Telling It All: Literary Standards and Narratives by Southern Women

Abstract

Literature, in the words of Alice Walker, is an effort tell immense story1-a remark which seems particularly applicable the women who have written in the Southern literary tradition. Walker's position is a significant one because it seeks enfranchise the works of women and blacks. It emerges from her own recognition as a Southern black female that the literary canon ought be whole. She elaborates on this in Beyond the Peacock: The Reconstruction of Flannery O'Connor: Though the rest of America might not mind, having endured it so long, I would never be satisfied with a segregated literature. I would have read Zora Hurston and Flannery O'Connor, Nella Larsen and Carson McCullers, Jean Toomer and William Faulkner, before I could begin feel well read at all.,2 Unfortunately, the comprehensive experience of literature which Alice Walker seeks very often has been undercut by the development of standards, presumably objective and absolute, which have excluded the creative expressions of women, blacks, poor, and nonliterate individuals. As Louise Bernikow writes: What is commonly called literary history is actually a record of choices. Which authors have survived their time and which have not depends upon who noticed them and chose record the notice. Which works have become a part of the 'canon' of literature, read, thought about, discussed, and which have disappeared, depends, in the same way, on the process of selection and power select along the way. Such power select, in England and America, has always belonged white men.3 The effect has been, as Cheri Register describes it, make the female experience peripheral to the central concern of literature--which is man's struggle with nature, God, fate, himself, and not infrequently, women. Woman is always the 'Other.'4 Oral testimonies are one of the few available sources of positive, affirming images of ourselves. In a very real sense, every time someone dies, a piece of human, regional, and cultural history dies with them--lost offspring, neighbors, and scholars. Oral narrative and folklore encourage us determine our roots. They validate the significance of life as it is experienced by most people. Not only has a deal of human experience been left out of the literary canon through the continued use of exclusionary standards, but, additionally, the available literature of women, blacks, and poor Americans has often been conveniently relegated the category of literature, which is a way of saying that it is largely of local interest only. These works fail, in other words, embody those universal truths that are characteristic of great literature. Of course, the novels of Norman Mailer and John Updike are not classified as regional works, even though those of us living outside of the Up East literary establishment have no doubt about their bases in specific regions. Chroniclers of life in the cities and suburbs of the urban Northeast are easily seen as constructing works of universal import. To escape being branded a regionalist, it takes a rare Southerner like Faulkner--whose identification was the only factor at variance with the norms of literary greatness. (His race, class, and gender obviously fit the definition.)