Drawing from Holloway's figurative use of the“mythic text,”this dissertation examines the first-person narratives of Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, and Maya Angelou so as to discover how these four Afro-American women writers originate their varied mythic texts, synchronically and diachronically revising both one another and their male counterparts in their own times. With this theoretical approach, I find out that in Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral Wheatley originates her mythic text from the Puritan redemption myth, which is blended with the Puritan captivity narrative form, associates herself with her enslaved fellowmen, claims her African identity, and connects to her African communal past. Jacobs in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl originates her mythic text by subverting the Christian myth to strongly attack slavery and the hypocritical white Christian slaveholders. With her spiritual rebellion, she further revises the dominant theology, passive Christian womanhood and motherhood. Her memories of an ancestral voice partially empower her to successfully become a fugitive slave along with communal help and maternal love for her children. Hurston originates her mythic text from the black folkloric storytelling narrative and terms it the power of words, which she associates with her female ancestral voice. Through this power, in Dust Tracks on a Road she relates her personal history and retells the history of her Eatonville community. Although the community deprives her of this speaking voice on her mother's deathbed, in Mules and Men she returns to her Southern black rural community to search for a mother figure with conjuring power and to collect the folklore that she heard during her childhood. This homeward journey has her reclaim her past connection with her own ethnic cultural community. Angelou originates her mythic text from her black ethnic cultural roots and deliberately parallels her personal history with that of the grand Afro-American socio-political surroundings. Due to her self-consciousness and identity with her ancestors, family, and community, in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970) she invents her self and recreates the time when Afro-Americans still have to encounter institutionalized racial prejudice. Because she integrates her personal life with the communal history, she clearly connects her self-development with her ethnic community and thus expresses a communal voice. She relates her life after her homeward trip to Africa and eventually becomes an empowered black woman writer in A Song Flung Up to Heaven, in which she concludes the book with the first line of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
Overall, these four writers intertextually
represent themselves in/against various contexts, while evolving their racial and gender selves during the varied phases of their lives. Through the memories of words, they are conscious of their collective self and clearly express their communal voice in their “mythic text.”