From Tragedy to Trial: Women's Subjective Memories in Slave Narratives

Abstract

　As the antislavery movement gained momentum in the mid-nineteenth century, the literary market was flooded with slave narratives written by (ex-) slaves or their amanuenses, which became a popular genre. Among more than 150 narratives published in a separate form from the 1790s to the 1920s, only one out of ten narratives was written by/about slave women. However, these narratives reveal their gender-oriented experiences in slavery, such as denied motherhood and sexual exploitation. Compared with male authors, who depicted the violence of slavery by presenting victimized and suppressed slave women, woman narrators/writers were articulate, positive, and even defiant toward their victimizers. Their life stories are retold, from the woman's perspective, as a "trial," not a "tragedy." For example, Sally Williams, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, and Elizabeth Keckley demonstrated in their narratives that they endeavored to resist their cruel fate such as forced separations by sale and coerced concubinage and childbirths. Motherhood was sustained by faith, and slave women resisted sexual exploitation by a "woman's pride." The slave women's truth in slavery is inscribed by authors/narrators who were ambivalent whether to write/tell or remain silent. The slave women's narratives provide us with a woman-centered history of the enslaved, different from the slave men's and white masters' testimonies.