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

4 страница из 129

What moves southern writers to tell their life stories? An obsession with the region’s past, forever doomed to explore it and interpret it in the present time, or Fred Hobson’s famed “southern rage to explain”? Most likely, both account for the urgent need to look back and dig into the recesses of memory to interrogate their past and recapture small details, the precise moments and events that were vital in shaping them or that explained who and what they really were. Whether the autobiographical impulse springs from the need to confess or justify oneself, win converts to the Abolitionist movement or narrate one’s own conversion, southern writers have felt the need to face the past, with all its secrets and burdens, and reveal their inner selves. Although the importance of autobiography in southern writing is undeniable, black and white writers have responded differently to that impulse. In canonical autobiographies like Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, the impetus is to tell the story of a black man who frees himself from bondage to construct a new identity as a free man, a self-made man—like iconic Benjamin Franklin in his famous autobiography—but who was born a slave. Autobiographies like An Unfinished Woman or Pentimento, however, reveal the story of a woman who identifies with the dispossessed and participates in the Civil Rights movement. One thing both Frederick Douglass and Lillian Hellman have in common is that they each wrote not one but four memoirs. They both embody the autobiographical impulse to tell about the self and the South at different historical time periods, but from two different approaches. Douglass uses his autobiography to create himself “anew” as a free man, as a human being; and Lillian Hellman—with her deliberate “distortion of what happened” in Pentimento—represents what Carl Rollyson calls an “imaginative use of the autobiographical form” and therefore “a form of autobiographical fiction” (422). To put it differently, while Frederick Douglass’s slave narrative is an example of the use of autobiography as a form of self-creation, Lillian Hellman’s memoir epitomizes the use of autobiography as a form of creation or recreation, that is, a fabrication that combines autobiography with elements of fiction. Although these two impulses can be found in many southern autobiographical writings, it is true that, as Bill J. Berry notes in his Introduction to Located Lives: Place and Idea in Southern Autobiography (1990), Douglass’s Narrative is at “the roots of a southern autobiographical tradition” (xiii).