Title: Thinking Back through Her Mothers: Judith Ortiz Cofer and Virginia Woolf
Abstract: Judith Ortiz Cofer chose arguably the most famous line in Room One's Own for the epigraph to Silent Dancing: Partial Remembrance a Puerto Rican Childhood, her collection stories, poems, and autobiographical essays: A woman writing thinks back through her (AROO 97). context, Woolf was writing the importance a female literary tradition for the woman writer.2 Masterpieces not solitary births, as she remarks elsewhere in her lecture; they require preparation, foreground, and female models and mentors (65). The line has taken on a life its own, however, and is often quoted in connection with the complex relations between biological mothers and daughters informing women's creativity, and also extended to the mother-daughter relations at the heart many women's texts. Woolf postulated that future women writers would resurrect new literary forebears, create new forms, and write about new subjects. Mothers, both literal and literary, have become an abiding focus for women writers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. the preface and opening essays in Silent Dancing, Ortiz Cofer pays tribute to her Puerto Rican grandmother, mother, and aunts as oral storytellers, and to the centrality her artistic foremother Woolf, whom she calls literary mentor for this project (13). Despite a long history ambivalence about Woolf's influence among many women writers color in the U.S., Ortiz Cofer embraces Woolf's credo female independence, woman-centered literary inspiration, and personal, poetic reclamation memory in her autobiographical writings. She stresses the parallels rather than divergences between the mutable truths in Woolf's literary acts memory, and the mutable stories in the ethnic women's oral tradition her home culture. She also engages the problematics embodiment and disembodiment in the female narrative voice central to Room One's Own and Woolf's autobiographical writings. Thinking back through her mothers, Ortiz Cofer explores the complex legacy her maternal inheritances in her autobiographical collections Silent Dancing and The Latin Deli, evoking childhood moments being, and reshaping stories and memories her later life and the lives other Puerto Rican women, both on the island and the U.S. mainland. Commenting on Woolf's strong emotional ties to her (Woolf's earliest memory in A Sketch the Past), her own ties to her and female relatives, and her essential relationship to Woolf, Ortiz Cofer suggests that there is this invisible umbilical cord connecting us and in my case, it became a literary umbilical cord. I feel that the life my imagination began with [them] (AcostaBelen 93). Maternity becomes more than metaphor for the creative process and literary influence. an implicit revision Woolf's famous admonition to the female artist to kill the selflessly nurturing, mothering Angel in the House (Professions 285-86), Ortiz Cofer also thinks forward through her own daughter, comparing the she passes on to her to the empowerment [that] ... the emerging artist needs to win for herself (Latin 168). Like so many Woolf's American successors, Ortiz Cofer figures female inheritance and legacy in both literal and literary terms. I Not writers have assented to Jane Marcus's sweeping characterization Woolf as the mother us all (xiii). While American women writers color have arguably drawn sustenance from Woolf's ideas, many have--openly or covertly--objected to her class, racial, and national biases. Alice Walker's well-known, extended homage to Woolf in In Search Our Mothers' Gardens is as much a study in striking contrasts as in fruitful parallels. If Woolf tells us that a woman needs income and a room her own in order to write, what then, Walker asks, are we to make of a writer such as the eighteenth century poet and slave Phillis Wheatley, who owned not even herself? …
Publication Year: 2009
Publication Date: 2009-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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