Alice Walker and Ralph Ellison work toward different ends in their essays "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens" and "An Extravagance of Laughter." Walker urges African American women to identify their own creativity. She refers to Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own" in relationship to the experience of these women. Ellison discusses the virtues of adopting a second self, for African Americans and those of other races alike. His inspiration comes from W.B. Yeats. The main difference in the approach of Walker and Ellison is that Walker advocates a stripping away of personality layers while Ellison advocates putting on personality layers.
Walker would disagree with Ellison about putting on layers because Walker contends that African American women have had to assume layers of personality all their lives. Walker discusses black women in the South during the early twenties. The creative spirit of these women was so repressed that they were virtually sleepwalkers through life. Their only means of survival was to adopt a second self: "They forced their minds to desert their bodies and their striving spirits sought to rise, like frail whirlwinds from the hard red clay" (Walker 640). They went through the motions of raising families, working alongside their husbands in the sharecropping fields, and enduring the insults of life in a racist society.
The only socially acceptable outlet for African American women in the early twentieth century was the church, and thus many assumed a second self of religious spirituality. For this reason, the poet Jean Toomer referred to these women as "saints." He perceived that they were more than ordinary women but lacked the words to adequately describe their hidden selves. Walker, however, has no trouble naming them. She describes them as "Creators, who lived lives of spiritual waste, because they were so rich in spirituality--which is the basis of Art" (Walker 640). The strain of mai...