The Contrast of Virginia Woolf and Alice Walker

The Contrast of Virginia Woolf and Alice Walker

After reading the four essays assigned to this sequence, it

becomes interesting to contrast two author's points of view

on the same subject. Reading one professional writer's

rewriting of a portion of another professional writer's essay

brings out many of each of their characteristics and views.

Also, the difference in writing styles could be drastic, or

slight. Nevertheless, the writers display how versatile the

English language can be.

Alice Walker was born in 1944 as a farm girl in Georgia.

Virginia Woolf was born in London in1882. They have both

come to be highly recognized writers of their time, and they

both have rather large portfolios of work. The scenes the

might have grown up seeing and living through may have

greatly influenced their views of subjects which they both

seem to write about. In her essay "In Search of Our

Mothers' Gardens," Alice Walker speaks first about the

untouchable faith of the black women of the

post-Reconstruction South. She speaks highly of the faith

and undying hope of these women and their families. She

even comes to recognize them as saints as she describes

their faith as "so intense, deep, unconscious, the they

themselves were unaware of the richness they held" (Walker

694).

In a passage in which she speaks about the treatment and

social status of the women of the sixteenth century, Woolf

explains that a woman who might have had a truly great gift

in this time "would have surely gone crazy, shot herself, or

ended up in some lonely cottage on the outside of town, half

witch, half wizard, feared and mocked" (Woolf 749). Her

use of some of these powerful nominative shows that she

feels strongly about what she is writing. Also for her, life

growing up and stories she may have heard may have

influenced this passage greatly. In her passage she imagines

what it may have been like had William Shakespeare had a

sister. She notices how difficult it would be even given the

same talents as Shakespeare himself, to follow throughout

and utilize them in her life.

It is clear after reading further into Woolf's passage that

obviously she lived in a different time period, only about fifty

years apart though. The way she relates and tells a very

similar story with an entirely different setting shows without

the reader even knowing that she wa...

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Whether this style that Virginia Woolf uses is correct or not,

it is powerful and it pauses the reader and , most

importantly, helps the reader think in exactly the same

manner as she was when she wrote it. The pauses she

experienced in her thoughts when she wrote the story about

the story about the writer's sister are simulated and relived

when the reader crosses them.

Both writers do a fine job of stressing the morals in their

writing. The reader can, in Walker's essay, put himself in the

first person and imagine the South very easily because of

how descriptive she is in her narration. The reader of

Woolf's essay clearly can understand and come to realize the

unfairness and downright cruelty of the pure neglect of

hidden talent among many women throughout time. She does

this through simply telling a good story. This perhaps show

that Virginia Woolf may have been fond of Walker's work.

Woolf chooses to clearly state and agree with the same

points Walker makes and shows the ideas in a different light

because indeed she is a different person with different

attributes. This shows up dominantly in her rewriting of

Walker's "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens."