Sarah Phillips by Andrea Lee

First published: 1984

Type of plot:Bildungsroman

Time of work: The 1960’s to the 1970’s

Locale: Philadelphia

Principal Characters:

• Sarah Phillips, an African American minister’s daughter who matures from a young child to an adult woman in the course of the novel
• Henri, Sarah’s French boyfriend during her college years
• The Reverend James Forrest Phillips, Sarah’s father, the pastor of the New African Baptist Church in Philadelphia
• Grace Renfrew Phillips, Sarah’s mother
• Matthew, Sarah’s elder brother
• Lyn Yancy, Sarah’s best friend in fourth grade
• Lily,
• Emma, and
• May, aunts of Sarah
• Gretchen Manning, Sarah’s best friend in seventh grade
• Martha Greenfield, Matthew’s white college girlfriend
• Mrs. Jeller, an old convalescent taken care of by Sarah’s mother
• Curry Daniels, a male friend of Sarah at Harvard

The Novel

Sarah Phillips presents the experiences of an African American woman growing up in a middle-class environment. It covers the period from the early 1960’s until the mid-1970’s. The setting and themes of the book are similar to those of the author’s own life.

Sarah Phillips is divided into twelve episodes. Each of these are a complete story in themselves but also develop the overall narrative. The story is told by a first-person narrator. It is recounted in the form of an autobiographical reminiscence.

The book begins with the narrator and protagonist, Sarah Phillips, living in France during a year abroad as a college student. Sarah is having an enjoyable time, reflecting with amusement on the French myths about America that come to the surface during her conversations with French people. When her French boyfriend, Henri, makes an insensitive racial joke, however, Sarah’s sense of serenity and fun is shattered. She begins to realize that although she had previously thought that Europeans did not possess American racial stereotypes, these stereotypes are difficult for her to escape. Sarah is reminded anew of her racial background and identity. She begins to reflect back on her childhood days.

Sarah had been born the daughter of a prominent African American minister. Sarah is reared in a middle-class residential section of Philadelphia. At the age of ten, she sits on a summer Sunday in a pew of the New African Baptist Church, where her father preaches. The world of the church, where Sarah is surrounded by her extended family, seems all-encompassing to the young girl. The long hours of prayer and singing begin to bore Sarah, however, and she idly fantasizes about playing outdoors in a treehouse. Sarah feels both protected and stifled by the rich atmosphere of the church.

Despite his profession, the Reverend Phillips does not maintain a strict religious grip on the household. Sarah and her older brother Matthew grow up in a loose and relaxed spiritual atmosphere. Even so, Sarah feels that she cannot live up to her father’s expectations of her as a good Christian. She is made particularly nervous by the rite of baptism. When her Aunt Bessie urges her to volunteer to be baptized, Sarah refuses. Sarah expects her parents to be angry, but their reaction is surprisingly mild. Her father’s reluctance to punish Sarah makes an impression on her and becomes a major ingredient of her bond to her father. By not imposing his own expectation on her character, the Reverend Phillips permits Sarah to become her own woman.

On the surface, Sarah’s childhood appears unexciting, but even the most ordinary people and places offer unexpected possibilities. Sarah’s mother, who appears sedate and domestic, always exudes an air of the thrilling and the forbidden despite her prudish exterior. With her best friend, Lyn, Sarah is enthralled by tales of gypsies stealing children, and she is quite disappointed when the gypsies never come to perform their dark task.

Sarah’s father is active in the Civil Rights movement. As the push for racial equality becomes more intense in the mid-1960’s, Sarah’s private life is increasingly affected by social changes. Sarah wants to attend a march in Washington led by Martin Luther King, Jr., but her father does not permit her. She watches the march on television with her family, feeling that she is missing out on taking part in a historic event.

When Sarah reaches the seventh grade, she enters an elite boarding school for girls in Pennsylvania. In the outside world, civil unrest rages, and the racial turmoil of the nation mounts, but Sarah’s world at the school is placid and tranquil. With her best friend, Gretchen, who is white, she explores areas of the school grounds forbidden to them by authorities. On one of these expeditions, the girls stumble upon the sparse and dingy living quarters of the school’s African American maids. Sarah is reminded that she leads a much more privileged life than most other African Americans.

