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Reviewed by:
  • Entitled to the Pedestal: Place, Race, and Progress in White Southern Women’s Writing
  • Ann Romines (bio)
Entitled to the Pedestal: Place, Race, and Progress in White Southern Women’s Writing, 1920–1945, by Nghana Tamu Lewis. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007. 208 pp. $37.95.

In this innovative first book, Nghana Tamu Lewis addresses the belief, still widely prevalent in scholarship and popular culture, that during the first half of the twentieth century, in a South much altered by industrialization, urbanization, and social change, including the northern migration of many southern-born African Americans, “the values attributed to white southern women of means . . . remained constant,” clinging to familiar shibboleths of “White Southern Womanhood” and “Plantation Mythology” (pp. ix–x). Why have these myths endured? Investigating this question at the center of her book, Lewis draws on the resources of recent scholarship—debates about “agency, ideology, cultural intervention, and authorship” (p. ix)—as well as her own experience as “one of the South’s [End Page 396] proudest daughters” (p. vii) and as “a descendant of slaveholders and a woman born of ‘privileged’ class status in the American South” (p. x).

Lewis grounds her analysis in fresh readings of texts produced between 1920 and 1945 by five Southern-born white women of considerable privilege: Julia Peterkin, Gwen Bristow, Caroline Gordon, Willa Cather, and Lillian Smith. In all these careers, she shows the authors’ “engagement with modernity” (p. 8), through a paradoxical “ethos of feminist conservatism” grounded in “racial, class, gender and sexual politics both conservative and progressive, regional and national” (p. 6). As a scholar with long-held interests in southern women’s writing, I found this a revealing approach, allowing me to consider how long-problematic southern mythology does and does not hold up in these five significant and underread careers—three of which were relatively unfamiliar to me.

With Peterkin, for example, who was a managing mistress of a South Carolina plantation staffed by Gullah “hands,” Lewis concentrates on three linked plantation novels—Black April, Scarlet Sister Mary, and Bright Skin—in which Peterkin, with support from Harlem Renaissance intellectuals, attempted to “wrest the black experience from a history of abuse in southern literature” by valuing and closely attending to black plantation culture (p.54). However, Lewis argues that, as a plantation manager wishing to continue in that role, Peterkin had also to acknowledge that African Americans’ new 1920s options of mobility and employment outside the South threatened her labor base and thus her plantation’s order. Thus, a complex, exploratory black character such as Sister Mary ends by identifying with and embracing that oppressive order, demonstrating Peterkin’s continuing commitment to “the ethics of plantation culture” (p. 54). Lewis traces related patterns of “feminist conservatism” in her discussions of Bristow and Gordon (p. 6).

In her final chapter on Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl and Smith’s Strange Fruit, Lewis constructs a different (although complementary) argument, maintaining that the two 1940s novels share “an aesthetics of civil rights politics that challenges rigid critical distinctions between novelistic aesthetics and politics but also points to a correspondence between Cather’s and Smith’s mythic consciousnesses of racial progress in the modern South” (p. 137). In her innovative reading of Sapphira, she points to the crucial character of Rachel Blake, based on Cather’s maternal grandmother, who engineers the escape of her mother’s abused slave girl, Nancy: “The mediation of Cather’s own subjectivity through Rachel . . . implies a correlation between Rachel’s call to action and Cather’s civil rights politics” (p. 145). Through Rachel, Cather “revitalizes the myth of Southern Womanhood, affirming its authority to promote racial progress in a modern southern context” (p. 154). In Strange Fruit too, according to Lewis, especially through the novel’s portrayal of relations of white [End Page 397] and black women, Smith initiates a “symbolic redemption of the myth of Southern Womanhood” that points toward a new “aesthetics of black civil rights politics” (p. 162).

All Lewis’s readings have provocative moments that open up new and significant discussions of these five writers. She relies on summaries and careful, close readings of the fictional texts...

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