Alice Walker In Search Of Our Mothers Garden Analysis

Improved Essays
Raydeen Cruz - Pathos
Lucrezia della Pietra - Ethos
Lissette Izaguirre – Logos (Lead)
Dr. Leiby
English 1A – 6422
14 March 2018 TITLE: TO BE DECIDED
Alice Walker is an African American woman whose artistic abilities are showcased through her published novels, essays, and poems. One of Walker’s essays written in 1974, exemplifies her search for the origin of her creativity as well as the struggle for freedom of expression that women of color have experienced throughout history. In Alice Walker’s essay titled, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens”, the author effectively utilizes ethos, logos, and pathos to convince her female African American audience that although their creative abilities have been stifled through centuries of oppression;
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Walker uses logos effectively to backup her claim that African American women have struggled the most by living through an enslavement that oppressed and stifled their true artistic abilities. Mentioned further in her essay, she informs her audience of just how difficult it was for an African American woman to express and keep their creativity alive in America: “…it was a punishable crime for a black person to read or write…freedom to paint, to sculpt, to expand the mind with action did not exist” (44). Additionally, Walker speaks of a young, creatively inclined slave girl from the 1700s by the name of Phillis Wheatley, whose poetic abilities were “…so thwarted and hindered by…contrary instincts, that she …lost her health…” (46). She goes on to explain that as a slave in America, Phillis Wheatley struggled with the yearning to express herself creatively whilst living an impoverished life that forced her to work so hard; her health eventually got the best of her. In her essay, Walker notes that although her own mother worked hard everyday of her life, she recalls her radiance and brilliance in those moments that she spent tending to her garden and creating

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