Embodying history: History, memory, and family genealogies in contemporary Southern women's writing

Southern women writers have been and are still accused of failing to exemplify the best in Southern literature because they fail to center their narratives on the history of the region. In fact, Southern women writers do indeed write history, although it is a history that negotiates and bridges the gap between the false notions of the "domestic" and the "public" or political by using the 'non-epic everyday' to explore the large, significant, or monumental events chronicled by traditional master historical narratives. For many Southern women, their experiences haven't been and will not be remembered outside of their families, and are therefore certainly left out of official or master historical narratives. Therefore, they write history in the form of multi-linear genealogies physically located in artistic sites of memory, or lieux de memoire. The lieux de memoire these women produce in their narratives are as varied as the authors themselves, and they allow for the burden of history to be borne among many rather than by one tormented individual character or author. This narrative technique is especially evident in Gayl Jones's Corregidora, Lee Smith's Fair and Tender Ladies, and Ellen Douglas's The Rock Cried Out and Truth. By focusing on the family histories located either in artistic productions (letters, blues music, or memoirs, for instance) or the literal products of their reproduction---in the bodies and souls of their children, they create physical witnesses of the history they write. Writing history through feminist genealogical narratives allows Southern Women writers to disrupt the master narratives that have forgotten, erased, or invalidated them. These narratives also point out the multiple origins of Southern history, fiction, and experience, in order to pass them on to future generations to use to make their own histories, thus allowing for the possibility of regenerative and constantly productive Souths instead of the singular, historical and tragically doomed and dying South.