61 pages • 2 hours read
Paule MarshallPraisesong For The Widow
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1983A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapters 4-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Sleeper’s Wake”
Part 2, Chapter 4 Summary
Once they closed on the house of White Plains and were weeks away from moving in, Avey only thinks of the early days on Halsey Street—“[a]n act of betrayal” she calls it (122). She knows yearning for the days they struggled to escape for 12 years was duplicitous to the husband who had been nearly killing himself—and her own toil—but the move makes her realize how much things had changed between them. She thinks of the fun they had together, dancing in their living room and playfully teasing one another. She thinks of their sex life, once lively and passionate, and the ways Jerome would worship her body before making love to her. He would recite poetry after waking early to bring home the Sunday paper and coffee cake for them to share. Gradually, after the fatalistic Tuesday night fight, all those rituals fell away. One stark change is that Jerome no longer seemed present as they made love—his “touch increasingly became that of a man whose thoughts were elsewhere, and his body […] felt impatient to leave and join them” (129). Afterwards, Avey lies next to him, unsatisfied and filled with rage.
On the recliner on her hotel balcony in Grenada, that rage still fills her but also because of “what she had become” (130).
After the move to White Plains, Jerome shaves off his characteristic moustache, and the absence of it shakes Avey. Though Jerome claims it had become too much trouble to maintain, Avey senses that the shaving represented the end of the fight for him, that he “foolishly let drop his guard” (131). The most upsetting change, though, is the way Jerome starts to talk once they lived in White Plains, dealing out criticisms to “his fellow man according to a harsh and joyless ethic”; he begins preaching that “negroes” (131) must stop looking for handouts from white men, that they must stop dancing if they are going to make “any progress” (132). He says things like that until he dies, though the last thing he ever said has a reiteration of “Do you know who you sound like?” in his sleep, making Avey realize that the Tuesday night fight haunted him until the day he died (132).
When they buried Jerome, Avey could not bring herself to look at him in his coffin until the very last second. When she did, she saw the “joyless” man who replaced her husband, and the sight sent her lunging at him, beginning to raise her fist (133). The funeral director, thinking she was overcome with grief, held her back as she trembled. At the end of the funeral, everyone told her she “held up [well] in the face of her great loss” (133).
Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary
Avey cries in the darkness on the balcony, her grief clashing with the sounds of the tropical landscape around her. She mourns her husband for the first time, but she does not mourn his death—she mourns his life. She mourns “that the struggle had been so unrelenting,” that he would turn on himself for his race, saying his skin color made the battle “uphill all the way” (134). Or worse, Avey recalls, when he would turn against his own race as though he was no longer a part of it. He blamed them for blaming the white man for everything, saying that black people needed to understand that it was the white man’s world: “it was their companies, their firms, their offices, their country, and therefore, theirs the power to give or deny” (135). This blame, this rage, is what Avey believes eventually killed him, sending the boiling blood to his brain with a stroke. The man she loved died long before his actual death, but she had nothing to mark it. She wonders if it was the night of the fight that killed his true self.
Avey considers everything—all the small, but significant pleasures—they forfeited for the dream of security and comfort, and she realizes the sacrifice was never worth it. She wishes she had known it then, that she and Jerome could have recognized everything worthy about their relationship and preserved it with the “vigilance needed to safeguard it” (139). Painfully, Avey realizes they could have had both success and happiness but were too focused on the former to maintain the latter.
As she blames Jerome for this loss, Avey recognizes her own culpability; she had avoided and denied her relationship to the events of the Civil Rights Era, as though they did not relate to her. She remembers how she viewed the woman from Halsey Street, as though Avey had always been better than her. Even with Marion, her youngest daughter who had an active role in the Civil Rights Movement, Avey’s instincts were to turn away. Jerome had been the same, if not worse: “he and Marion hardly spoke to each other” because of their differences of beliefs (141). Over the years, Avey began to sound like Jerome, and she hardly recognized herself.
After breaking into a fit on the balcony, Avey remembers the last time she slept in her clothes: it was the first New Year’s after they moved to Halsey Street, and she and Jerome had fallen into bed exhausted after the long trip into Brooklyn. When they woke, Jerome carefully began undressing her, opening the closet so that the full-length mirror faced them. Avey had worn a party hat, which fell off as they made love, skirting across the room and pointing to their image in the mirror.
