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8. Narratives of a Writing Life, Part 1: Ellen Glasgow and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
- Louisiana State University Press
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8 Narratives of a Writing Life, Part I Ellen Glasgow and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Autobiographical writings by southern women novelists constitute an especially interesting group of texts, composed as they are by women who have established successful careers as professional writers by the time they come to write a self-reflexive narrative, one that features an authorial self who is writing and a protagonist self who, along with other characters, forms the central cast of the stories. Their careers of writing fiction have, of course, given them ample practice in creating narratives that link imagination to memory and past experience . Consequently, we find that, in comparison with many of the writers considered in previous chapters, novelists’ approach to autobiographical writing suggests a more conscious regard of the demands of narrative and the essential constructedness of a text. These women consciously wrote for publication and were very much aware of a general public audience, including the devoted readers who had read and admired their fiction. Unlike the successful novelist Lillian Smith, whose essayistic Killers of the Dream employed self-narrative in the service of her indictment of southern racism, these writers’ chief focus is upon the authorial self as a writer. Virtually alone in having written a book-long commentary about the composition of her novels, their themes and characters, and about southern writing and the art of fiction generally, Ellen Glasgow in A Certain Measure assumes the authority of her “certain measure of achievement” to compose a public persona of “honest craftsman,” “willful author,” and “persistent novelist,” as she refers to herself in the book’s preface (vii). In the posthumously published The Woman Within, however, she composes an overtly personal narrative centered upon the “quest for independence” that she depicts as having led to much anxi212 Narratives of a Writing Life, Part I: Glasgow and Rawlings 213 ety and loneliness but that finally anchored her success as a writer. Similarly, the novelists’ autobiographies considered here all express in one way or another the pressures of tradition—social and literary—upon their effort to compose a selfnarrative of a writer’s life. As professional writers of fiction, they are experienced and sophisticated in their approach to the textual construction of their project. They have few illusions about accessing a fixed past, as if it were a film to be replayed. They know they are composing a text, a life narrative. They are ever aware that they are in control of what to tell and what to leave out—that is, what “belongs” in the plot they create. Each strives to construct a convincing character who over time reasonably turns out to be the very person she in fact understands herself to be—at the time of writing. As the genre demands of every autobiographer, these women begin to fashion their stories from the endings of them, writing from and toward the conclusion. Hence, age, life and career stage, family situation , the social era in which they write, and, certainly, their motive for writing —these and many other factors all impinge greatly upon the narratives they compose. The autobiographer who is a novelist is of course mindful that a satisfying, interesting narrative needs coherent form, sensuous detail, pace, voice. She is also aware that she is writing in a genre built upon certain traditional reader expectations. For example, one expects to read of the autobiographer’s family relationships, friends, education, residences, key experiences, ambitions, successes , and failures. Having already established a circle of readers of her fiction , the writer assumes her life story will in some respect be read through the prism of her previously published work. And, almost inevitably, she will fashion life events in relation to her story of “the writing life.” Finally, a woman who has published novels throughout a career is also knowledgeable about the publishing enterprise—the interest of editors and publishers in producing a book that has a foreseeable market and wide readership. Thus the literary self- consciousness that the novelist brings to the writing of a life narrative leads, unsurprisingly , to nuanced, artfully formed, lively texts that have dramatic scenes, dialogue, tensions, oppositions, meditations, resolutions, and a steady thread of character development that links episodes into a coherent narrative. Considerable scholarly attention has been devoted to many of the texts I will mention here, notably, Will Brantley’s discerning and well-researched Feminine Sense in Southern Memoir, a study of the autobiographies of Lillian Smith, Ellen Glasgow, Eudora Welty, Lillian Hellman, Katherine Anne Porter...