Paper Title
Start Date
12-6-2011 9:30 AM
End Date
12-6-2011 12:00 PM
Subject Areas
North America, modern, activism, bodies, gender, race, sexuality, violence
Abstract
In this essay, I explore the ways in which reformer, lawyer, and writer Vara Majette (1875-1974) embodied the social and discursive contradictions of the Jim Crow South. Her life and the texts she produced direct attention to the somatic and emotional pressures white middle-class women negotiated in a social order predicated on their supposed racial and sexual purity. Something of an outlier, Majette maneuvered between male and female, black and white, and rural and urban worlds. As a writer, she also moved between modes of discourse. She identified herself as a “dissenter,” and prided herself on her lifelong impulse to challenge white southern myths and codes of complicity. She did so in a remarkable range of registers: from editorials (with headlines such as “The White Man to Blame”), case reports and legal briefs, to reminiscences, poems and novels (with titles such as White-Blood and Daughters of Men.) The paper explores the conditions that compelled Majette to candor and the discourses at her disposal. It charts the tension between her awareness of the pain and vulnerability she shared with (though not necessarily to) other women, and her insistence on her own agency and expressivity. Majette’s very efforts to publicize her physical and emotional troubles and connect them to reform initiatives led to isolation, not connection and change.
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Intimacy and Trauma in Vara Majette's New South
In this essay, I explore the ways in which reformer, lawyer, and writer Vara Majette (1875-1974) embodied the social and discursive contradictions of the Jim Crow South. Her life and the texts she produced direct attention to the somatic and emotional pressures white middle-class women negotiated in a social order predicated on their supposed racial and sexual purity. Something of an outlier, Majette maneuvered between male and female, black and white, and rural and urban worlds. As a writer, she also moved between modes of discourse. She identified herself as a “dissenter,” and prided herself on her lifelong impulse to challenge white southern myths and codes of complicity. She did so in a remarkable range of registers: from editorials (with headlines such as “The White Man to Blame”), case reports and legal briefs, to reminiscences, poems and novels (with titles such as White-Blood and Daughters of Men.) The paper explores the conditions that compelled Majette to candor and the discourses at her disposal. It charts the tension between her awareness of the pain and vulnerability she shared with (though not necessarily to) other women, and her insistence on her own agency and expressivity. Majette’s very efforts to publicize her physical and emotional troubles and connect them to reform initiatives led to isolation, not connection and change.