Cutting through the image-making of her contemporaries as well as later interpreters who envision Sojourner Truth as the symbol of the strong woman, ""black or not,"" Painter persuasively offers us the real woman behind the myth. Still, Painter reminds us, ""Everything we know of Sojourner Truth comes through other people, mostly educated white women,"" for, despite decades of involvement with liberal, even radical, intellectuals, she remained illiterate. Relying on biblical allusions that her ""Bible-literate"" audiences could amplify, she was spellbinding. Historian Nell Irvin Painter even contends that Truth is less of a piece of. Shrewd, and with a commonsense wit, possessed of such a thundering voice that skeptics wondered if she were a man, she was never, Painter asserts, a quaintly exotic innocent. Consequently, Gilberts 1850 Narrative of Sojourner Truth is an attempt to. A striking presence on the platform, the subject of an as-told-to autobiography that went through many editions and helped sustain her financially, she seemed a born survivor, shedding slavery, abuse, poverty and prejudice during her 80-odd years (admirers claimed 110-she died in 1883). Isabella Van Wagenen, a Pentecostalist domestic born into slavery about 1797 but who reinvented herself at 59 as an abolitionist orator, then into a fiery suffragist, is seen here through the prism of the religious, social and political movements that animated her. Yet it has additional strengths as 19th-century social history.
Because other biographies of Sojourner Truth, unusual even among ex-slave women as itinerant preacher and political activist, have been published in recent years, Painter's compelling life loses some of its edge.
0 kommentar(er)
