Walker in Meridian shows how motherhood is ‘an angel of seeing life,’ of esteeming all life, of opposing all that may crush it. It emphasizes that motherhood isn’t only biological state however an attitude towards life. Walker centers around the wide racial encounters of African-American and as a ‘ champion of the Womanist world’ she is worried of black women who have been profoundly distanced by the white culture. As Karen Stein writes: the novel points out that the Civil Rights Movement often reflected the oppressiveness of patriarchal capitalism. Activists merely turned political rhetoric to their own ends while continuing to repress spontaneous individuality.
To overcome this destructiveness, Walker reaches for a new definition of revolution. Her hope for a new society in heres political change, as well as personal transformation. (Stein 66) The protagonist of the novel is Meridian. Her fantasies are about the releasing of her mother from the burden that motherhood has been.as an outcome brings out of the initiatory encounters which Meridian experiences with an effort to discover her identity and her very own moral focus where she attempts to build up a culmination of being. Meridian, The title identity, is a college educated woman who goes up against in her existence with aiding southern blacks in gaining political and social equality. For the procedure of the social changes, Meridian moves in forward so as to push ahead to look for the connection between her own history and communal history. Meridian is as a woman protagonist, awakens from her dependent status as a black woman, daughter, wife and mother to her own self and endeavors to become the maternal provider of the bigger black community. Meridian resembles an artist in the sense she needs to extend her psyche with action. Meridian has involved herself into bloodless revolution with her thought of loving enemy and peaceful way to deal with confrontation. Meridian commits to the strengthening of women.
Meridian subsequent to bringing forth Eddie Jr, she comprehends and realizes what it is to be a woman and mother and all the more imperatively to be a poor black woman. While do as such, Meridian sees her mother as a ‘willing know nothing, a woman of ignorance’ (p.17), who blindly holds to convention in its most hallowed form. Her mother has been critically victimized by European gift of Christianity as an opiate to the black slave, a consoling myth who blackened the brutalities of oppression. She has surrendered all obligations regarding her own welfare to God and she needs Meridian to do as well. Meridian declines to submit herself to the Christian convictions of her mother and she moves her mother’s visually impaired commitment to religion, likewise she challenges mother’s blind devotion to religion and passive acknowledgment of the covering compels of marriage and motherhood. Meridian considers sex to be an “sanctuary” (p.57), and in this Meridian ‘look out at the male world with something approaching equanimity, even charity; even friendship’ (p.57). She, in the wake of encountering motherhood in the initial phases of her life, chooses to look for admission in a college to discover her very own way and identity. This better approach for proceeding with the life for discovering personality empowers her to accomplish, the most astounding purpose of intensity, flourishing, wellbeing, and so on. Deborah E. McDowell in “The Self in Bloom; Alice Walker’s Meridian” says that as a result, she develops ‘a completeness of being’ (McDowell 262). Hers is an adventure from the most ordinary position as a high school dropout to a self-enlightened individual who has accomplished her selfhood and she recognizes what is the reason and mission of one’s own life. She needs to start as a ordinary black woman and to end as a confident individual. To comprehend herself, she has needed to experience countless trials and tests to discover the answers of her questions in her mind. Subsequently, she is advanced ‘from a woman raped by racial and sexual oppression to a revolutionary figure effecting action and strategy to bring freedom to herself and other poor disenfranchised blacks in the south’ (Washington 148).
Actually Christian Barbara in Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition says: ‘Meridian’s quest for wholeness and her involvement in the civil rights movement is initiated by her feelings of inadequacy in living up to the standards of black motherhood’ (Christian 47-48). Meridian needs to give some significance to her life as an individual. She is stirred to her actual self, the minute she thinks about the Civil Rights Movement. The minute her marriage to Eddie has broken down, and Meridian has joined Civil Rights Movement. Meridian’s mother despises her radical political activities. To Meridian’s inclusion in the civil rights movement, her mother reacts: ‘As far as I’m concerned…you’ve wasted a year of your life fooling around with those people (Civil rights movements). The papers say they’re crazy. God separated the sheeps from the goats and the black folks from the white’ (p. 83). Meridian commits herself to social battle, earns a grant to Saxon college. In the beginning of movement, Meridian, as a volunteer in the Civil Rights Movement, confronts with the sentiment of union and outright commitment. She dissents with alternate volunteers against the town’s divided hospital facilities and she takes an interest in the freedom march to the church. She joins the Civil Rights Movement and discovers her capacity to raise her voice against segregation. Deborah. E. McDowell in “The Changing Same: Generational Connections and Black Women Novelists” says ‘Meridian challenges her mother’s unquestioning acceptance of her secondary citizenship’ (Mc Dowell 267).
