The Characters
Although Grange is the title character, the majority of characters in the novel are black women, and the novel progresses as an account of the women in Grange’s life and what he has done directly or indirectly to them. In structuring major parts of the novel around Grange’s struggles to find himself and to be a responsible man, Walker presents his character primarily from an interior perspective. Although the external conditions of racism and poverty are important to the novel’s meanings, how Grange responds to those conditions is the key to his character presentation.
In his first life, when he thinks of himself as a victim of injustice, he responds to his condition by taking his frustrations out on those closest to him, his wife and his son. He treats both cruelly, because expressing his love outwardly and in positive ways would mean acknowledging his inability to do anything for his family that might change their condition. Beyond his abuse of his family, he retreats into himself and avoids who he is through excessive drinking and by having an affair with Josie. Walker depicts Grange as a coward, a man afraid to face up to his kinship responsibilities. This point is made when Walker has Grange use the occasion of his wife’s affair with Shipley as a rationalization for leaving his family.
Grange, however, is not a static character. He confronts new experiences and a second life in New York City, and he begins the process of coming to terms with who he is and what he might do to make up for his failures in his first life. A growing sense of a new self marks his reentry to the South, where he assumes the responsibility for rearing his granddaughter Ruth in his third life.
The early depiction of Grange shows how his lack of parental concern for Brownfield makes Brownfield the hard and cruel man that he becomes. Brownfield carries forward Grange’s legacy of abuse to family.
Margaret, Josie, and Mem are victimized and thwarted in their self-development both by society and by Grange and Brownfield. These women’s lives show what happens when little kinship is present.
Margaret only wanted to be loved. She used to wait for Grange to come home, dressing up for him and hoping he would notice her, but he never did. The sharecropping system oppresses Grange, but Margaret has to contend with oppression and debasement not only from without but also from within her own family. By the time Brownfield is fifteen years old, she has long since given up. Only in her sexual affairs does she find arms that temporarily comfort her.
Josie has similar experiences. On the surface, she is not passive like Margaret and Mem. Josie hides her reaction to a lifetime of abuse by men in her loud and vulgar behavior and in her profession as a prostitute, in which she relishes taking money from men and debasing them. Like Margaret, she wanted somebody to love her. Her father rejected her and publicly humiliated her when she was a pregnant teenager. Grange uses her even in his third life, marrying her for her money and ignoring her while he showers all his attention on Ruth. Brownfield uses her in his attempt to get revenge on his father.
Only Mem’s youngest daughter, Ruth, has the opportunity to not be a victim. Unlike her mother, whom Brownfield beat and finally killed, Ruth receives only the best part from her family, her grandfather Grange. He teaches her to be independent, proud, and strong. He shows her how to defend herself, even to...
(This entire section contains 655 words.)
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use a gun if she must. She is the only Copeland woman posed to deal effectively with racism and oppression and to be healthy in the process. At the novel’s end, she challenges segregated schools and racist history books, and she joins the emerging Civil Rights movement.
The Characters
Walker’s purpose in this novel is to provoke an empathetic as well as critical response to the race problem in America. She writes primarily for readers who do not understand racism and its effects on personality—hence her strategy to create black characters that feel intensely the pressures of the situation, characters that are agonizingly human. She gives her characters a real setting, the American South that she knows so well. In fact, when she leaves the cotton fields, the dusty clay roads and quiet woods, the drafty tenant shacks, and travels north to Central Park, she loses the touch of immediacy. Walker is also successful with dialogue; she knows the dialect of her people. Nothing captures better the color, the humor, and the pain of the black experience than her manipulations of nonstandard English, and her vivid and often raunchy metaphors. In order to reveal the motivation behind the characters’ behavior, Walker assumes an omniscient point of view and moves the center of consciousness from one character to another. First one sees the world through Brownfield’s eyes, understands why he develops such hatred for his wife, his father, and his daughter. From his own perspective, his father never loved him. Grange’s abandonment is, for him, a selfish, unfeeling act. From Brownfield, Walker transfers the reader to Josie’s mind, where the keys to her weakness and her prostitution still dwell in her unconscious, in her dreams. In many scenes, Walker assumes total omniscience, reporting not only observable events but also the thoughts of various characters. In the second half of the novel, she mainly reports the thoughts of Grange and Ruth. One comes to understand that Grange’s abandonment of his family was the result of extraordinary sensitivity and frustration, that Grange and Ruth, whom the society regards as crazy, are isolated examples of sanity, and that Ruth’s dogged independence and defensiveness derive from the horrible experience of seeing her murdered mother’s body.
