Week Two: The Antebellum South (I)
While
the individual terms of this course--southern women writers--are interesting,
the tensions among and between them clarify the real energy of this material.
As Gail Godwin wrote in Ms. Magazine in 1975, only in the South
would a young woman find "an image of womanhood already cut out for her"
(qtd. in Betts, 2).
To be a Southern woman is to inhabit a whole range of behaviors and stereotypes,
whatever one's personal inclinations. There's the obvious "Southern belle,"
delicate, dependent, motherly or virginal--and white. But for some women,
there is also another, less appealing image: highly sexual, servile, hard-working--black,
invisible. To be Southern and female is thus to have to come to terms with
these images--and the writings from the antebellum period are remarkable
in demonstrating how early these stereotypes emerge. (Think about how these
images occur in Eliza Pinckley's letters and Eliza Bowen's short story
or Harriet Jacobs' autobiography). These readings help us, I think, begin
to appreciate how deeply these images are embedded in our cultural psyche.
What about "Southern writing"? The South has in fact produced one of the most distinguished literatures in this nation. We will sample portions of this rich tradition--from the late nineteenth-century's local color stories to the remarkable burgeoning of literature that practically overwhelmed U. S. letters in the mid-twentieth century, boasting writers like Robert Penn Warren, Tennessee Williams, Allen Tate, Richard Wright, Thomas Wolfe, Jean Toomer, Walker Percy--and, of course, William Faulkner. Any Southern writer has to deal with this impressive literary family, and if one is a woman, one also has to come to terms with the powerful patriarchy that it reflects and frequently supports.
But "women writers" have their own traditions. It's a tradition that has often been neglected or unappreciated, but the Second Wave of the women's movement (the First Wave having been the nineteenth-century struggle for suffrage), has been very successful in recovering the work of women writers, who, because their work was misunderstood or too threatening to male hegemony or other accepted ideas about "women's place," were often forgotten in literary history. "We think back through our mothers if we are women," says Virginia Woolf; and if our mothers are unknown to us, our thinking--like our writing--is not truly our own.
Southern women writers: these are individuals who have dared to accept the challenge of writing about and inside an extraordinary cultural and literary tradition through the lens of their differences as women. But what does that really mean? What does it mean to be a "Southern woman writer"? As we begin our reading this week, try to begin to ask that question: can we identify what qualities mark "Southern women's writiing"? How does writing as a Southerner affect writing as a woman? Can we separate these out? How about race and class and place? And what do all these terms reveal to us about our own roles in this culture?
[Betts, Doris. "Introduction." The History of Southern Women's Literature. Eds. Carolyn Perry and Mary Louise Weaks. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U P, 2002. 1-4.] Back.
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