Avey, in the present, rips off her girdle and collapses into bed, still raging against the memory of her former self.
Part 2, Chapters 4-5 Analysis
The theme of loss is the focus of Chapter 4 as Avey recalls the true cost of Jerome’s drive to make it out of Halsey Street. This is first explored through the motif of dancing. In their early days, their happiness and freedom of spirit is represented through their physical movements; they put on records and moved about their living rooms, free of inhibitions and full of playfulness. Jerome’s joy in watching Avey dance represents his appreciation of her and his former ability to take the time to truly see her.
Furthermore, dancing is used to represent African American culture, particularly because it has historically been demonized and weaponized against black Americans, and the couple’s cessation of free movement signifies the turning of their backs on their blackness. In their early days, they enjoyed black art: music groups like Wings Over Jordan or The Five Bling Boys; poetry from the likes of Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, and Lucille Clifton. Black art, specifically poems by African Americans, is a consistent motif throughout the novel, alluding to the subconscious affect the art has on Avey despite her resistance to taking part in black culture later in life; it permeates her consciousness and was essential in forming who she is. The novel uses this motif to relate the way African American artists shaped the generations of posterity, even those who resisted the mold. Jerome and Avey lose this, though, as well as their passion.
Avey’s anger over being unseen and unsatisfied by her husband, though, is suppressed. She buries her anger so that when it finally manifests, years later on an island in the Caribbean, it consumes her. The chapter also uses the symbol of the mustache to represent the profound loss of her husband’s youthful self; the moustache, which he had worn for decades to take the focus off his intelligent eyes, is shed once they settled in White Plains. It symbolizes Jerome’s acceptance that the marathon is over, that he can rest. To Avey, it represents his confirmation that their life and selves before White Plains are gone for good. Finally, as Avey rages at the sight of a stranger in her husband’s casket, she emphasizes that her “great loss” (132) happened many, many years ago; that her husband was a stranger who had “taken up residency behind his dark skin” (131). This final realization underlines the fact that, in hoping to succeed within a principally white and racist America, Jerome traded in his black identity for a white mask.
Chapter 5 further develops the essential theme of loss alongside the theme of materialism, emphasizing that the latter brought about the former. Loss is first represented through Avey’s mourning of Jerome’s life more than his death. This is significant because it demonstrates the profound cost the couple paid to achieve their dreams—they had to lose the best parts of their relationship and themselves. Most of all, Jerome begins to believe that the struggle he faced in gaining employment was not because of institutionalized and individually practiced racism but because he was too “naïve” to understand that the world belonged to white men (135). Jerome turns on his own race, chalking his success up to a work ethic and wisdom uncommon to his race, revealing his internalized racism, which he uses to succeed in a hyper-capitalist society designed almost exclusively for the success of white Americans.
Avey acknowledges her own role in this too, finally understanding the duty to herself, her family, and, finally, her race that she willfully neglected. This acknowledgment comes in the form of understanding the corrupting influence of wealth, centering loss within the theme of materialism: “What kind of bargain had they struck? How much had they foolishly handed over in exchange for things they gained?” (139-40). The novel likens Avey and Jerome’s loss to Faustian bargain; they signed away their souls—their happiness and love—for the prospect of success.
The chapter then shifts its attention to the ways Avey intentionally distanced herself from her black identity. As Avey imagines her daughters peering down at her body at her wake, she realizes that she, like Jerome, wears a white mask: “they might sense, they might even glimpse, gazing down at her, the pale outline of another face superimposed on hers like a second skin, a thin-lipped stranger’s face, alive and mocking” (142).
Finally, the chapter uses the symbol of mirrors to demonstrate the last time Jerome and Avey were truly themselves. Mirrors as a symbol, first employed when Avey was on the ship, are used to reveal the self not physically shown. In her memory, Avey sees the image of her and Jerome making love in the mirror because it is the last recollection she has of their true, interior selves—before they don their white masks. This realization is essential for Avey’s character growth and marks the beginning of her cultural regeneration.
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By Paule Marshall