Walker’s purpose goes beyond identification with individual characters. She tries to survey the racial situation in the South (and to some extent in the rest of America) over the past hundred years, and perhaps by implication even earlier, during the era of slavery. The characters are thus not only individuals but also representations of black consciousness. Grange, the title character, contains in himself the history of the black race in America. In tracing the changes in his own racial consciousness, he identifies changes in black attitudes. In the first stage, he says, the white society hated him, and he, adopting their judgment, hated himself. In the second stage, he began to hate whites and love himself. The third stage is a movement outward from the self; Grange directs his love toward another. At the end of the novel, Ruth and others may be on the verge of a fourth stage, friendship and equality with whites, but Grange himself dies in the third.
As Alice Walker is a black woman writer, one might anticipate bias against whites and perhaps against men. Yet the novel is remarkably free of bias. Whites as individuals have little place in the action. When they do appear, Walker seems almost consciously trying to balance them out. The stereotyped white boss, Shipley, superficially well-meaning but patronizing and insensitive to blacks as human beings, is replaced by a white couple at the end participating in civil rights marches and voter registration. Walker does not try to make any of the white characters fully motivated human beings—there are enough white novels around to do that. She concentrates on black society. One sees a similar balance in the depiction of men and women. The strong wife (Margaret) eventually worn down by the man, the stronger wife (Mem) who is invincible and therefore murdered by the man, the strong-willed young woman with a future (Ruth), and the wise juju woman (Sister Madelaine) share the stage with Josie, defeated early in life by her own intolerant father, and Mrs. Grayson, Ruth’s teacher, who has entirely lost her black consciousness. While Walker with some sympathy paints Brownfield as the most dangerous destructive force in black society—making him by the end a hateful devil that deserves killing—she insists that men are capable of change—Grange is the proof—and finally makes Grange a powerful force for good, not because he has attained the level of love and acceptance that characterize Quincey at the end, but because he, more than anyone, understands the hell of racism and yet survives with his personality intact. All that having been said, Walker clearly has the greatest respect for black women who have maintained racial pride in defiance of the oppressive slavery that both white and black males have imposed on them.
Characters
Walker's central character is Grange Copeland, whose evolving impact on his family spans three generations, depicted by Walker as three distinct lives. Grange devastates his wife, Margaret, and ruins the childhood of his son, Brownfield. He only becomes the heart of the novel during his third and final life. In this phase, Grange takes responsibility for his past actions and strives to atone for his mistakes by dedicating himself to raising his granddaughter, Ruth. He is determined to provide her with the opportunity for a fulfilling, loving, and joyful life—a life he forfeited for himself and, through his actions, denied to both his wife and his son.
Margaret, Grange's wife, and Mem, Brownfield's wife, symbolize women whose lives are wrecked by their husbands' feelings of inadequacy. Both Grange and Brownfield resort to beating their wives to assert their masculinity. Margaret exacerbates her own misery by engaging in affairs, hoping to provoke Grange's jealousy and remind him of his past love—a strategy Walker portrays as self-destructive. Mem, in contrast, is described by Grange as the closest thing to "a saint." Initially, Mem embodies the potential unlocked by education, allowing her to earn a better wage and escape the cycle of poverty symbolized by sharecropping. Ironically, this same education contributes to her downfall by heightening Brownfield's sense of impotence. His need to feel powerful by violently dominating at least one person ultimately leads him to murder Mem.
