Felipe Smith

The "saving" of lives is central to Alice Walker's art. This "redemptive" quality in
her work goes beyond the thematic to the very heart of Walker's aesthetics, as she
makes clear in her essay "Saving the Life That Is Your Own: The Importance of
Models in the Artist's Life": "It is, in the end, the saving of lives that we writers are
about. We do it because we care. We care because we know this: the life we save
is our own" ( Gardens14). The urgency to "save lives" thus stems from Walker's
acknowledgment of a spiritual bond connecting the writer to the lives she depicts:
Artistic redemption "saves" the artist as well.

The most dramatic illustrations Walker provides of the saving power of art
emphasize this mutual benefit to "saver" and "saved." In her essay "The Old Artist:
Notes on Mr. Sweet," Walker tells how her career as a writer--her very life in
fact--was "saved" by her art. She wrote her first published story "To Hell with
Dying" instead of committing suicide. In the process, she saved for future
generations the story of how the old guitar player Mr. Sweet "continued to share his
troubles and insights [and] continued to sing." Simultaneously, through writing she
gave herself the courage to "turn [her] back on the razor blade" ( Word39).

Mutual redemption is also the focus of Walker's discussion of her artistic
debt to Zora Neale Hurston. In "Saving the Life That Is Your Own," she describes
how crucial Hurston Mules and Men ( 1935) was to her completion of a fictional
version of her mother's remembrance from the Depression in a story called "The
Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff." In this early Walker story, the narrator quotes a
conjurer's curse directly from Hurston's book as part of her plan to secure justice
for the wronged Hannah Kemhuff. Walker explains the effect of her "collaboration"
with her esteemed literary ancestor in terms of an indescribable joy that comes from
the auspicious knowledge of partaking in the ebullient community of historical
personages and ancient spirits ( Gardens13).

The highly spiritualistic terms of this revelation are characteristic of
Walker's discussions of the saving power of art. Walker secularizes such terms as
redemption and salvation to encompass solutions to social problems such as racial
and gender oppression. She models her redemptive strategy on writers such as
Chopin, the Brontës, de Beauvoir, and Lessing, whom she describes as fully
cognisant of their own oppressive condition and of the need to create a self-
redemptive order ( Gardens251). One result of this is an implicit connection for
Walker between "savers" and "saviors." She describes Anaïs Nin as "a recorder of

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