Introduction
0.1 Alice Walker and Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart
As a reputable Afro-American female writer, Alice Walker has established her reputation in contemporary American literary world. She has published a large number of literary works which include essays, poetry and novels. She shows her great concern and sympathy for Afro-American women’s miseries under racial and sexual oppressions. In 1983, her masterpiece The Color Purple won Pulitzer Prize. She coined the term “womanism” in her In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens (1983). Walker’s unique writing style and her sense of responsibility to speak for African American women are inseparable with her growth background. In 1944, Walker was born in the south of Georgia. She was the youngest of eight children in her family. Her father worked in a sharecropping farm and her mother worked as a maid. The ancestors of her family were slaves under the brutal sharecropping system. They were forced to work on the farm and pick cottons. Her brother’s mischief caused her blindness when she was eight years old, and her parents did not care her much after that accident. Walker attributed that accident to patriarchy, and his father’s brutality was served as a model in her later writing. She persisted in working hard and succeeded in entering Spelman College with scholarship. At that time, the American Civil Rights Movement reached its climax and Walker decided to dedicate herself to the political movement to fight for racial equality. The movement had a great influence on Walker’s writing and after that she began to denounce racism and sexism in her novels.
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0.2 Literature Review
So far, critical response to Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart is limited and there is a dearth of secondary sources. Positive reviews have been garnered by some critics. Susan McHenry, a founding editor of Black Issues Book Review, praises “Walker’s invocation to open your heart”, (McHenry, 2004:44), finding a rich rewarding journey of her own through reading this book. She considers the story is helpful for people to extricate themselves from midlife predicament. For McHenry, an additional impressive merit lies in “Walker’s embrace of the vagaries of human nature, self-deprecating humor and profound philosophical insights” (McHenry, 2004: 44). Vanessa Bush issues with the assertion that this dreamlike novel incorporates the political and spiritual consciousness and emotional styles, expressing the author’s contemplation of the world’s status (Bush, 2003: 358). Negative reviews counterweigh the praise to this novel. Wendy Weil in his brief article argues, “Walker still lyrically evokes place and mood, the underlying smug peachiness, the unconvincing experiences, and the idiosyncratic thinking make this more a self-indulgent fantasy than an intellectually provocative tale” (Weil, 2003: 1422). Kakutani, t