Racial issues enter Sarah’s life in a different way when Matthew brings home a white girlfriend, Martha Greenfield, during his first year at college. Sarah’s parents treat Martha in a hostile way. They are used to a segregated world and are not ready to accept interracial dating. Sarah gains new insight into the predicament of African Americans as well as into the dynamics of her own family.

Sarah goes away to summer camp, where her life is dominated by a teenage gang called the Thunderbirds. As a good student from a prosperous family, she naturally feels different from this gang, but she is also attracted by their defiance of social regulations. At the end of camp, she is accepted in a way by the Thunderbirds, although she will always be different from them.

While Sarah is shopping for clothes with her mother, Mrs. Phillips takes her to visit Mrs. Jeller, an old convalescent who had been a parishioner at the Reverend Phillips’s church. Mrs. Jeller tells a story about how, as a young girl, she had been forced by her pregnancy into a loveless early marriage. This had occurred long ago in a impoverished section of Kentucky, and the baby had died when it was only a year and a half old. Sarah feels that her comfortable middle-class identity is further questioned by this tale.

Sarah goes to Harvard University. There she meets Curry Daniels, a dynamic young photographer. Curry convinces Sarah to let him take photographs of her in the nude, but they never have a romantic relationship. In a way, Sarah is disappointed in this. Sarah’s college years are filled with social and personal accomplishment, yet there remains an unsatisfying aftertaste about the entire experience.

Sarah is still at Harvard when her mother calls to tell her that the Reverend Phillips has had a stroke. Sarah rushes home, at once horrified by the news and feeling that it possesses a strangely unreal quality. Sarah returns to the scene of her nurturing childhood, this time not celebrating life but commemorating death. Seeing her former life through adult eyes, she comes to a new understanding of herself that enables her to accept her father’s passing. Feeling she has at last begun to know herself, Sarah sets out back to Harvard. She has no idea what her ultimate destination is, but she feels that her individual journey has finally begun.

The Characters

Sarah Phillips, the heroine and narrator of the book, guides the reader on a tour of the various stages of her life. The other characters in the book function as auxiliary figures who fill in the outlines of Sarah’s progress through the first two decades of her life.

Intelligent, sensitive, and observant, Sarah nevertheless doubts herself and her own capacity to come to terms with her experience. Sarah is grateful to her parents for their loving attention, but she never feels herself a part of their world. Attracted by the romantic appeal of the gypsies and the Thunderbirds, she is too straitlaced to stray far outside the middle-class contours established by her parents. At first oblivious to her racial identity, Sarah determines to come to grips with the contradictions of being a middle-class, educated African American.

The Reverend Phillips, Sarah’s father, is a figure of great wisdom and power. Yet he uses his authority not to discipline Sarah and her brother but rather to make them feel protected and loved. Sarah feels somewhat distant from her father, whom she reveres but does not fully know. Reverend Phillips, however, clearly is the dominant figure in his daughter’s life.

Sarah’s mother, Grace Renfrew Phillips, is more elusive. Beneath her placid, bourgeois exterior lurks a far more exciting and illicit world of adventure and intrigue. Sarah’s mother seems more traditional and self-effacing than her intelligent, ambitious daughter. Sarah, though, gets much of her questing spirit, her desire to encounter new realms other than the one into which she is placed by birth, from Mrs. Phillips.

Matthew, Sarah’s brother, provides a male perspective on many of her childhood experiences. Sarah’s aunts, Lily, Emma, and May, help to compose the comfortable church setting of Sarah’s youth. They also point up traditional, socially endorsed behavior patterns of African American women from which Sarah sharply departs. Mrs. Jeller, an aging convalescent, indicates the vast differences between Sarah’s well-off status in life and those of older African American women.

Sarah’s friends, Lyn Yancy, Gretchen Manning, and Curry Daniels, are introduced in order to underscore certain stages in Sarah’s development. They call attention to the ever-present factor of race in all of her personal relationships. Sarah’s French boyfriend, Henri, initiates the narrative of the book through his racial insult.

