The blues as black female redemption. A literary analysis of Gayl Jones' Corregidora, Toni Cade Bambara's “Witchbird” and Alice Walker's “Nineteen Fifty-Five”

This BA thesis examines the figure of the female blues singer through the analysis of three different literary works: the novel Corregidora by Gayl Jones and two short stories, “Witchbird” by Toni Cade Bambara and “Nineteen Fifty-Five” by Alice Walker. The purpose of this thesis is to highlight the importance of the blues as creative manifestation of African American cultural identity and as a tool of emancipation and redemption especially for African American women, through the analysis of blues women in their literary representations. After lingering on how the abolition of slavery affected the black community and how its consequences and impacts were reflected on the blues as expression of the black collective consciousness, I will focus on the fictional representation of the black female experience. I will explore in the aforementioned works how blues women challenged the mainstream notion of black female identity and sexuality, broke taboos, preserved memory, dealt with psychologic traumas and searched for freedom and independence.