Rewriting the Self: Reconstructing Female Subject in Ernest Gaines’ The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman

Abstract

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman is a historical novel cast in the form of fictional autobiography centered on an emancipatory narrative of the African Americans. It is a folk autobiography, which puts in the fore a female voice that reconfigures the history of the African American struggle for liberation. In other words, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman reshapes and delineates the autobiographical “I” in the process of black subjectivity. This paper investigates Gaines’ particular way of predicating female subjectivity that moves away from the stereotypical or traditional representations of black female subjects in their historical struggle for Civil Rights in the United States. More specifically, the focal point of the present paper is the way Gaines represents and reforms the experience of blacks’ struggle by conjoining the egalitarian coexistence, or the collective task of male and female subjects, a cross-gendering, which erodes the traditional conceptions that subordinate women’s roles in the discourse of African American nationalism.