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"Not my mother, not my sister, but it's me, O Lord, standing …": Alice Walker's "The Child Who Favored Daughter" as Neo-Slave Narrative - Critical Essay
Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1997 by Neal A. Lester
This father is unable to accept the power his daughter has over him. Her beauty, his thoughts of her, his thoughts of her words to her white lover, perhaps even his thoughts of violence against her make his body and mind respond uncontrollably. Hence, according to his all-consuming worldview, the source of his attraction and repulsion must be destroyed. His final violent act against her--cutting off her breasts--serves to de-feminize her, to make her less beautiful and less tempting to him and to other men:
He can only strike her with his fist and send her sprawling once more into the dirt. She gazes up at him over her bruises and he sees her blouse, wet and slippery from the rain, has slipped completely off her shoulders and her high young breasts are bare. He gathers their fullness in his fingers and begins a slow twisting. The barking of the dogs creates a frenzy in his cars and he is suddenly burning with unnamable desire. In his agony he draws the girl away from him as one pulls off his arm and with quick slashes of his knife leaves two bleeding craters the size of grapefruits on her bare bronze chest and flings what he finds in his hands to the yelping dogs. (44-45)(7)
In this father's eyes, he has destroyed his daughter in this act. We learn nothing more about her after this account. Yet what is important here is not necessarily what happens to the daughter after the horrendous amputations, but rather that her father's perverted sacrificing/punishing of his daughter--allegedly to protect her from the sins of the world and to protect himself from his sinful attraction to her--does not destroy the fact that the daughter acted and thought independently and defiantly, behavior that according to patriarchal ideals de-feminizes her as well. Whether or not she dies is less important than the fact that her letter will forever remind him of the daughter, the sister, and the wife he could never possess.
As do all slave narratives by virtue of their existence as accounts by former slaves, Walker's story redefines notions of authority and authoring. While it would seem that masters had complete control over slaves, both Douglass's and Jacobs's narratives show that slaves did not define their power by the. same terms. A slave's defiance, a slave's literacy, a slave's "signifying" when asked how he or she liked being a slave, a slave's sorrow songs and work songs, a slave's folktales were all ways of asserting an individual and collective identity and a humanity publicly denied them but privately and communally realized. In Walker's story, these women survive physical and emotional abuse because they are strong-willed and are thinkers. The women's power, like the slaves', is not necessarily a spoken authority but a power manifest in their defiant thinking and actions.
The most threatening source of power to the father here is his daughter's literacy. Although she says but one defiant "no" when he commands her to deny the contents of her letter to the white lover, and although the father threatens and beats her, it is she who controls his actions by documenting her thoughts and overpowering his verbal and physical assaults. Throughout the story, the daughter who favored Daughter carries her books, symbols of her mental liberation and weapons against her father's efforts to control her. The father's inability to know her--her thoughts and her actions--decenters him in her life. Notice that she condescendingly "look[s] over his head at the brilliant ... sky" (37) when he confronts her with the letter. And while the father can read--he reads the Bible and the letter--there is no real sense that the father writes--or creates--as does the daughter. The daughter becomes, in a sense, her own creator, displacing her father as "Father, judge, giver of life." That this father is threatened by the daughter's words on a page is further symbolized when he destroys the baby wasps building their "paper houses":
