SOURCE: “Gayl Jones and the Matrilineal Metaphor of Tradition,” in Signs, Vol. 20, No. 2, Winter, 1995, pp. 245-67.

In the essay below, Dubey analyzes Jones's use of a matrilineal structure to achieve meaning in her novels Corregidora and Song of Anninho.

Since the publication of Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens in 1974, black feminist literary critics have recurrently used the metaphor of matrilineage to authorize their construction of a black feminine literary tradition. Essays such as Dianne Sadoff’s “Black Matrilineage: The Case of Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston,” Marjorie Pryse’s “Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker and the ‘Ancient Power’ of Black Women,” and Joanne Braxton’s “Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance” posit the mother as the origin of the black women's literary tradition, as well as the guarantor of its temporal continuity. Apparently resuming a familial metaphor long familiar to Euro-American feminist...