Critical Essays on the Writings of Lillian Smith ed. by Tanya Long Bennett

Abstract

Reviewed by: Critical Essays on the Writings of Lillian Smith ed. by Tanya Long Bennett Jennifer Ritterhouse Critical Essays on the Writings of Lillian Smith. Edited by Tanya Long Bennett. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021. Pp. vi, 179. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-3685-4; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-3684-7.) “Am I really going down in history as just the ‘brave little woman who spent her life helping Negro[e]s,’” Lillian Smith asked plaintively in a letter written the year before her death from cancer in 1966. She hoped instead “to be acknowledged as the writer I think I am” (p. 8). Although scholarship on Smith has grown steadily over the decades, historians are especially prone to discuss her politics and draw on her insights about the segregated South without exploring her literary artistry. Yet Smith’s “optimism about improving society was inextricably tied to her artistic impulse,” argues Tanya Long Bennett, a professor of English at the University of North Georgia, an institution with which four of the seven contributors to this volume are also affiliated (p. 5). Critical Essays on the Writings of Lillian Smith is the first edited collection examining Smith’s entire body of work—from her best-selling debut novel Strange Fruit (New York, 1944) and her widely cited autobiography Killers of the Dream (New York, 1949) to her lesser known books from the 1950s and 1960s. These seven essays are organized chronologically “to guide readers through the powerful aesthetic and thematic workings of her texts” (p. 16). Along the way, they connect Smith’s writings not only to segregation and the civil rights movement but also to modernism, psychoanalysis, the Cold War, trauma theory, and the struggles of female artists in a misogynistic culture. The basis for Smith’s optimistic belief that individuals were able to overcome societal barriers and form mutually beneficial relationships also becomes clear. Bennett provides both a valuable introduction, which includes a review of existing scholarship on Smith, and the collection’s first essay. Her careful examination of the geography of Maxwell, Georgia, the setting of Strange Fruit, culminates in an appreciation for Smith’s use of multiple perspectives to put the reader in the shoes of various characters, female and male, Black and white. “Smith’s use of narrative point of view to effect individual awakenings aligns with research indicating that fiction can diminish perceived race boundaries,” Bennett writes (p. 38). Conversely, examining how anxious white patriarchs enforced boundaries and indoctrinated the young is the primary goal of [End Page 183] Killers of the Dream, as interpreted by Justin Mellette, who puts Smith’s autobiography in dialogue with William Alexander Percy’s Lanterns on the Levee (New York, 1941) and other texts. Emily Pierce Cummins focuses on Killers of the Dream as well, using trauma theory to highlight Smith’s optimistic “belief that human connection and understanding can stop the cycle of trauma and restore the future” (p. 83). Moving into Smith’s Cold War–era writings, Wendy Kurant Rollins offers a close reading of Susie, a character in The Journey (Cleveland, Ohio, 1954). “Smith weaves into Susie’s characterization two sides or impulses that Smith frequently identified in herself and called her Martha and Mary sides,” Rollins writes. As a result, Susie comes to embody “the maddening and isolating effects of totalitarian political culture on women” (p. 89). Keenly aware that Smith was no twenty-first-century feminist, Cameron Williams Crawford interrogates Smith’s problematic use of an eight-year-old girl’s false rape accusation as a plot device to explore the mob mentality of the Joseph McCarthy years in One Hour (New York, 1959). Narrated by a white male minister, One Hour can also be read to show “how rape culture is perpetuated when men’s voices are given more power than women’s,” Crawford argues (p. 124). In the collection’s final two essays, April Conley Kilinski finds much more than nostalgia in Memory of a Large Christmas (New York, 1962), and David Brauer draws especially close connections between Smith’s political sensibilities and her use of rhetorical strategies and multivocal narration in Our Faces, Our Words...