The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, the representative novel of Ernest Gaines, helps to build up the author's position in the contemporary American literary circle. The novel narrates,through a former slave, almost a century's history from the liberation of slaves in 1860s to Civil Rights movement in 1960s. In the novel, Gaines attempts to reconstruct history to subvert the main-stream ideology, to fill up the blanks and ruptures in the official history, to dig out the omitted or the forgotten history, to rewrite the distorted or the misunderstood history. This essay analyzes the novel from the new historical perspective, and believes that this novel challenges the authoritative status of the official history, and helps people to better understand the historical reality. Moreover, history is never the rigid past. It asserts an active influence upon the reality and the future. By recounting the ethnic history, Gaines also reflects on the effects of the unequal ethnic relationship on both the African-Americans and the Whites, and explores the future development of the Black ethnic group.
