“Memories wasn’t a place, memories was in the mind”: The Gothic in Ernest J. Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman

MATTHEW TEUTSCH Auburn University KATHARINE HENRY UNC Chapel Hill “Memories wasn’t a place, memories was in the mind”: The Gothic in Ernest J. Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman ONE DOES NOT TYPICALLY PERCEIVE ERNEST J. GAINES AS A GOTHIC, OR more technically, Southern Gothic, author. Instead, readers tend to see him as a historical realist and regionalist writing, in Faulkner’s words, about his “little postage stamp of native soil” in South Louisiana. Reading Gaines through these lenses serves an important purpose since one of his major goals is to tell the stories of the people he knew, people whose voices were absent from literature and history until he began writing. We would like to provide an alternate lens to consider when approaching Gaines’s texts. Rather than limiting him as a regionalist or a realist, we propose studying him as a Southern Gothic author who highlights the changing South and the loss of its governing rules in ways that rival Faulkner’s examinations of the decaying South. Herman Beavers makes this move in Wrestling Angels into Song: The Fictions of Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson when he notes the Gothic elements in Catherine Carmier, Of Love and Dust, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, and In My Father’s House. For this essay, we expand upon Beavers’s observations to focus on how southern codes affect the psyche of Gaines’s white characters. In 1971, Theodore L. Gross observed that African American texts “instinctively adopted the Gothic tradition of American literature and given its more supernatural and surrealistic characteristics a realistic basis, founded on actual lives often lived in the Gothic manner, that is indeed terrifying” (184). While the fearsfacedbycharacters in the works ofCharlesBrockdenBrown,NathanielHawthorne,EdgarAllanPoe,and others carry with them “supernatural and surrealistic characteristics” that represent society, the terrors that Gaines’s characters encounter are found in their own lives through firsthand experience, creating, in 512 Teutsch and Henry essence, what Maisha L. Wester calls a “gothic existence” (35). Wester expounds upon Gross’s observation when she writes that “the horror in [Toni Morrison’s] Beloved is different—it comes from reality—and so, is that much more threatening and terrifying” (1). The tangible aspects of such Gothic lives lead African American authors to “appropriate and revise the genre’s tropes in unique ways to both speak back to the tradition’s originators and to make it a capable and useful vehicle for expressing the terrors and complexities of black existence in America” (1-2). Gaines does this in his novel In My Father’s House (1978), a narrative that traces the lost relationship between Phillip Martin and his son Etienne. The text strongly correlates this familial loss with the continued effects of slavery and segregation. In one scene, the novel takes on a particularly Gothic tone as Etienne hides in his tomb-like bedroom while Chippo Simon speaks with Joanna about Phillip. Chippo senses Etienne’s ghostly presence from the other side of the wall with an eerie feeling that Etienne is listening even though he does not make his presence known. When Gaines’s work incorporates elements of the Gothic, it is not necessarily to speak back to the originators of the tradition but to reply specifically to William Faulkner and his representations of the South. Wester argues that American culture, whether it realizes it or not, makes a concerted turn towards the Gothic: “This is largely because of the nation’s tendency to exclude and repress counter narratives from its dominant metanarrative” (4). If Faulkner, and as some critics note, Quentin Compson, has become the “universally acknowledged spokespersonforthesouthernpsyche”(Kreyling99),thenGainescreates a counternarrative that draws upon the genre to highlight Faulkner’s myopic representation of the South that addresses the African American presence but ultimately relegates it to white spaces. Part of Gaines’s response to Faulkner comes through his examination of the psychological effects of slavery and segregation on the white landowners who worked to preserve their way of life. In this way, Gaines’s deployment of the Gothic differs from that of Morrison’s Beloved, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, and Sherley A. Williams’s Dessa Rose, all of...