This page was created by Aleya Washington. The last update was by David Squires.
Miss Jane as Voiceless
The narrative proceeds under the pretense that it is told by Miss Jane about Miss Jane, but her inner voice is heard the least in the novel. Just like in the manuscript, the novel is seemingly about her life, but the story actually revolves around the lives of others—in particular, the lives of four male characters. In this way it seems that although Gaines revised the book into a woman’s tongue, he did not give her a voice. Gaines utilizes Miss Jane’s voice simply to gender the narrator and place her into the strong black woman trope. Not much would change if the narrator remained omniscient, sexless, or impersonal.
When Ernest Gaines wrote the novel, he chose to set Miss Jane Pittman’s life mostly after slavery. By doing this, he hurries past the horrors of slavery. There is only one scene where he allows for an illumination of the violence of slavery. When Miss Jane Pittman is beaten by the mistress for saying that her name “ain’t no Ticy no more, it’s Miss Jane Brown…and Mr. Brown say catch him and tell him if [she] don’t like it” (9). That moment depicts the violence, however, not in psychological depth. The scene simply states that the mistress hit her and that she “got tired beating [Jane] and told [her] master to beat [Jane] some” (9). That description hints at the extent of the violence by suggesting its duration. We also get a sense of the force of the beating because, by the time the mistress stops, Jane “was already bleeding” (9). Scenes such as this leave readers to infer from the description how Miss Jane experienced the violence and what sort of trauma it inflicted emotionally or psychologically.
In this typewritten draft, the editor admits that Miss Jane forgets parts of the story often. Instead of allowing her forgetfulness to be part of the story, the story is completed by others around her. She relinquishes some of the power of her own voice to others so that the story can be complete even if it is not from her perspective. The editor claims that he does not know if she is "doing this purposefully or not." If she is, then she makes a conscious choice to silence herself and regulate her own voice in regards to the story.
This perspective favors the original manuscripts and typescripts that used differing voices, of stories told through their own voices. The story of each of the men that Gaines focuses on would have been more impactful if told through their own tongue and not the eyes of another. Similarly, if Miss Pittman gave more depth to her own experience, rather than foregrounding several men in her life, the novel would hold more significance as the portrayal of a black woman.