Myth, Fairy Tale, Epic, and Romance: Narrative as Re-Vision in Linden Hills

When Virginia Fowler asked Gloria Naylor in a 1993 interview, "Do you see yourself as having some sort of prophetic role as an artist?" Naylor replied, "I see myself more as a filter than I do as a prophet. I see myself—I call myself within my own head a wordsmith. I'm a storyteller, I really am" (Fowler 143). Naylor's second novel is a masterpiece of storytelling, a tightly woven narrative of intertextualities, multiple layers of story that reiterate, revise, and invert familiar western texts. Critics have closely examined some of these intertexts, especially Dante's Inferno (Ward), Plato's Allegory of the Cave (Houmans), Virgil's Aeneid (Ward, Saunders), and the Gothic novel (Sandiford). Less has been written about the biblical myth as intertext in Linden Hills. This vast cycle of stories pervades the novel as Naylor constructs her inferno, explores the demonic dance of shadow in Willa's cave, traces Willie's epic journey through the Linden landscape, and, finally, destroys her Gothic mansion and the people who live there. Within this biblical frame, other familiar stories arrest my attention and provoke me to examine how Naylor uses them. The doomed marriages of Linden Hills offer multiple versions of the German fairy tale "The Frog Prince"; the relationship of the Norman Andersons revises the Book of Ruth as chivalric romance; the Reverend Michael T. Hollis' ritual of dressing for Lycentia Parker's funeral parodies the classical epic hero arming for battle; and the story of Laurel Dumont transforms the Daphne of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Naylor's use of patriarchal western narratives provokes a question. As an African- American woman writing in the last quarter of the 20th century in a country where patriarchy once ensured the oppression of her people, why does she choose patriar- chal narratives as the architectural bases for her novel? Obviously, these works have