A Summary and Analysis of Alice Walker’s ‘Roselily’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Roselily’ is the opening story of Alice Walker’s short-story collection In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women (1973). The story explores the conflicting emotions of a young black woman on her wedding day, as she prepares for a new life in which she must leave behind her young children and move north from her home in Mississippi.

Summary

The story focuses on the marriage of an African-American woman, Roselily, to an African-American man. Walker cleverly structures ‘Roselily’ so we are given the words of the preacher officiating at their wedding ceremony (presented in italics), with the third-person narrator’s description of Roselily’s thoughts and doubts interspersed between the preacher’s lines.

Roselily’s husband-to-be is from the northern states, and plans to take his new bride to live in Chicago. Roselily, though, is from Mississippi in the south, and she knows her husband dislikes the customs of her family and friends from the southern states. It is also heavily implied that, whereas Roselily’s family are Christians, her husband is from a different religion (probably Islam), and views his bride and her community as worshipping ‘the wrong God’.

Indeed, Walker takes us into Roselily’s mind, where we discover that she views her husband’s religion as one of imprisonment and restraint: ropes, chains, and handcuffs. She fears the soot and dirt of a big city like Chicago, while also acknowledging to herself that it will be a ‘chance’ for her children ‘to be on top’ for once.

We learn that Roselily has given birth to four young children, one of whom she gave away to the child’s father, because he had some money to raise the child. He had been to Harvard and it’s implied he considered himself too good for Roselily, in terms of his education and social status (possibly because family pressure forbade him to marry a woman ‘beneath’ him).

This man was also too ‘weak’ to stay in the south with Roselily to raise their child together, so took the child north to New England with him. Roselily hopes the child will grow up to be stronger than his father.

Roselily also feels ‘shut away’ from her husband: even his suit seems severe and overly stiff and formal, and his religion is different from hers. She knows she will be expected to wear a veil and cover her head, as women are often expected to in his religion. She can already feel herself losing contact with her children. She is only now realising how difficult it is going to be to forget her old life as she finds her way in her new one.

We learn that Roselily’s mother is dead and her father seems detached from the wedding. She believes her husband would be better off marrying one of her younger sisters instead of her, and her thoughts turn to death and her grandparents asleep together in their graves. She thinks about what she will do when they are married: unable and not allowed to work, she will be a wife and a mother, looking after the babies she has with her new husband. The thought doesn’t bring her comfort. She will miss bathing her warm body in the sun.

She now realises she rushed into the marriage before talking through with her husband-to-be what his expectations were. Now, she cannot even be sure that she loves the man she is marrying. She feels sad, and fantasises about striking the preacher out of the way before he can finish the ceremony.

For the rest of the wedding, she is barely aware of what’s going on. Her husband’s hand on hers feels like an ‘iron gate’, constraining her. She realises she feels ignorant about Chicago, her new home where she will arrive in the morning, and all she can do is press her ‘worried fingers’ into her husband’s hand.

Analysis

Alice Walker’s story is named after its protagonist, and her name, in turn, is charged with symbolism. The ‘Rose’ half suggests the passionate sensual life she has led prior to the story: she is the mother to three young children, possibly by different fathers, but now she seeks to settle down and become a ‘pure’ woman, with the ‘lily’ half of her name suggesting purity (lilies are white).

These two elements of Roselily’s character – passion and purity, sensuality and respectability – are in tension, even conflict, in Walker’s short narrative. As the narrative unfolds, we learn that Roselily was ‘impatient’ to escape a life of work (sewing) and looking after her children on her own, but now it is beginning to dawn on her that she is swapping one hard life for another.

For instance, she knows her husband will want her to bear more children, which he can raise as his own, so the responsibilities of motherhood, will not go away in her new life, even if she will now be supported by a husband and father figure for her children.

She will also lose the support network of her father and younger sisters and the broader Mississippi community; she knows that the people of Chicago will be different, and that her new husband does not understand the ways of southern people. Although she finds much to admire about him, his pride also carries a stiffness and aloofness which alienates and concerns her.

So, why is she marrying him? Note that her husband is not even given a name in the story, as if to reinforce how little even Roselily knows of him. There is every indication that this is a marriage of convenience, allowing the unwed mother Roselily to escape a life of poverty and become a ‘respectable’ woman through marriage to a good man. But she does not love this man, and the prospects for wedded happiness for Roselily are not good.

Themes

‘Roselily’ tackles a number of themes which we find in Alice Walker’s later fiction, including her novels. These themes include societal pressures, gender roles and the expectations society has for women, religious constraints, economic hardship, and the quest for a better life, all woven through the lens of a black woman’s experience.

Narrative Style

One of the masterstrokes of Alice Walker’s story is the way she presents Roselily’s internal conflict. The story delves into her inner monologue, revealing anxieties about leaving her familiar community, sacrificing personal freedoms, and potentially facing further hardship in the new city.

Walker uses an omniscient third-person narrator to reveal this monologue to us, rather than having Roselily speak directly to us in a first-person narrative. But Walker closes the space between the reader and Roselily through using moments of free indirect discourse to bring us closer to Roselily’s thought processes, doubts, and worries. Free indirect discourse involves the voice of the third-person narrator merging with the thoughts of the character in subtle and nuanced ways.

For example, although much of the narration sticks simply to reporting what Roselily is thinking (‘She wishes’, ‘she thinks’, and so on), there are moments when it is clear that the narrator is ‘channelling’ Roselily’s thoughts in her own words: for instance, the excitement but also the sense of the unknown which the exclamations (‘A new life!’, ‘Free!’) convey, or the questions she poses (‘Full of what? Babies’).

These questions echo the questioning nature of Roselily’s mind as she fears for her future, much as the exclamations are poised between anticipation and fear.

Final Thoughts

The story ends without resolving Roselily’s internal conflict, leaving the reader to ponder her ultimate decision and the challenges that lie ahead. We will never learn how her marriage works out and whether she manages to adjust to a new life in Chicago.

Walker wants us to consider how marriage involves leaving behind part of one’s own life in order to make room for a new one, but with Roselily, the marriage is even more momentous since it involves moving to a new state, swapping her rural life for a life in the big city, and marrying into a new religion – and saying goodbye to her old life, the life of the passionate red ‘Rose’, in order to make way for a life as the pure ‘lily’.