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89 difference and “i” Cultural Consciousness in the Personal Essay or much of its history, the personal essay has been a domain of white male authors, so inattentive to the drastically different circumstances of women and minorities that Lamb’s diatribe on the mistreatment of women stands out as a premodern rarity. Far from speaking out on cultural and political issues, personal essayists from Montaigne to Beerbohm chose to ruminate instead on books, ideas, manners, and personal experience. So, the “I” of the personal essay often echoed its genial and peaceable settings—the book-lined study, the coffee house, the drawing room, the rural retreat—settings attuned to a persona that was companionable rather than contentious, reflective rather than assertive, witty rather than solemn. In other words, a charming, white male of yore without any ax to grind. The appeal of that personagewas once so strong that as late as 1918, Agnes Repplier , America’s then most notable female essayist, affirmed it in her assertion that the essayist’s “personality is born of leisure and reflection ”—not of such “bitter and blinding truths” that come in a time of war. It’s not surprising, then, that Virginia Woolf frowned on the discontented manner of Hazlitt and celebrated the chameleon-like Beerbohm as the early twentieth century’s preeminent essayist. Though the traditionally charming “I” would make one more distinguished appearance in the essays of E. B. White, the contemporaneous essays of George Orwell embodied such an intense consciousness of colonialized cultures and subjugated people that they prefigured a radical change in the essayist’s persona. Indeed, when blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, and women came to write of their personal experiences, they often did so by directly confronting the differences that set them apart or the tensions and abuse provoked by such difference, as in Richard Wright’s “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” a searing account of the abuse that he suffered from white fellow laborers during his early working years. In pieces with such a focus, the essayist’s intense concern with painful exor much of its history, the personal essay has been a domain of white male authors, so inattentive to the drastically different circumstances of women and minorities that Lamb’s diatribe on the mistreatment of women stands out as a premodern rarity. Far from speaking out on cultural F Personae and Culture 90 perience inevitably leads to a drastically different persona from the genial companion of the past. I remember my first encounter with such a presence in James Baldwin’s “Stranger in a Village,” which I read some fifty years ago, when I was a teaching assistant, guiding my freshman students through the more familiar terrain of Bacon, Addison, Lamb, Beerbohm , and White. Baldwin’s persona was so imbued with an intense consciousness of difference that it seemed completely at odds with those traditional essayists. As its title suggests, Baldwin’s essay centers on his experience in a Swiss mountaintop village where “no black man had ever set foot . . . before I came.” A bizarre sojourn for Baldwin who never imagined “that there could be people anywhere who had never seen a Negro.” Also bizarre for the villagers, whose naïve curiosity about his physical traits led them to treat him like a freak of nature rather than a human being, as Baldwin makes clear in a striking series of recollections: Some thought my hair was the color of tar, that it had the texture of wire, or the texture of cotton. It was jocularly sug‑ gested that I might let it grow long and make myself a winter coat. If I sat in the sun for more than five minutes some daring creature was certain to come along and gingerly put his fingers on my hair, as though he were afraid of an electric shock, or put his hand on my hand, astonished that the color did not rub off. In all of this, in which it must be conceded there was the charm of genuine wonder, and in which there was certainly no element of intentional unkindness, there was yet no suggestion that I was human. I was simply a living wonder. I knew that they did not mean to be unkind, and I know it now; it is necessary, nevertheless, for me to repeat this to myself each time that I walk out of the chalet. Here as elsewhere in the first part of this essay, Baldwin looks at the villagers looking at...

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