Entitled to the Pedestal: Place, Race, and Progress in White Southern Women's Writing,1920-1945

6. NEW BEGINNINGS: Old Sites of Authority

Is Massa gonna sell us tomorrow?” / “Yes, yes.” “Mama, is Massa gonna sell us tomorrow?” / “Yes, yes, yes.” “Mama, is Massa gonna sell me tomorrow?” / “Yes, yes, yes.” —Mrs. Arness, Bringing Down the House During my years of graduate work at the University of Illinois at Urbana -Champaign, I discovered the seed of my contention with critical assessments of white southern women’s writing that has resulted in this book. At about that time, I also discovered A Di≠erent World (1987–1993), a favorite sitcom of mine, in syndication. After Lisa Bonet left this Cosby Show spino≠ in 1988, the storylines increasingly directed toward capturing “the” black experience at historically black colleges and universities. The subtext of a 1991 episode debated the possibilities that extend from reversing the Hegelian master-slave dialectic in order to reckon with “mammy,” the imagined and material projection of black women as paradoxically maternal and asexual, sexually available and undesirable, and passive and domineering, which cuts across both the Plantation Mythology and the myth of Southern Womanhood. The episode concluded with Kimberly Reese, the character initially most hostile to mammy, performing a skit wherein she evolves from an Aunt Jemima–like figure singing “Dixie” into an African queen reciting Nikki Giovanni’s “Ego-Tripping.” The performance , an assertion of Kim’s expanded consciousness of the construct’s broad-ranging signification, mapped and negotiated lyrical, visual, and poetic discourses that adumbrate the complexities of black women’s histories as objects of racial and sexual oppression as well as self-a∞rming cultural agents. It broadly approximates the processes by which this book has proposed that modern white southern women writers used the myth of Southern Womanhood and the Plantation Mythology to negotiate sites of contradiction, limitation, and possibility in their own lives. NEW BEGINNINGS Old Sites of Authority 6 J j 165 j 166 | New Beginnings I have argued for a revaluation of Julia Peterkin, Gwen Bristow, Caroline Gordon, Willa Cather, and Lillian Smith’s cultural work so as to recuperate the resonating e≠ects of their authorial investments in southern myths between 1920 and 1945. I have made use of whiteness and cultural materialist theories throughout, and I could say more to push my feelings about each writer’s particular urge toward racial association and disassociation . Ellison’s and Fiedler’s seminal work on white masking, for example, which Lott’s Theft and Love (1995) masterfully builds upon, could o≠er a yet more nuanced perspective on the contours of Julia Peterkin’s “intimate material expression” of “blackness” (Lott 5). This sort of recognition could amplify the complex exchange between notions of white female agency and what Maurice Wallace refers to as the ideality of black masculinity (62–63), which I gestured toward in my discussion of Gordon’s signification on “black” coded dialogue. The ironic truth that extends from Gordon ’s play on the ideality of black masculinity in None Shall Look Back is that Uncle Winston’s self-actualization is conceivable only in terms of his (negative) relationship to white women’s bodies. There is, too, about Cather and Smith’s tacit commentary on racial oppression and repressed samesex desire in America a provocative exchange with James Baldwin’s theory of black male surveillance, whose analysis also falls outside the scope of this book.1 A subtle, though persistent, narrative strand throughout has been the still pressing need to reexamine the cultural politics of the Southern Renaissance , which King, following the leads of Cleanth Brooks, Louis D. Rubin , Lewis Simpson, and Allen Tate, dates “after the late 1920s” (7).2 It was, according to King, an initiative that the Fugitive turned Agrarian poets o∞cially launched and which the death of James Agee brought to an end in 1955. Notably, E. MacDonald appears to be the only male critic to challenge King’s chronology, uncovering in the early-twentieth-century writing of Amelia Rives and Mary Johnston fledgling impulses among southern writers “to look at and within themselves and their region with critical discernment” (264). In an e≠ort properly to accredit the work of Kate Chopin and the early fiction of Ellen Glasgow, Manning argues in “Real Beginning” (1993) that “the Southern Renaissance began for women well before World War I” be- Old Sites of Authority | 167 J cause they “encountered intense cultural tension decades earlier” (40). Anne Goodwyn Jones echoes Manning’s sentiments in her survey...