Mastering Slavery

Memory, Family, and Identity in Women's Slave Narratives

Jennifer B. Fleischner

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1996
• ISBN:
  9780814728888
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire nord-américaine

In Mastering Slavery, Fleischner draws upon a range of disciplines, including psychoanalysis, African-American studies, literary theory, social history, and gender studies, to analyze how the slave narratives--in their engagement with one another and with white women's antislavery fiction--yield a far more amplified and complicated notion of familial dynamics and identity than they have generally been thought to reveal. Her study exposes the impact of the entangled relations among master, mistress, slave adults and slave children on the sense of identity of individual slave narrators. She explores the ways in which our of the social, psychological, biological--and literary--crossings and disruptions slavery engendered, these autobiographers created mixed, dynamic narrative selves.

CHAPTER 1
Introduction

The Critical Legacy

In my interpretation of the narratives as psychologically revealing autobiographies, I go against the current of much recent work. Indeed, two generations of scholars have pointedly rejected psychological approaches to slavery, at least partially in strong reaction against Stanley Elkins’s Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959). As Nell Irvin Painter observes in an essay arguing for the study of “slavery’s psychological costs” in light of theories of trauma and child abuse, “to speak of black people in psychological terms can be problematical, for this history has a history” (“Soul Murder and Slavery,” 130).

Briefly, Elkins depicted the slave as the psychological casualty of a closed and repressive system that he compared to the Nazi system of concentration camps; slavery, Elkins argued, infantilized the slaves, producing adults who were childlike, docile, loyal, deceitful, and irresponsible. “Absolute power for [the master],” Elkins wrote, “meant absolute dependency for the slave—the dependency not of the developing child but of the perpetual child” (130). Historians fired back in full force to dispute Elkins’s claims about the “Sambo personality” and the debate with Elkins spawned important studies on the slave community, the slave family, slave culture, and, eventually, slave women.¹

By documenting the significance of slave family and culture in the lives of slaves, historians sought to refute the central premise of Elkins’s thesis: that the slave personality was determined solely by the slave’s relationship with an absolute master. Meanwhile, they were revolutionizing the historiography of slavery by establishing the use of slave narratives, speeches, interviews, and letters as authentic historical documents—source material Elkins did not use. Historians also turned to slave songs, spirituals, sayings, and folktales to provide insight into the slave community.

Another arm of the “slavery debate” dealt with Elkins’s use of psychology. Taking their cue from Elkins, historians disputed his claims about the so-called slave personality by offering alternative “personality types” and views about the roles slaves played or did not play. Thus, questions of the appropriateness of psychological approaches to slavery turned upon an understanding of psychology as primarily a social and political phenomenon.

However, a distinction must be made between Elkins’s psychological approach and my own psychoanalytic one. Elkins’s application of a theoretical model involving role playing, personality types, and interpersonal relations is basically nonpsychoanalytic, in that it analyzes personality primarily as the product of ongoing interpersonal interactions. In contrast, psychoanalytic theory understands character as being motivated by individual intra- and interpsychic conflicts that are considered the expression of the entangled interplay of innate and acquired needs. In the broadest terms, where Elkins speaks of “absolute” external forces that have been imposed on the helpless slave, psychoanalysts would speak of imposingly powerful inner needs in a dynamic encounter with the external world.

Thus, the methodological problems for historical interpretation caused by Elkins’s failure to consider slave testimony also makes his work objectionable from a psychoanalytically oriented point of view, for it eliminates precisely that evidence—narrated memories of childhood experiences—which psychoanalytic theory is best suited to interpret. Accordingly, also missing in both Elkins’s idea of the “absolute master” who creates a “slave personality” and its critical reception is the essential psychoanalytic insight that slavery, rather than transforming adults into docile children (or rebels, or whatever), structured the physical and psychological development of enslaved children who grew up into enslaved, fugitive, and freed adults.²

Finally—and crucially—the question of the usefulness of psychoanalytic strategies for interpreting individual slave narratives was not actually engaged by the debates over Elkins’s work. Indeed, identifying personality types (which are, of necessity, relatively coarse-grained) is of limited usefulness when it comes to telling textured stories about particular human beings. Psychoanalytic theory, of course, utilizes general principles and rubrics; but as an interpretive practice it is thoroughly committed to the historically specific nature of individual experience.

Literary critics have had their own reservations about psychological approaches to slavery through slave narratives. One pillar of critical belief has been that the narratives are not amenable to psychological analysis because the limiting demands of the genre and the market prohibited their individuation, one from another. By this logic, the psychoanalytic question of how individual memory operates at the stress points of autobiographical identity—the intersections of mind, body, experience, and language—is irrelevant to a study of slave narratives.

One of the more persuasive proponents of this view has been critic James Olney, who takes up the problem of memory in slave narratives in order to discount its autobiographical significance.³ Olney interestingly argues that because of the very restricted intention and premise of the narratives (to describe slavery “as it is”) they are practically devoid of the kind of autobiographical, symbolic memory that assigns significance to the events of the past—discovering in them, and then creating out of them, a pattern that brings the life and the reader “in and through narration” into the present (149). For Olney, slave narratives are “most often a non-memorial description fitted to a pre-formed mold”: thus, exists the repetitiveness that occurs across slave narratives (of theme, content, form, and style) (151).

