“The Highs and Lows of Black Feminist Criticism,” Barbara Christian

Christian’s essay contained a few voices of criticism—ethnic, feminist, and even Marxist theories. Going back to Alice Walker’s “In Search of Our Mother’s Garden,” Christian writes on how Walker suggests we stop looking only at high art to find our feminine voice, that we must begin to look at “low” art, the gardening, cooking, oral storytelling that our mothers have passed along as a part of our history because of the lack of access to high forms of art in the past. Christian suggests that “even as we moved [towards finding the right balance of female voice], the high, the low persisted, in fact moved further and further apart.” Like Showalter, Christian believes that we depend so much upon Freud, Foucault, and Derrida to define what feminist writing is that we totally negate the essence of women’s writing—which is, in fact, writing from the life-experience of being a woman. We continue to show the male world that we cannot define ourselves without them—that we depend primarily upon male characteristics of writing to measure what we are (or are not). It makes much more sense, instead, to define ourselves based on the characteristics that are uniquely woman, not just un-man. We need to focus on how we respond as a woman to different texts, whether they be the high and mighty art of the white dead males, or the so-called middle art of women novelists, or the so-called low art of our mother’s apple pie recipes. We have distinct female responses to all art, and we must recognize these responses as valid and true. As Christian writes, “as we look high, we might also look low, lest we devalue women in the world even as we define Woman. In ignore their voices, we may not only truncate our movement but we may also limit our own process until our voices no longer sound like women’s voices to anyone.”