Southern History across the Color Line.

By Nell Irvin Painter. Gender and American Culture. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2002. Pp. [xiv], 247. Paper, $17.95, ISBN 0-8078-5360-7; cloth, $37.50, ISBN 0-8078-2692-8.)

These six essays were all previously published elsewhere, mostly in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Topics range from a brief biographical sketch of Alabama communist organizer Hosea Hudson and the author's experience of interviewing him to a discussion of the published journal of Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas, the southern slave mistress-turned-women's rights reformer. Why republish the essays in this form? The author, Princeton University professor of history Nell Irvin Painter, hopes that taken together they will illustrate the need for historians to think across racial lines. She has spent her career arguing that the black and white communities are intricately intertwined--what happens in one affects the other--yet historians generally consider southern history from only one side of the color line.

Other themes link the essays, however, such as an emphasis on individual subjectivity or biography. Although Painter is interested in community studies, she fears a tendency among scholars to reduce blacks (or whites) to a collective identity. Her emphasis on individual agency serves as a corrective to this imbalance, she maintains. Painter's interest in interpreting individual historical actors has also led her to explore concepts from psychology and psychoanalysis. This move has been criticized in some quarters for failing to acknowledge "the difference time-bound culture makes," but rather than abandon the approach, Painter says she has "tried to heed these warnings but still keep going" (p. 5).

In fact, psychoanalysis informs the majority of essays in the collection. In "Sexuality and Power in The Mind of the South" Painter uses the popular works of Sigmund Freud to demonstrate the Viennese doctor's influence on southern thinker W. J. Cash. Although Freud warned against conflating civilizations with individuals, Cash proved less than rigorous in his applications of Freudian theory to the South, Painter says. The result was a persistent confusion of race and class, power and sex throughout his book. In the end, Cash proved to be just one more white man determined to keep black women in their place.

Sexuality surfaces alongside psychoanalysis in other essays. A comparison of Thomas's journal, the 1855 novel Lily by Susan Petrigru King (Bowen), and the autobiography of fugitive slave Harriet Jacobs again relies on Freud--in this case, his discussion of "Dora"--to understand how power expressed through sex shaped the lives of southern women. Just as Freud found the lives of women emotionally intertwined in households where sexual exploitation occurred across class lines, so too were slaveholding and enslaved women both degraded when masters sexually abused the latter. Painter's widely read essay "Soul Murder and Slavery," included in this collection, also broaches the subject of shared psychological repercussions from violence and sexuality.

Written for different purposes, the essays sometimes overlap, and at other times they shift abruptly in style or subject matter. Readers familiar with Painter's scholarship will find nothing new here. Nevertheless, one cannot help but applaud the appearance of this collection, which provides a fine introduction to the ideas of an important scholar.

MARIE JENKINS SCHWARTZ

University of Rhode Island