55 pages • 1 hour read
Rebecca WellsDivine Secrets Of The Ya-Ya Sisterhood
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1996A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Geographical Context: Louisiana
Louisiana is located in the southeastern United States and its southern coast lies on the Gulf of Mexico. In the summer, temperatures can reach 100 degrees Fahrenheit or higher. Its high humidity levels make the area muggy and wet in the summers and cold and damp in the winters. The Louisiana wetland, also known as the bayou, is famous for its unique landscape that combines massive trees, deep rivers, and marshes. It is home to a wide variety of animals, perhaps the most famous of which is the alligator. The girls of the Ya-Ya tribe claim a profound and ancient connection to the land, and they spend most of their time outdoors, surrounded by cypress trees or nestled in the creek of the bayou. Alligators are used as a metaphor in the novel during the Ya-Ya ritual to symbolize the fears and pains of life from which the women protect one another.
The sections of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood that follow Vivi’s story are set in the heart of the Louisiana bayou, primarily in a town called Thornton. The novel’s setting is as dynamic and essential as its characters, providing a vivid backdrop to important scenes, as well as a connection to the history and land that the Ya-Yas hail from. The novel emphasizes that the bayou was a different place in the 1930s and 1940s, before air conditioning and television brought most people indoors. The Ya-Yas are willing to suffer the heat of the Louisiana summers as they escape into adventures in the bayou or the creeks, as much a part of the land as the trees themselves.
Historical-Cultural Context: Louisiana
Louisiana has a rich and vibrant history that is a mixture of First Nations (Chitimacha, Coushatta, Jena Band of Choctaw, and Tunica-Biloxi), Creole/Acadian, and African American cultures. Indigenous tribes were forced onto reservations in the early 1800s and have since struggled to find deserved representation and equity in their homeland. These mixed cultures have not always co-existed peacefully, and the ideologies left over from the era of slavery linger in Louisiana. This is depicted in the novel through the stories told of the Black women who nursed and raised white children for wealthy white women. Vivi recalls how disturbed Sidda and Little Shep became when their nanny, Melinda, left them, and the jealousy she felt at their love for someone who was not their biological mother. Sidda has great affection for her childhood nanny, Willetta, whom she is still in touch with. She notes that many southern families depend on Black nannies to care for their children, but they unfairly expect those children to distance themselves from their nannies when they grow up. She also notes that this is still a practice that carries on in the south (at least when the novel was published, in the 1990s.)
The Creole people who settled in Louisiana also come from a history of oppression and prejudice, as they were forced out of their homeland in Acadia (the eastern coastal provinces of Canada) in the 1700s by the British. As a result, many immigrated to the area of Louisiana and maintained their language and culture. In the novel, the characters speak English with tiny bits of French thrown in. French was the original language spoken by Acadian people, and their insistence on continuing to use it, even if only sparingly, is a connection to that past. Similarly, many of the characters in the novel have French names. Acadians were also faithful Catholics, which is why many of the characters in the novel are practicing Catholics. This “bayou world of Catholic saints and voodoo queens” (XI) is embodied in the Ya-Yas themselves, who all retain a sense of faith and connection to their Catholic roots while also refusing to let themselves be encumbered by stifling ideologies.
