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

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Two more important studies on southern autobiography appeared in 2011. Peggy Whitman Prenshaw’s award-winning volume Composing Selves: Southern Women and Autobiography truly is an exceptional contribution to the study of southern life-writing by women. She focuses on the autobiographies and memoirs of eighteen women who grew up in the South in the period between 1861 and the 1930s, which she calls the “late southern Victorian” period (5). Her book covers the autobiographical texts of well-known women writers (like Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, Lillian Smith, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Zora Neale Hurston, Ellen Glasgow, Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Spencer, and Ellen Douglas) but she also examines the writings of what Prenshaw calls “wifehood narratives” (Mary Hamilton and Agnes Grinstead Anderson) which, in a way, function as “the biographies of husbands” (96). Furthermore, she includes the life writing of four southern women who were actively involved in politics (like Virginia Foster Durr and Mary Craig Kimbrough Sinclair). On the other hand, in Radical Spiritual Motherhood: Autobiography and Empowerment in Nineteenth-Century African American Women, Rosette R. Haynes offers a very different approach to southern women’s life-writing. She focuses her study on the autobiographies of five itinerant nineteenth-century African American preachers (Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, Julia Foote, Amanda Smith, and Rebecca Jackson). These traveling radical mothers seek both spiritual and bodily freedom, and these aspects connect them, in Haynes’ view, to the slave narratives of authors like Harriet Jacobs, Mary Prince, and Sojourner Truth. Therefore, Haynes analyzes those spiritual autobiographies “to explore the links between the treatment of sexuality and the body in the texts of enslaved and free women” (2). She also includes a final chapter on Pauli Murray, who became a twentieth-century Episcopalian priest, and her 1956 autobiography Proud Shoes to show the continuity of earlier radical spiritual foremothers and their autobiographical texts.