Alternate Author Name(s)

Angelo Vincent Costanzo

Document Type

Dissertation

Date of Award

1976

Keywords

Authors, Black, Literature, Black authors, Autobiography, 18th century

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

English, General Literature, and Rhetoric

First Advisor

Vincent Freimarck

Second Advisor

Bernard Rosenthal

Third Advisor

Roger B. Stein

Abstract

Recent interest in the autobiographical mode of writing has focused on almost all forms of fictional and nonfictional works of literature. Articles and books have appeared on religious and political authors, such as Malcolm X, Norman Mailer, and Eldridge Cleaver; while at the same time other studies have emerged dealing with the confessional mode in writing. Recent poets, such as Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Allen Ginsberg, who give various versions of their life stories in poems, have figured in many careful scrutinies of the confessional and autobiographical school of poetry, which goes back to William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman.

Autobiographical writing has been popular since St. Augustine wrote his Confessions in Africa during the Middle Ages. However, within the last several hundred years it has gained widespread use and recognition as a serious aesthetic form. Prior to the eighteenth century, most autobiographies were religious in nature and patterned after Augustine’s and Bunyan’s works. In modern times the stream divides into two branches—religious and secular; thus in the eighteenth century we see Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Edwards writing two very diverse kinds of autobiography. The narrator of a religious life emphasized his or her struggle to save his soul and then depicted his entrance into a spiritual community of shared values and goals. The secular autobiographer stressed his individual search for identity within the framework of society’s temporal institutions, such as those of government, business, and education. Since the time of the Renaissance, the individual’s concern for himself as a man has usually been the primary quest in most autobiographical writing, whether religious or secular.

The development of autobiography has proved useful to writers of the last two hundred years, which have been characterized by increasing fragmentation of the unity of societies in the West. The breakdown of the commonality of values and aims has given each individual the difficult task of seeking his own identity in a world that does not offer clear-cut guidelines to living. A person’s self examination is of paramount importance to him or her, and thus autobiographical writing has become a significant mode of literature.

When we speak of the Western tradition, we think of people who are white Europeans and Americans. However, we must recall that writers of African ancestry have lived for many years in the West and have contributed to its cultural life. In 1903, W. E. B. DuBois wrote in The Souls of Black Folk that the black man in America lives in a world

which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness, —an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, —this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face. (16-17)

The merging of “his double self into a better and truer self” has especially concerned the black autobiographer whose chief purpose in writing is self-inspection, for he faces the denial of his humanity by the white society at large. Thus, the black writer always has in some sense to confront the world autobiographically because he has to deal with the consciousness of his life or condition as a black.

In the eighteenth century, the autobiographical form became popular among black writers because it provided for most of them an opportunity to accomplish two pressing objectives. A black man who escaped from slavery had an interesting and remarkable tale to tell about himself, and at the same time he had to scrutinize his life for purposes of self-discovery and identification in the alien world of the West. Thus autobiography served the black narrator well: it helped him to examine the Western tradition, while it allowed him to express unique life experiences about his blackness.

Black autobiographers have tended to avoid the strong emphasis on individualism which has characterized most white literature. In the manner of Augustine and the American Puritan writers, the black narrators have explored their lives under a system of religious and/or secular communal values. For most blacks this has meant a heightened sense of both individual and collective development, involving a person’s commitment to the noble aims of a community of brothers who strive for diverse kinds of freedom. In this practice many of the black autobiographers of the West resemble the African writers of personal narratives who have always placed the individual’s search for fulfillment within the social structure of the tribal group. The Western black writer has retained some connection, so to speak, with his ancestral culture because of the special necessities of his situation in a hostile white environment, where survival has forced him to unite with his brothers.

....

One can observe then that most black literature written in America has suffered from a tremendous prejudice and from social and economic conditions that hampered its development and proper recognition. The black writers have been always handicapped by social, economic, racial, and educational inequality, and thus their works up until recent times have been sparse, unappreciated, and kept somewhat isolated or completely divorced from the great body of American literature. As a result, very few people are aware of black contributions, especially of the early works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and what little knowledge readers have of those periods allows them to believe that the black writer is a figure largely outside the mainstream of American literary culture. This is not true, however, and a close study of black literature proves the American, or larger yet, the Western cultural character of the black author; while at the same time it shows the unique contribution of black writing to literature in general.

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