New role perspective of African American women in Terry Mcmillan’s <i>Waiting To Exhale</i>

Abstract

A number of studies on female-authored African American literary works have focused on female writers’ creative responses to male-authored representations of the tensions of racism, internal crisis of man-woman relationships and the challenges of empowering the black female character. Little attention has been paid to the changing role perspective of females in African American female writings. This study investigates Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale and highlights a paradigm shift from the communal experience to the individual, the internal crises and wave of aspiration as she projects the female character as ambitious and daring. The choice of professionally successful black women as characters in her novels relates to the drastic increase in the population of working class women in the 1990s. The novel is subjected to literary analysis to determine the dimensions of change in female roles and images. The analysis reveals that Waiting to Exhale accentuates the quest for personal liberty, romance and intimate relationships as points of conflicts in black female protagonists’ existence. McMillan’s fiction engages recognisable literary conventions to project these new roles and reinforce her radical feminist and modernist orientations which situate the novel within the post-womanist literary generation expressing specific historical, socio-political, economic and gendered contexts.

Keywords: African American literature, feminist, roles, womanism, Waiting to Exhale and Terry McMillan