Themes and Meanings
The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Walker’s first novel, is a poignant preface to her fictional canon. In this novel, published when Walker was only twenty-six years old, many of her later artistic concerns are present, including the creation of “real” black women, the sexual and racial oppression of black women, the preoccupation with the inner lives of characters, the repressed or thwarted creativity of black women, the exploration of the effects of racism and discrimination on individuals from an inside perspective, the legacy of parental values transmitted to children, and the use of African American history and cultural traditions. More than anything, the novel is the story of the individual’s relationship to community.
The novel privileges the idea that in African American experience the individual has a responsibility to the group, whether the group is family or the larger black community. In working with this idea, Walker charts the toll on individual lives when kinship or the communal self is absent or seriously undervalued.
The history of the Copeland family is a record of the difficulties African Americans face in keeping the notion of kinship alive in a racist world. Walker’s narration of the effects of the sharecropping system, a metaphor for America’s overarching racism and discrimination, on Grange and Margaret reveals that kinship has a precarious future. If black people do not struggle to maintain it, awful events can happen to them, events more terrible than racism itself.
Grange responds to his lack of power to combat racism by taking his frustration and anger out on his wife and child. Margaret responds to the same environment and to Grange’s treatment of her by neglecting...
(The entire section is 718 words.)