Olney’s insightful arguments against reading autobiographical memory in slave narratives have found wide-ranging indirect support. As Toni Morrison has pointed out, the constrained conditions of the narratives’ production—mostly edited, published, and read by whites—inhibited self-revelation and self-expression. Indeed, Morrison has said that she wrote Beloved to create / remember the interior life of the slave that, in her view, slave narrators of necessity deliberately suppressed—the story they did not “pass on” (“The Site of Memory,” 303; Beloved, 274–75). And as Ruth Shays, the daughter of slaves, told an interviewer not long ago: “When it comes to the old times, you can’ go to books and courthouses because most of our foreparents had sense enough not to spill their in-gut to whitefolks, or blackfolks, either, if they didn’ know them” (Gwaltney, 31).

The important recognition of the mask of narrative has given critics a powerful metaphor for the slave’s resistance to slavery. Moreover, it has usefully focused readings on the larger political motivations of the narrators and the ideological significance of the genre. Indeed, an important goal for these narrators was the creation of a collective identity through which to gain social, political, and economic recognition. Reading narratives as primarily cultural and ideological constructs, critics have also been able to erect a helpful typology for interpreting slave narratives.

But there are limitations to the premise that these narratives are shaped by and reflect nothing but cultural and ideological currents. For how, then, can we account for the differentiated memories the narrators actually do depict, and the idiosyncrasies of theme, content, and style? How can we explain the autobiographical commitment that the narrators insist they bring to their work? Indeed, the ruptures, suppressions, and repetitions that have dissuaded critics from treating the narratives as open texts are the very points at which the narrators tip their hands. In these moments, the narratives seem to remember what has been forgotten or deliberately suppressed.

In the 1980s, a range of scholars systematically began formulating theories of the slave narrative as an African American literary form. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., contextualized and crystallized the concerns of rhetoric-based studies of the slave narrative when he asserted: “The slave narrative represents the attempts of the blacks to write themselves into being’ (Davis and Gates, eds., The Slave’s Narrative, xxiii).⁴ Elaborating on this statement in later works, Gates helped usher in a central line of thinking about African American literature as an oppositional tradition, devised to refute racist allegations that “its authors did not and could not create ‘literature.’”⁵

Gates understands the narratives to have emerged within the context of Enlightenment values, specifically the belief that the mark of humanity is reason, of which the visible sign is written language, for this belief was deployed to justify the enslavement of black Africans who, unable to write and read Western languages, could be relegated to the category of subhuman. Gates cites Immanuel Kant’s influential conflation of color and intelligence, presented in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764), in which, commenting upon an obviously shrewd and intelligent remark made by a “Negro carpenter,” Kant reasons, “it might be that there was something in this which perhaps deserved to be considered; but in short, this fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid” (cited in Figures in Black, 19).

Gates’s critique suggests the ways in which signs (in a text), through the operation of politics, acquire ontological import; and therefore, the hundreds of narratives written by ex-slaves in the United States (the earliest of which was published in 1760) by their very existence posit the selfhood of human beings of African descent who undercut the racist view of the inferior “nature” of the Negro. This helps to explain why questions of “authenticity” and “truth-telling” are self-consciously addressed in the narratives, for example, in subtitles, such as “Written by Himself” or “Written by Herself,” and why the narratives were published with their textual frames of authenticating documents (letters, papers, and introductions by white editors or friends) meant to prove the black slave’s literary authority.

The argument that slaves wrote themselves “into being” has other crucial resonances as well. For instance, literacy becomes the key to the slave’s resistance to slavery; consequently, in this interpretive tradition, scenes of reading and writing figure prominently. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (1845), the representative text for this view, exemplifies the explicit connection between literacy and freedom. In numerous scenes, Douglass reinforces the lesson he learned when his master forbade his wife to continue giving the young slave boy reading lessons: that the “white man’s power to enslave the black” lay in keeping him illiterate (37). After this eye-opening discovery, Douglass, with great determination and single-mindedness, forges his “pathway from slavery to freedom” through the written word (38).

Critical emphasis on the relation between literacy and power illuminates other aspects of the confrontations between master and slave. In the antebellum years, proslavery ideologues set up an elaborate system of rules (about dress, mobility, or education) and documents (traveling passes, free papers) meant to enable whites to tell the difference between enslaved and free black—and sometimes white—people (thereby, of course, contradicting their own arguments about the “naturally inferior Negro”). In this discursive system, being able to master texts could be literally liberating: to use the famous example of Douglass, he escapes, traveling North by train, using a borrowed sailor’s protection, a certificate that both described the person holding it and asserted that he was a free American sailor. (An early thwarted plan to escape with fellow slaves involved traveling passes forged by Douglass.)

