¶ … Bessie Head's "Woman from America" versus Edwidge Danticat's "Night Women"
Edwidge Danticat's "Night Women" brings dignity to the life of a woman who is a prostitute. The woman is evidently selling her body to support herself and her young son. Through soaring, poetic language, the reader is able to see that the nameless narrator has an inner life of intelligence and strength. This is not immediately observable in her social world, due to the unfortunate circumstances of the protagonist's exterior life. In the Night Woman's society, she may be an outcast woman, but her thoughts have a richness and a depth that likely goes unseen by her customers. Bessie Head's "Woman from America" also portrays a kind of outcast woman. The woman is not a curiosity due to her sexual lifestyle, but because of the fact that she comes from America. Unlike the prostitute of "Night Woman," the American woman inspires a mixture of awe more than aversion in the gazer.
Both stories are told by unnamed narrators and give a sense of the narrator speaking for a collective, rather than an individual. The "Night Woman" speaks for all women who must sell their bodies to survive. She states that the world is divided between day and night women, and she is one of the latter. Instead of a wife with one husband, she must please many men. Instead of a woman with the security of knowing her child has a father, she must tell the young boy stories about ghostly men who come and leave...
However, she tells herself: "I thank the stars I at least have the days to myself" (Danticat 380). But ironically, even when the Night Woman gives thanks for daylight, she thanks the stars, rather than the sun, showing her to still be a creature of the night, trapped in the perspective of the night.
The narrator of "Night Woman" observes herself with a cool, clinical distance, looking at herself with the eyes of a male gazer as she puts on rouge and gazes at her golden skin and small buttocks. She looks with much more tender affection upon her young son, as she worries about his teeth and watches him envelop himself in her blood red scarf. When she observes women going to sell piece-work in the market, the contrast between her fate and their fate is clear -- she is free of the obligations and burdens of the day. The day women make very little money in exchange for a great deal of work. Given her beauty, in contrast to these women, it makes sense for the survival of herself and her son to sell her body on the open market -- and also to avoid the trap of a loveless marriage.
The Night Woman has no illusions about her future prospects. She knows that as her son gets older she must make up new stories to convince him that she is not what she is, and to conceal from him that his father is a random, nameless man. She knows that none of the men who claim to love her feel any real affection for her, although they claim to adore her more than…