In turmoil the police thump her down and she is trampled by people running forward and backward. The sheriff gets her by the hair and starts to punch her and kicking her in the back. She doesn’t shout with the except in her own mind. She untainted by opposing cases: as she being captured and beaten and the she understands that ‘they were at a time and place in History that forced the trivial to fall away and they were absolutely together’ (p. 81). Along with Meridian, Truman and Lynne have likewise paid high costs for their roles and their activities in the movement and they have lost what individuals think about the focal point of private life: children, parents, personal love. Meridian, by her contribution in the movement, overlooks the occasions in her own past that once kept her from the bigger historical setting of her life. Walker In an interview with Claudia C. Tate talks about the structure and criticalness of Meridian and she discusses her feelings of trepidation about ‘how much of the past, especially of our past, gets forgotten’ (p.185). Meridian turns into a model of strong woman by her college education. She starts to explore the potential outcomes for her own development through the beginning of her instruction which Wade Gaylein The Black Women in the Novels of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison observes: ‘Without the Movement and without the training, Meridian could have turned out to resemble Mrs. Slope, a woman who realizes suffocation is all purposeful, yet who lives in any case a real existence of visually impaired forfeit’ (Ophr 58). She comprehends the intensity of education which makes the women confident, self-supporting, and comprehends that nothing can prevent her from achieving her objective.
The activities in the College have great effect on her life. Meridian dependably goes up against with the question. The battle of Meridian in her personal change and in discovering her identity echoes June Jordan’s meaning of her obligations as a women’s feminist: I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self- love and self- respect…and… I am entering my soul into a struggle that will most certainly transform the experience of all peoples of the earth, as no other movement can,…because the movement in to self-love, self-respect, and self-determination is…now galvanizing…the unarguable majority of human beings everywhere. ( Hernton 58) Meridian, in her improvement, relies upon her development for moving in backward so as to push ahead, and in backward is the South. Deborah E. McDowell in ‘The Self in Bloom; Alice Walker’s Meridian’ watches: It is significant that much of the novel is set in coastal Georgia, where the `survival of Africanism particularly of the oral, religious, and musical traditions is said to be most salient. Echoing Jean Toomer, Walker sees the South, despite it’s history of racism and oppression, as regenerative, for it is the South that is the cradle of the black man’s experience in the New World, and the South that has continued to shape his experience in this country. (p.272) Meridian notification that the black young women who left home and return are effective secretaries, teachers, and every one of them made them thing in like manner: ‘They all had changed their appearance with the goal that they may look increasingly like white women. They fixed and dyed their hair, wore make-up, and made different things, all under the appearance of move enhancement’ (p.111). Meridian also mindful of herself as an adventurer and she feels that she has a place with the general people who have led troops in fight like Harriet Tubman, Thus, Meridian, begins to guarantee the black woman’s history and attempts to reconnect herself with that positive and rousing history of black women. Meridian’s duty to justice grasps her very own people and her oppressors.
By choosing the female community Meridian underscores her duty to equity as well as avows the women’s activist philosophy in which she understands that the individual is the political. At last, she uncovers a “ neo-feminist consciousness” that empowers her to perceive that the ‘dignity and value of a person are to be found in the degree of inner growth achieved, in compassion, in the affirmation and acting out of humanistic values over and against the in Specifics of one’s condition’ (Koppelman Cornillon 186). Meridian’s journey is for individual space where she can identityize herself as she decides to. Meridian’s assignment would basically be to obtain a term from feminist epistemology, one of ‘consciousness-raising ‘. Through the Meridian, Walker needs to bring out who looks for identity and the privilege to end up a free individual. All through the American history, Blacks were attempting to pick up the Civil Rights: ‘The Civil Rights Movement in the South was considered one of America’s most important movements of political and social readjustment in the 20th century’ (Bulton 3). The movement was the because of the significant endeavors of the Blacks since Reconstruction. Walker in this novel endeavors to portray Meridian’s development through a some points such as the likelihood of vision, the void of an premature marriage. McDowell in The American Kaleidoscope: Race, Ethnicity, the Civic Culture says that Meridian’s identity is ‘a pdecayotype for psychic wholeness and individual autonomy’ (McDowell 102). In the convention of Bildungsroman, the book is a progression of initiatory encounters which Meridian experiences to discover her personality and builds up a fulfillment of being.
