The present paper seeks to apply Linda Hutcheon’s theory of historiographic metafiction to Meridian (1967) by Alice Walker. Hutcheon coined the term historiographic metafiction to refer to the tendency of literary texts to combine literature with history in order to highlight the literariness of history and the historicity of literature. Alice Walker, in her Meridian, yokes the idea of identity crisis to the crisis in grand narratives of history. Walker’s novel adds the dimension of race to the aforementioned crisis and demonstrates how race is also an artificial narrative knitted into the texture of mainstream history. The fact that an African American novelist writes about the oppression of a female protagonist who has to endure the atrocities of a patriarchal world is the final aspect by means of which the fictionality of history is laid bare. In other words, feminine narratives in a patriarchal discourse serve as alternate possibilities to the orthodox history.
