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- Title
“Oh, Sophronia, it's you I want back always”: ヘルマンにおける黒人乳母表象.
- Authors
利根川 真紀
- Abstract
This paper aims to demonstrate Lillian Hellmanʼs long-term struggles with her Southern childhood experience, by identifying the changes in her portrayals of the black nurse in her third play, The Little Foxes (1939), and its revision in The Collected Plays (1972). Although the play is often regarded as a drama about Reginaʼs outfoxing her brothers and husband in order to attain financial victory in a male-dominated world, Hellman simultaneously makes it a drama about Reginaʼs daughter, seventeen-year-old Alexandra, who chooses in the end a moral value espoused by her black nurse Addie, distancing herself from her biological mother. At stake in this play is a psychological predicament of a white child who is brought up by two mothers, white and black, a phenomenon prevalent among white middle and upper class families in the segregated South. For this play Hellman drew heavily on her maternal family, whose roots were also in the South and inextricably intertwined with her childhood memories. She wrote nine drafts before publishing, and the manuscript researches by scholars reveal her endeavors throughout to deal with black people. Their presence was much more prominent in the earlier drafts, indicating that she didnʼt know how to incorporate them successfully into the play. Thus, in this play, we see Hellmanʼs effort in reconsidering her Southern roots in terms of black-white relationships. Hellman was deeply attached to her nurse Sophronia of her New Orleans childhood days. However, it was more than 30 years after her death when Hellman wrote about her in a magazine article featuring the Civil Rights march on Washington. During that time, she was living in the North with her live-in black domestic Helen, nearly 20 years her senior. They frequently quarreled when it came to racial issues, through which Hellman became aware of the power imbalance inherent in their employer-employee relationship and her blindness to the black side of life. Her new knowledge led her to a better understanding of her childhood nurse. In fact, an analysis of Chapters 2 and 15 of her memoir, An Unfinished Woman (1969), shows how she came to see Sophroniaʼs rather cryptic messages in a new light and gradually acquired her critical views not only towards the Southern patriarchal family structure but also towards the white Southern racial consciousness at large. Such an improved understanding, moreover, seems to have brought about changes in her treatment of a black surrogate mother figure, as is attested in her depictions of Addie in the 1972 version. Addie was made inactive and some of her important lines were omitted in the later version. The depiction changed, in short, from an all-loving mammy to a distant, sometimes enigmatic person. The black nurse experience in her childhood must have been at times so puzzling and so deeply embedded in her mind that it took her years to comprehend and articulate its full significance. With Hellmanʼs literary effort, we have just one more example of how white Southern writers coped with their racially difficult childhood, which is undeniably one of the distinctive hallmarks of 20th century white Southern literature.
- Subjects
HELLMAN, Lillian, 1905-1984; MIDDLE class families; FAMILIES; EARLY memories; MEMORY in literature; PATRIARCHY; SURROGATE mothers; RACIAL identity of Black people; LITTLE Foxes, The (Play : Hellman)
- Publication
Journal of the American Literature Society of Japan (Japanese Edition), 2019, Issue 55, p37
- ISSN
0385-6100
- Publication type
Article