is about the black women’s ability to survive even after they have been knocked down repeatedly. . . . It is a tribute to black women who strive for and develop a sense of self.”
Shange’s portrayal of African-American gender relations drew public criticism from black male commentators, who accused her of undermining racial solidarity with her negative portrayals of men. She shared this controversial status with other black women authors of her generation influenced by feminism, including Alice Walker and Gayl Jones. For colored girls became a success on Broadway and remains Shange’s most well-known work.
Shange went on to write several other experimental plays focusing with candor and sometimes rage on the relationships between black men and women. In the 1980s she began to work less in the theater, instead publishing several collections of poetry and, in 1982, her first novel, Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo. This work tells the story of three sisters, each of whom reflects a different aspect of African-American femininity. Its experimental form includes recipes, poems, and nonstandard spelling and punctuation. Betsey Brown, published in 1985, is a more stylistically conventional book and arguably a more optimistic one. Set during the early Civil Rights Movement, it centers on the main character’s unique position as a relatively empowered member of the middle class—an aspect of Shange’s own experience that she had not emphasized in for colored girls or other writings. However, this semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story shares with Shange’s earlier works a commitment to exploring the strife within the African- American female psyche as shaped by both racism and sexism, though here Shange’s portrayal of oppression is considerably more understated. In Black Women Writers at Work Claudia Tate describes the changes the novel represents for the author, remarking that Betsey Brown “seems to mark Shange’s movement from explicit to subtle expressions of rage, from repudiating her girlhood past to embracing it, and from flip candor to more serious commentary.”
Writer and scholar Sherley Ann Williams, writing for the feminist magazine Ms., is most interested in Betsey Brown’s focus on black middleclass life. Compared to other contemporary novels that equate black authenticity with poverty, argues Williams, Betsey Brown “depicts an affluence that is not incompatible with black culture and community. . . . The book speaks to some of the deeper complexities and paradoxes that have helped sustain and perpetuate the positive aspects of the Afro- American experience.” However, Williams is less positive about Shange’s literary achievement. She finds fault with Shange’s sentimental portrayal of servants and the fact that “the characters and the narrators all talk and think alike.”
Overall, the popular press failed...
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to embraceBetsey Brown as a major achievement for Shange. In a tepid New Statesman review, Marion Glastonbury comments that the “drama of political change” that the novel’s historical setting evokes “is curiously played down.” She notes that the novel, just published, was already slated for production as a musical and asks, “Will the lyrics sound better once we hear the tune?” Susan Schindehitte, writing for the Saturday Review, is more charitable about Shange’s style, crediting Betsey Brown for its “lyricism and personality,” while criticizing the fact that “there is no glue to bind [the novel’s various] elements into a flowing whole.” She too notes the plans to adapt the novel for the stage and goes on to diagnose the novel’s weakness thusly: “This isn’t really a novel after all. It is dramatist Shange’s latest play . . . masquerading as a novel.”
While critics tend to find fault with the novel, Betsey Brown is a popular choice for high school reading lists due to its relevant themes and accessible style. Furthermore, it remains a significant work in the context of the literary renaissance of black women writers of the 1970s and ’80s and their struggles with representing feminist issues from an African-American point of view, as well as for its portrayal of the black middle class.