Race

Abstract

In this book, Minrose Gwin explores the interrelationships between women as a model of Southern racial experiences. In order to understand "this volatile, often violent connection between black and white women of the Old South," she examines a wide variety of books including proslavery and abolitionist fiction of the mid-nineteenth century, slave narratives, diaries, and modern fictional versions of the Southern slave experience by Faulkner, Cather and Margaret Walker. A historian will find the greatest interest in the expositions of "Fictional Sisterhood in a Fictional South" of the nineteenth century, and "Mistress and Slave Woman as Obverse Images." An analysis of the feminist undercurrents of Uncle Tom's Cabin, including the strength of the black-white female bond, is most convincing. Even more startling, however, is the uncovering of similar female bonding in Aunt Phillis's Cabin, a polemical proslavery pot boiler. Black women in the Old South were forced to be strong; white women were supposed to appear weak, although many clearly were not. In slave narratives and autobiographies Gwin points out that, in terms of a "wholeness of female identity" (respectibility and sexuality), each race had "only half." The slave narratives are carefully and critically discussed, both as a means of asserting black humanity, and in terms of their remarkably forgiving attitudes towards white mistresses. The ambivalence toward black women, shown in the writings of their white mistresses, is also clear. Although there are many instances of sisterhood in times of trouble, the color barrier generally blinded white women to the humanity of the black woman who was usually perceived in stereotypical terms. It might also be worth remembering that most white women in the South were not slave holders. Did their attitudes differ from those of the upper-class women? While the analyses of the works of Faulkner, Cather, and Walker are equally interesting, they are far more problematical in terms of the thesis of this work. Cather, in Sapphira and the Slave Girl, seems to have been able to recreate the "ambiguity of cross-racial relationships," but in an essentially nostalgic world in which evil does not wound. Walker, in Jubilee, writing during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, seems to regard "black humanism" as an answer to racism. Can the black woman's saintly forgiveness of the southern white woman's viciousness really tell us about the slave/mistress experience of the Old South? Or, is it, most likely, a reflection of the hopeful sixties? The most brilliant chapter of this book is its discussion of the relationship of Clytie and Rosa in Absalom, A bsalom!, epitomizing both the chasm and the connection between the races. Faulkner seems to have been the author who best explored the failure of human relationships