Rethinking Historical Realism: Catholicism and Spirit Possession in Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman

Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971) is widely regarded as realist historical fiction: one of the initial wave of contemporary slave narratives which challenged traditional historiography by recovering—as accurately as possible—the voices of those who had been enslaved. Its first-person narration was so convincing, in fact, that countless readers and even a few journalists regarded the book as genuine testimony of a living source, similar to the Works Progress Administration interviews of former slaves conducted in the 1930s.¹ In some ways, this generic confusion might have been predicted; not only does the title undermine the novel’s status as a work of fiction, but the text is also framed as an oral history, recorded and transcribed by a black historian who asked the subject (Jane) to tell “the story of her life” (vii). Indeed, Gaines has said that he drew heavily from the WPA interviews while writing Miss Jane Pittman, even calling them his “Bible,” and that he used these documents “to get the rhythm of speech and an idea of how ex-slaves would talk about themselves” (qtd. in Rowell 94).

Critics often point to Gaines’s investment in slave testimony when considering the formal properties of the novel, associating it with a wider trend in African American literature of the period towards a fuller, more accurate representation of lived history. For example, Madhu Dubey argues that realist narratives like Miss Jane Pittman were “kindled by” the political climate of the 1960s and, specifically, the push from civil rights activists to revise the historical record, which they viewed as entirely divested of the perspective of slaves (781).² According to Dubey, the “revisionist historiographic enterprise” of this period accounts for Gaines’s recourse to literary realism, since he was not attempting to discredit the “truth-telling claims characteristic of realist historical fiction” but rather to amend or correct what had already been written (782). This is the way she distinguishes a work such as Miss Jane Pittman from later, “antirealist” strains of the slave narrative genre—think of Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada (1976), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage (1990)—that “overtly situate themselves against history, suggesting that we can best comprehend the truth of slavery by abandoning historical modes of knowing” (784). At the time he was writing his novel—in the late sixties, when the WPA interviews and antebellum slave autobiographies were first deemed legitimate evidence—Gaines was far too engaged himself in recovering a lost history, Dubey claims, to want to destabilize the historian’s authority.³

The historian in Miss Jane Pittman is, of course, Jane herself: a century-old African American woman who was born into slavery and lived through the start of the Civil Rights Movement. Her first-person narrative traces, in chronological order and with poignant verisimilitude, the major events that had an impact on Louisiana’s black population during that time (the Civil War, Emancipation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow legislation) through her personal experience of that history. Thus, in structure and in content, the novel affirms its realist historiographical aims in a mode that Gaines himself liked to call “folk.” As he told an interviewer in 1983, Miss Jane Pittman is “not a story told by an educated person, but an uneducated person, an illiterate person, but someone with a tremendous sense of being, of knowing” (qtd. in Blake 139). And yet, despite how seriously Gaines takes his narrator and the historical analysis that her voice provides, he destabilizes her authority at key points in the novel to such an extent that Jane’s ability to accurately record history is called into question. These moments, as I will demonstrate, confound the realist tenure of her narrative by introducing into the text elements of supernaturalism, which oppose the rational and objective historiography that she otherwise represents. In fact, one of my principal claims is that Gaines uses the supernatural trope of spirit possession to articulate alternative means of remembering slavery and to engage radically antirealist...