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

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The rebellious and transgressive acts of women who proudly exhibit their condition as failed southern ladies become the main focus of Susana Jiménez Placer’s essay. By centering on the family and different generations of female family members, she examines the memoirs of three southern white women—Virginia Foster Durr’s Outside the Magic Circle, Florence King’s Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady, and Shirley Abbott’s Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South. These women saw their upbringing conditioned by the social expectations usually placed on white middle-class women in the New South. But they used their autobiographies to explore the personal experiences that led them to challenge these traditional expectations, mainly symbolized by the image of the southern lady, and thus deconstruct the (false) self. Consequently, these white women failed as southern ladies and happily became “pariahs,” who proudly identified this failure as the first step towards self-definition through the “achieve[ment of] intellectual independence and personal success as southern women.” Acknowledging “the mutual dependence existing between [the lady] image and that of the black mammy,” so clearly manifested in these memoirs, Jiménez Placer turns then to focus on the white memoirists’ confrontation with the artificial image of the black mammy as an inevitable complement to that of the lady in the southern charade. Jiménez Placer notes that, in contrast to their clear-sighted determination to lay bare the mutilating effects of the lady image, confronting the parallel character of the mammy mask represents an unsurmountable challenge for Durr and King but not for Abbott.