Читать книгу Constructing the Self. Essays on Southern Life-Writing онлайн

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Apart from the debate over the different traditions, other perspectives have enriched the discussion of southern autobiography, particularly in the 1990s, with the renewed interest in memoirs and the narrative of the self. Fred Hobson’s seminal work But Now I See: The White Southern Racial Conversion Narrative (1999) presents the autobiographies and memoirs of a large group of white southerners who wrote their personal stories of enlightenment in the form of “racial conversion narratives” in a conscious effort to seek redemption for their racist past during segregation. Their “racial repentance” (2) takes place through confession and after a personal transformation, showing their journey from the darkness of sin to the light and joy the racially born-again white southerner experiences. In these stories of “secular salvation,” so similar to religious conversion as Hobson argues, “[t]he impulse is the same—to witness, to testify” (4) and to offer “a public confession of racial sins” (5). He takes his assumption one step further when he suggests that the white racial conversion narratives of Lillian Smith, Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin, James McBride Dabbs, Pat Waters, Willie Morris and many others are also slave narratives, like that of Frederick Douglass, or “freedom narratives.” “That is,” Hobson explains, “these writers too escape a kind of bondage, flee from the slavery of a closed society, of racial prejudice and restriction, into the liberty of free association, free expression, brotherhood, sisterhood—and freedom from racial guilt” (5). When referring to Lewis P. Simpson’s notion of “the autobiographical impulse” in southern writers, Hobson acknowledges that the canonical figures of the Southern Renaissance did have “the impulse to address race in personal terms . . . but not the desire, and perhaps not the courage, to confront race in personal and autobiographical, not to mention confessional, terms” (13-14). However, as Hobson claims, other less prominent white figures driven by racial guilt, like William Alexander Percy and Ben Robertson, started to address race autobiographically in the early 1940s.