Interest in the slave narratives as subversive deployments of what had been the master’s language has also spurred critics to examine the particular rhetorical devices employed in the narratives. Gates’s The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (1988) set a direction for study of the relation between the African oral tradition, the African American vernacular, and the African American literary tradition. As Gates argues, through the use of the trope of “signifying,” a rhetorical device emphasizing a subversive use of repetition and revision, African American writers have been able to “inscribe their voices in the written word”—into the Western literary tradition—and to reverse the power relations in that tradition (130). In this view, slave narratives are the site of the emergence of an African American tradition of signification, in which self-expression is aligned with subversion of the culturally dominant discourse.

Feminist critics, similarly building upon the idea that the narratives are sites of resistance, subversion, and self-creation, highlight questions of sexual difference and gender identity. Intensely concerned with language and power, these critics have suggested that overemphasis on the functional and figurative implications of literacy has tended to occlude important themes and strategies in slave autobiographies by women.⁶

Probably the galvanizing moment in the study of women’s slave narratives came when Jean Fagan Yellin authenticated Harriet Jacobs’s authorship of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself (1861). Yellin’s 1987 edition of Jacobs presented indisputably the narrator who would become the representative female slave voice in the African American literary tradition; Incidents was canonized, raised alongside Douglass’s narrative. The outline of female identity, as perceived in Jacobs’s narrative, took the contours of a life shaped by resistance to sexual exploitation, the problematics of enslaved motherhood, and the necessity of negotiating relationships with black and white women.⁷

With Incidents as a focus, critical attention reoriented questions of language and power around matters of sexuality and sexual abuse, womanhood, motherhood, and inter- and intraracial sisterhood. Several studies explored the ways in which slave women narrators deploy and transform nineteenth-century female stereotypes (the virtuous [white] woman, the sexually rapacious black woman [Jezebel], the Mammy-figure [Aunt Jemima]); and they examined slave narrator’s strategic use of popular narrative forms (sentimental fiction, gothic novel, Bil-dungsroman) to dramatize their struggle for self-definition within the racial, sexual, and economic hierarchies of U.S. culture. These studies also analyzed the ways in which archetypal slave narrative figures—the outraged slave mother, the lecherous master, the victimized slave girl, the jealous mistress—functioned to further the interrelated causes of feminism and abolitionism.

Hortense J. Spillers locates Incidents within an analysis of slavery’s impact on “the symbolics of female gender” (“Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 80). Brutally leaving its marks on the female body, slavery is the ground for the “originating metaphors of captivity and mutiliation” and the “grammar of description” of the African descendant as Other that still imbue the “dominant symbolic activity” of American culture (68, 70). Moreover, as Spillers argues, slavery’s disruption of the African family, beginning with the kidnappings in Africa and continuing with the Middle Passage, threw the “customary lexis of sexuality [for the slave woman], including ‘reproduction,’ ‘motherhood,’ ‘pleasure,’ and ‘desire’ . . . into unrelieved crisis” (76). Slave narratives, Spillers suggests, participate in the reconfiguration of the American “cultural text” in terms of the different “representational potentialities” for African Americans (80).

A Compulsion to Repeat

Any study of slave narratives must rely on some assumptions about the vexed concept of the “self” which stands at the center of autobiography. Where does the sense of “self” come from? How is it constituted? Where does it end? How can it be expressed, described, named? Historians and literary critics who study slave narratives seem generally to assume a correlation between the historical life and the narrated life, and between the slave as narrator and the slave as protagonist. However, there has also been a counter tendency, suggested by poststructuralism, to interpret the narrated self as invention and form, rather than as having reference to a real self in the past. But how these linguistic self-constructions come to be, and how they relate to the self, whose past experiences and present memories are the subjects at hand, is not clear.

In Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography, John Paul Eakin elaborates on the implications of the idea that autobiography is the special form of narrative that takes as its referent one’s own life. As Eakin argues, “poststructuralist criticism on autobiography characteristically—and mistakenly—assumes that an autobiographer’s allegiance to referential truth necessarily entails a series of traditional beliefs about an integrated, unified, fully-constituted self and mimetic theories of language and literary form” (30). Instead, he believes, the making of autobiography involves not so much an attempt to reflect the world as to transform it—and so also, oneself in the world; it is evidence of “a simultaneous acceptance of and refusal of the constraints of the real” (46). Accordingly, to write an autobiography is to act on the desire to repeat one’s past in order to “supplement” it, because the past is and was “never acceptable” (46, 51).

Eakin’s suggestive commentary posits a view of desire in the writing of autobiography that is analogous to Freud’s key notion of the “compulsion to repeat.” This is Freud’s phrase for what he saw as the unconscious process of delayed, disguised, and repeated expressions of early powerful encounters, experiences, and impressions that seemed, at the time, unacceptable or overwhelming and so were gradually repressed.⁸ Psychoanalytic thinking since Freud has ranged widely from his early formulations, but it still anchors itself in some notion of repression and the idea that, over the course of a life, each individual symbolically restages earlier powerful experiences out of a complex tangle of motivations: to test, verify, and correct reality; and to master or give vent to underlying feelings of rage, fear, frustration, and pressures for revenge.⁹ In this way, the psychoanalytic model of the vicissitudes...