Cultural Identity and the Search for Self in Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow

Through the lenses of psychoanalytic literary criticism, this study foregrounds reconciliation with one’s cultural heritage as instrumental to inducing self-actualization. The article finds, with the analysis of the choices of Avey Johnson and her husband, that in Praisesong for the Widow, the African American protagonists’ ascent to middle-class respectability culminates in disillusionment. For in the process, they succumb to Western cultural ethics at the expense of their own identity as people of African descent. Understandably, the paper postulates that happiness is not the fruit of financial and material accumulation, but the gratification of a soul craving to discover the self.