L’Espace dans The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman

This article on The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman expands on the notion of “symbolic geography” coined by Charles Rowell. Pitting the urbanized industrial North-East (represented by Ohio) against the wilderness of the Texan frontier (South-West of Louisiana), Gaines plays with the recurrent topoi of white American literature and opposes them to the North-bound quest of Miss Jane Pittman (typical of African-American narratives). Yet the novel finally subsumes all these oppositions in a central space at the core of Louisiana where all stories originate and are finally brought back to be juxtaposed and exposed in all their ambivalences. In this heart of the heart of the country, boundaries do not so much separate as reveal a double-faced reality.