Maud Martha

Harry B. Shaw (Essay Date 1987)

SOURCE: Shaw, Harry B. "Maud Martha: The War with Beauty." In A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction, edited by Maria K. Mootry and Gary Smith, pp. 254-70. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

In the following essay, Shaw discusses Brooks's treatment of conventional American standards of female beauty in her novel.

Arthur P. Davis's article of December 1962, "The Black-and-Tan Motif in the Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks," even after twenty years provides a fitting springboard for a discussion of the same motif in Brooks's novel, Maud Martha.>1> Davis explores the social theory that among black people the inside color line had tended "to create a problem within the group similar to that between colored and white in America.">2> He points out that this color difference within the group caused special problems for the dark girl, who...