The Signifying Monkey: the Metaphorical Features Of In Search Of Our Mothers' Garden

The book In Search Of Our Mothers' Garden is a well-known collection of essays written by American female writer Alice Walker. In this collection she put forward "womanism" which deconstructed the white female-oriented feminism. From the perspective of Gates' Signification Theory,the signifiers,such as garden,house,mother,deviate from the conventional signification,thus producing rich lexical meanings and forming a new semantic field related to art creation and cultural tradition of black women. This kind of metaphorical rhetoric is a typical way of articulation of the black and one of typical styles of black literature.