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Stories of Resilience in Childhood: The Narratives of Maya Angelou, Maxine Hong Kingston, Richard Rodriguez, John Edgar Wideman, and Tobias Wolff
MELUS, Fall-Winter, 2000 by Lynn Z. Bloom
Stories of Resilience in Childhood: The Narratives of Maya Angelou, Maxine Hong Kingston, Richard Rodriguez, John Edgar Wideman, and Tobias Wolff. Daniel D. Challener. New York: Garland, 1997. 216 pages. $65.00 cloth.
All autobiographies are success stories. Even if the author has not triumphed over adversity in actual life, the writing that transforms life into art signals that the autobiographer is in charge--of the writing, if not the life. Through that writing the autobiographer claims the authority to control how others will come to know and understand that person, that life represented therein. Skilled American autobiographers--and the authors studied here are the best--are the tellers of wonderful, inspiring tales in which they, as the de facto heroes of their life stories, overcome innumerable obstacles to achieve success in the American grain. Thus they not only survive, they attain the education, literary finesse, and access to mainstream publishers which enable them to prevail in print, as in person. Indeed, their works encourage mainstream readers to regard these authors as spokespeople for the potential and possibilities of their race and ethnic backgrounds, to take the individual for the entire group.
Thus it is not surprising that in this revised doctoral dissertation (English Department, Brown 1993), Challener analyzes five canonical childhood autobiographies--Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life (1989), Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior (1976), Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory, (1982) and John Edgar Wideman's Brothers and Keepers (1984)--to address the issue of resilience. "Why," his central question asks, do some children surmount many difficulties and go on to live fulfilling lives while other children who face similar difficulties end up living desperate, sad lives? What helps children beat the odds?". Challener's ambitious interdisciplinary perspective draws on research on urban school reform and bilingual education; economics of the disadvantaged and studies of discrimination based on race, ethnicity, and sexual identity; the psychology of birth order and adolescent development--an orientation dependent on literal readings of these more--and less--imaginative works. The elements of literary criticism (James Olney's position that "autobiographies offer a hazy metaphoric sense of what a child's life was like") and syntactic linguistic analysis that surface at intervals seem uncomfortably grafted to the economic, sociological and psychological perspectives that give Stories of Resilience a place in Garland's series, Children of Poverty: Studies on the Effects of Single Parenthood, the Feminization of Poverty, and Homelessness.
Challener's analysis of these autobiographies yields the not surprising conclusion (from sociological and psychological perspectives) that "first and foremost adult female family members contributed dramatically to the resilience of all five children." Thus Grandmother Henderson "never fail[s] to protect and provide for" Maya Angelou; "Brave Orchid encourages Maxine to become a woman warrior"; Rosemary Wolff, Bette Wideman, and Richard Rodriguez's (unnamed) mother "steadfastly encourage," support, and "believe in" their children--interpretations that lose credibility the farther the mother moves offstage. Fathers, on the contrary, either abandon their children (Angelou, Woolf) or are ineffectual (Rodriguez, Kingston, Wideman), thereby keeping them "at-risk." Neighbors, neighborhoods, and "community institutions, especially schools and churches" step in to fill the breach. However, it is a stretch to believe, as Challener claims, that the strength that Stamps, Arkansas transmits to Angelou ("if an entire village is willing to pitch in, an amazing child can be raised") is conveyed with comparable force and benevolence by Tobias Wolff's experience in the Boy Scouts (ironically rendered); and by John Edgar Wideman's basketball playing, and Richard Rodriguez's writing for the school newspaper, neither addressed prominently in the autobiographies. Such literalist overdetermined readings of these autobiographies reinforce the evidence proffered in such sociological studies as Emmy Wemer and Ruth Smith's Overcoming the Odds: High Risk Children from Birth to Adulthood (1992). However, Challener's procrusteanism also has the unintended consequence of transforming complicated lives, rendered by these autobiographers in rich symbolism, wondrous complexity, dazzling language (he's best on their silences), into factual, clinical case studies.
Lynn Z. Bloom is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor and Aetna Chair of Writing at the University of Connecticut. Her specialities are autobiography, creative nonfiction, and composition studies, and they are reflected in her research on "The Essay Canon" (College English March 1999) and Composition Studies as a Creative Art: Writing, Teaching, Research, Administration (Utah State UP 1999).
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