SOURCE: "Dancing Out of Form, Dancing into Self: Genre and Metaphor in Marshall, Shange, and Walker," in Melus, Vol. 19, No. 3, Fall, 1994, p. 91-107.

In the following essay, Waxman discusses the novels of Paule Marshall, Alice Walker, and Ntozake Shange in terms of the ways in which they incorporate dance forms and metaphors into their representations of African American women.

Western culture has typically seen dance as an empowering activity, offering a forum for individual self-expression, or acting like a religious ritual that binds the community and spiritually renews the individual. In literature, the dance for centuries has been a conventional celebratory ending, all of Shakespeare's comedies, for example, conclude with a wedding dance. Northrop Frye has noted dance's presence in the masque, during which audience participation with the actors was encouraged (288); he also emphasizes the "participation mystique" of dance, comparing it to religious lyrics and "poems of community...