In general, the characters other than Sarah are in the book to illustrate specific aspects of the novel’s themes. They do not grow or develop. Sarah, on the other hand, progresses from child to adult as the novel proceeds.

Critical Context

It is interesting that the novel’s title is the name of an individual person. This was a common practice in the nineteenth century, as evidenced by such books as Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850) and Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877), but it has been far less common in the twentieth century. Lee’s novel, like its nineteenth century counterparts, chronicles the tension between public and private experience. Sarah Phillips has an affirmative faith in the capacity of an individual to prevail against worldly obstacles. One of the novel’s principal accomplishments is its skilled interweaving of personal and social realms. To some extent, Sarah is free to determine her fate, but the pressures of society and race are never minimized.

Andrea Lee first came to prominence with the publication of Russian Journal in 1981. That book, written in lapidary prose, was a candid account of Lee’s personal experiences while visiting the Soviet Union during the “era of stagnation” presided over by Communist Party leader Leonid Brezhnev. Full of observant and idiosyncratic reportage, Russian Journal garnered praise from across the American critical spectrum. This feat was especially impressive in light of the fact that Lee was only twenty-eight at the time the book was published. After Russian Journal, Lee’s readers eagerly awaited a novel from her. Their expectations were satisfied with the publication of Sarah Phillips in 1984.

Bibliography

Cahill, Susan. Introduction to Women Write: A Mosaic of Women’s Voices in Fiction, Poetry, Memoir, and Essay, edited by Susan Cahill. New York: New American Library, 2004. Places Lee within the ranks of the greatest women writers in English, naming her as the inheritor of a literary lineage that begins with Anne Bradstreet.

Hogue, W. Lawrence. Race, Modernity, Postmodernity: A Look at the History and the Literatures of People of Color Since the 1960’s. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Discusses modernity and its limits in Sarah Phillips and Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory.

Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. Review of Sarah Phillips, by Andrea Lee. The New York Times, December 6, 1984, C22. A generally favorable review, praising Lee’s “eloquence and brilliant clarity of detail.” Lehmann-Haupt writes that the book is important as a story of “the ambiguities of growing up a member of a proud and privileged minority”; he claims that its only defect is the fact that it is limited to Sarah’s memories of the past and does not show her in action after she has come to terms with her heritage.

Obolensky, Laura. “Scenes from a Girlhood.” The New Republic 191 (November 19, 1984): 41-42. Argues that, despite her knowledge of the world she describes, Lee fails to deal with real issues. Objects to “a tone of detachment often bordering on the sardonic.” Reverend Phillips and Sarah are seen as the most successful characterizations; however, Sarah is described as “an elitist snob.”

Shreve, Susan Richards. “Unsentimental Journey.” The New York Times Book Review, November 18, 1984, 13. Comments on the problems of young people such as Sarah and her brother, educated for leadership in the white establishment, yet expected to resist being incorporated into that world. Although Shreve finds flaws in the book’s structure and in the characterization of the protagonist, she praises Lee’s “simple and yet luminous” style.

Van Wyngarden, Bruce. “Pieces of the Past.” Saturday Review 11 (January/February, 1985): 74. The reviewer finds the original short-story structure too obvious. Van Wyngarden also expresses disappointment that the book’s action stops with Sarah’s decision to leave Paris—which, he argues, should have happened in the last chapter instead of in the first.

Vigderman, Patricia. Review of Sarah Phillips, by Andrea Lee. Boston Review 10 (February, 1985): 23-24. Argues that the novel has taken as its “formal model” the children’s novels that are mentioned as Sarah’s favorites, in which each chapter “is a separate adventure,” but “the book as a whole constructs another world.” The reviewer expects the book to be criticized because its characters are so deeply involved in white society, but insists that Sarah Phillips is “a very gracefully written book about black identity.”

Washington, Mary Helen. “Young, Gifted and Black.” Women’s Review of Books 2 (March, 1985): 3-4. Argues that Sarah Phillips becomes trapped in “a permanent ambiguity,” disconnected from her heritage and from her feelings, both as a black and as a woman. Suggests that the “evasions” of Sarah Phillips are the result of pressures from the conservative establishment.