Definition and Toni Morrison

Interiority refers to a characer's innermost thoughts, feelings, and reactions to events. A reader's access to a character's interiority is integral to connecting with a character, to feeling along with a character. Without interiority, a character can read flat. In contemporary fiction, the connection to characters' subjective experience is normally expected; since authors invent characters, they are not limited to objective observation, absent from interior knowledge. In Toni Morrison's essay "The Site of Memory," she notes "the absence of the interior life" in slave narratives, explaining that "popular taste discouraged the writers from dwelling too long or too carefully on the more sordid details of their experience" (90). The thinking was that white people didn't want to feel accused of wrongdoing by slaves harping on the terrors brought on by slavery, so the narratives refrained from delving into slaves' thoughts about their experiences. In effect, slave narratives serve more as historical accounts of what happened rather than adequately expressing slaves' feelings about what is happening to them.

As Gaines’s novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman is a neo-slave narrative, it holds true to this convention, as we learn more about Jane’s experience than her personal feelings about her experience. Frequently in times of distress or emotional turmoil, she claims to forget details or omits commenting on her circumstances. Jane’s interior life is buried in what she doesn’t say, what she doesn’t convey in words or show in emotional expression. It’s almost as if she is immune to feeling, serving more as an orator of her story than a participant. The most apparent absence of explanation in the novel concerns Jane’s physical limitations. Due to the permanent physical effects of growing up enslaved, she cannot bear children. She recounts, "The other reason I never looked at a man, I was barren. An old woman on the place told me that...one word: ‘Barren.’ I went to a doctor and he told me the same thing: 'You barren, all right.'" When Joe asks her to "be his wife," she hesitates, explaining, “I didn’t want to tell him I was barren" (80). The word is repeated four times on one page. She keeps repeating the word, perhaps to emphasize its importance to the story. Her devotion to Ned and Jimmy suggests Jane wanted a child, but readers never hear it from her. The narrative gives no access to her interiority. 

We don’t know how Jane felt when the doctor confirmed the old woman’s suspicions. With no natural family of her own, the idea of not having any true kinship in the future might have been devastating. Or, if she didn’t desire children but was willing to have them to appease a man, readers should know that too. As readers, we desire to know more about Jane, especially when it comes to her inherent feelings about something so personal and permanent. With her barrenness, she spoke of it only when she had to, when the narrative direction forced the admission. Gaines could have given voice to her pain—the same voice he deemed worthy to recount the story. Without the intimate details, the voice reads flat, expanding the divide between character and reader.

In previous drafts of the novel, Jane’s barrenness is described in a conversation between two other people on the plantation. The details are the same, but they are recounted by someone other than the barren woman. Those characters would not be privy to Jane’s personal feelings about her inability to have children, so the absence of emotion is expected. In the final draft, Jane’s description is the same as the outsiders’ explanation, absent of interior thoughts, prohibiting the reader from feeling with Jane.


 

The narrative closes off access to Jane’s interiority early in the novel. We see her impersonal mode of narration, for instance, when the Emancipation Proclamation is announced: “Then all of a sudden somebody hollered, and everybody started singing. Just singing and dancing and clapping” (11). Jane doesn’t include herself in the celebration. Alhough the slaves’ reaction is a performance, Jane doesn’t perform. There is no indication of her reaction, no outward emotion shown at the news of freedom. Her reticence to share her feelings or even engage in a celebratory performance removes her from the relief and joy shared by the group. This moment of exultation is not felt by Jane or the readers. We are watching it happen just as Jane is. The novel’s title promises an autobiography, but the title is misleading because it is more a story of the people in Jane’s life than a story about Jane herself. In the his notes to Gaines, Dial editor Bill Decker mentions this absence of clarity, acknowledging that Jane doesn't exactly own her story. The absence of Jane’s interior life, as Morrison would put it, produces a character who serves more as a vessel for a story than a woman inhabiting her own story.