At the beginning of the novel, Meridian is in a condition of decay. Toward the end of the novel, she prospers and reinforced. The novel delineates decay and development through Meridian. For Meridian, it turns out to be evident that the political and financial and social strengthening is essential for the development of women. All through the African Cultural custom, Meridian moves towards her liberation and advancement, and increases her personality through the Civil Rights Movement. Meridian finishes her voyage of knowing herself and she makes herself in her own image and not as a biased one in light of the fact that regardless of Meridian’s excruciating private encounters, she comes to know another self. Meridian understands that she should overcome the possibility of ‘a woman’s place’ and for satisfying this mission, she should leave from two institutions which have customarily sheltered women: the family and church. They have offered comfort however they have added to a restrictive belief in the best possible job of women. Walker in her novel Meridian over-connotes black woman like identity to an extreme. Walker utilizes the novel as a thoughtful and diagnostic instrument in our very own individual pursuit, and Walker offers tissue to the novel due to the inquiries, and questions are rooted in this current nation’s past, and hold on in the present. Meridian finishes her journey of knowing herself to the degree that she makes herself in her very own image, and she succeeds in evolving a new self. She understands that she should conquer the possibility of ‘a woman’s place’ and to satisfy this mission she should leave from the church and her family which have generally sheltered women.
Meridian impelled on a scan for spiritually and political wellbeing. She has trespassed against biological motherhood. She turns into a mother who extends her brain in which she is coordinated towards the preservation of all life. In the novel Meridian, the main character, grows up through the eyes of the reader. Her emotional, physical and psychological stages of obstruction have been completely portrayed. Meridian is sufficiently strong to dismiss religion at a early stage in spite of the way that her mother is a dedicated Christian. In school, Meridian can’t complete a discourse since ‘ she knows that there is no truth in the words she speaks (p. 121). Her resistance is additionally found by they way she becomes a non- conformist when she gives up family life and motherhood to attend the college’ (p.91). Her choice to fill in as a volunteer for voter registration portends further her individuality. Her assurance to give the wild child a possibility and, later after his unfortunate death, an appropriate memorial service regardless of being denied by the authorities further demonstrates Meridian’s ability: Meridian driving “the students sang through tears that slipped like melting pellets of sleet down their grieved and angered checks: we shall overcome…’ (p. 37). She effectively gets associated with the Civil Rights Movement, yet hiding it from the college. She urges others to join the movement, and they go from door to door trying to persuade others to have the boldness to cast a ballot. In spite of the disillusioning association with Truman Held, Meridian is sufficiently able to continue having lost a child, lover and her friend Anne-Marion, Meridian moves into her next phase of life in the wake of defeating a serious disease at the school. She turns into an arbiter between her people and the mayor when Black people are not permitted to swim in public swimming pool, and the mayor declines to build them theirs. Meridian leads the Blacks in a serene show to the city hall leader’s office bearing the cadaver of a dead five-year old kid who had been struck in the sewer for two days:“It was Meridian who had led them to the mayor’s office, bearing in her arms the bloated figure of the five-year-old boy who had been struck in the sewer for two days before he was rake out with a graphing hook” (p. 93). That is after a few children were suffocated in floods while swimming in trench that fills in as make move pools. The women sit with the mother of the lost child, review their own lost children, gaze at their reviling husband who couldn’t glance back at them and shake their heads.
All through the novel, Meridian is portrayed as having a positive feeling of herself as a Black woman: strong, independent, and adventurous. She lives among the poorest Blacks in the country South, becoming like them, driving them in peaceful challenge walks to enhance conditions in their communities: While other students dreaded confrontation with police she welcomed it, and was capable of an inner gaiety, a sense of freedom, as she saw the clubs slashing down on her from above only once was she beaten into unconsciousness, and it was not the damage done to her body that she remembered.(p.230). Walker praises her as a Black woman for these qualities. The Writer likewise makes a variety of ground-breaking black mothers to demonstrate her relationship with Black motherhood. Walker follows Meridian’s foremothers back a few ages. One was a slave who gradually starved to death to keep her children and to sustain them; another a slave artist who gets her family’s freedom with her earning from the artistic paintings decorating people’s bans. Walker brings alive the slaves’ past in the story of the slave woman Louvinie a story-teller. The slave artist and the story teller speak to Walker’s worry with the imagination of the African-American women.
