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

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The remaining two essays connect life-writing and performance, showing how some narrators use their “life texts” to put on a transgressive show of Dixie while others use a comedic mask in their memoirs to construct their selves. Beata Zawadka’s contribution examines the role of southern actress Tallulah Bankhead and her Hollywood performances in popular movies of the 1950s as acts of southern subversion and transgression. In her article Zawadka views the southern lady as a Dixie act and the embodiment of what she calls “the southern cultural transvestism . . . disclosing the region’s fe/male identity.” Interpreting the southern lady ideal as “drag” and as “the embodiment of the culturally transgressive Dixie,” Zawadka finds a clear example of this hypothesis in Tallulah Bankhead’s hybrid acting style in three of her movies, My Sin (1933), Lifeboat (1944), and Die! Die! My Darling (1965). The transgressive nature of the actress’s performance in these movies can be seen in her use of different strategies and methods—the “living mask” that allows her to construct a new identity in My Sin; and Stanislavsky’s acting Method that enables her to have “private moments” and use her own personal emotions for self-discovery, recreating through her female characters the southern spirit and at the same time using it to reflect on “her own and the South’s” identity in Lifeboat. The third movie analyzed, Die! Die! My Darling, on the other hand, represents what Zawadka calls “transgressive ‘hagsploitation,’” in which Bankhead offers a “self-reflective” characterization of her “cinematic or real life (southern) victimization” and her identification with the South as a culture.