Unlike Brownfield, Mem never internalizes the negative image he tries to impose on her through abuse. She resists self-hatred and fights back. Ultimately, she is only defeated by physical weakness caused by malnutrition, beatings, and repeated pregnancies. Mem emerges as a tragic heroine to the reader, consistently portrayed as a loving and giving mother who cannot bring herself to believe that even Brownfield is entirely evil.
In contrast to Margaret and Mem, Walker introduces Josie and her daughter, Lorene. Josie is described as "a devouring cat, voracious and sly, wanting to eat [Brownfield] up, swallow him down alive." Josie's desire to possess Brownfield stems from her inability to make Grange hers. Josie's life serves as a template for Lorene's, who, born in a whorehouse, seems predestined for oppression. Though Lorene, largely a reflection of Josie, disappears halfway through the novel, Josie remains a prominent figure. Walker gradually reveals that Josie's harshness is not inherent but a defensive mechanism learned from a life marred by trauma. As a teenager, Josie was raped, publicly humiliated, and rejected by her own father. Despite these adversities, Josie is capable of love; she sacrifices everything, including her hard-earned bar, for Grange. Ultimately, she is exploited and betrayed by Grange, who does not reciprocate her love. Walker's portrayal of Josie is complex, yet she exemplifies a character whose flaws are exacerbated by physical abuse, oppression, and societal judgment.
Brownfield Copeland is depicted as the most malevolent of the main characters, though Walker does not suggest he is born evil. Brownfield's frailty, stemming from a largely loveless upbringing, evolves into violent misogyny in adulthood. He feels compelled to assert his manhood, against economic oppression, by dominating and abusing his family. While Walker occasionally elicits some sympathy for Brownfield, he ultimately represents a destructive force born from internalizing racist stereotypes of black worthlessness and disempowerment, eradicating any potential for love and goodness within him.
The only character potentially more malevolent than Brownfield is the white landowner, Shipley. Unsatisfied with raping Margaret and ruining one generation of Copelands, Shipley aims to do the same to Brownfield: "He [Brownfield] knew too that the moment he accepted money from Shipley he was done for. If he borrowed from Shipley, Shipley would make sure he never finished paying it back." Shipley embodies the inhuman evil of racist economic oppression of black sharecroppers by white landowners, illustrating how debt can create a form of slavery as severe as any before Emancipation. There is a cruel irony when he tells Brownfield, "they will start out afresh." In reality, their relationship would perpetuate a pattern of racist oppression spanning centuries: Brownfield is aware of this but feels powerless to escape. The character of Shipley blends with those of Captain Davis and Mr. J. L.: in these figures, Walker presents embodiments of oppressive racism rather than fully developed, individualized characters. While Walker is careful not to dismiss either Grange or Brownfield as monstrous, these characters are depicted as purely evil, representing the racist power that threatens to devastate the lives of all rural blacks.
In stark contrast to the racist white landowners, who embody the evil of a bleak future and a cycle of harsh racial oppression, Ruth Copeland, Grange's granddaughter, symbolizes hope for the future in the narrative. By raising Ruth, Grange not only atones for his past mistakes but also instills in her the understanding that violence is not the solution. Ruth embodies Walker's vision of "wholeness"—the capacity to transcend external oppression and internalize self-love instead of hatred from others. This enables Ruth to preserve her smile, her laughter, and most importantly, her ability to love herself and others. Walker clearly conveys this intention when describing Grange's dedication to Ruth and his aspirations for her future:
... in her [Ruth's] living there must be joy, laughter, contentment in being a woman; someday there must be happiness in enjoying a man, and children. Each day must be spent, in a sense, apart from each other; on each day there would be sun and cheerfulness or rain and sorrow or quiet contemplation of life. Every day must be past, present and future, with dancing and winemaking and drinking and as few regrets as possible. Her future must be the day she lived in.... Survival was not everything. He [Grange] had survived. But to survive whole was what he wanted for Ruth.
Walker sees the promise for the future solely in Ruth's wholeness, and it is this promise that Grange fiercely protects with his life. Thus, the novel, though bleak, concludes on a cautiously hopeful note.