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 Elkinsâs Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959). As Nell Irvin Painter observes in an essay arguing for the study of âslaveryâs psychological costsâ in light of theories of trauma and child abuse, âto speak of black people in psychological terms can be problematical, for this history has a historyâ (âSoul Murder and Slavery,â 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. âAbsolute power for [the master],â Elkins wrote, âmeant absolute dependency for the slaveâthe dependency not of the developing child but of the perpetual childâ (130). Historians fired back in full force to dispute Elkinsâs claims about the âSambo personalityâ 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 Elkinsâs thesis: that the slave personality was determined solely by the slaveâs 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 documentsâsource 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 âslavery debateâ dealt with Elkinsâs use of psychology. Taking their cue from Elkins, historians disputed his claims about the so-called slave personality by offering alternative âpersonality typesâ 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 Elkinsâs psychological approach and my own psychoanalytic one. Elkinsâs 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 âabsoluteâ 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 Elkinsâs failure to consider slave testimony also makes his work objectionable from a psychoanalytically oriented point of view, for it eliminates precisely that evidenceânarrated memories of childhood experiencesâwhich psychoanalytic theory is best suited to interpret. Accordingly, also missing in both Elkinsâs idea of the âabsolute masterâ who creates a âslave personalityâ 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
Finallyâand cruciallyâthe question of the usefulness of psychoanalytic strategies for interpreting individual slave narratives was not actually engaged by the debates over Elkinsâs 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 identityâthe intersections of mind, body, experience, and languageâis 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 âas it isâ) they are practically devoid of the kind of autobiographical, symbolic memory that assigns significance to the events of the pastâdiscovering in them, and then creating out of them, a pattern that brings the life and the reader âin and through narrationâ into the present (149). For Olney, slave narratives are âmost often a non-memorial description fitted to a pre-formed moldâ: thus, exists the repetitiveness that occurs across slave narratives (of theme, content, form, and style) (151).
Olneyâs 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 narrativesâ productionâmostly edited, published, and read by whitesâinhibited 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 suppressedâthe story they did not âpass onâ (âThe Site of Memory,â 303; Beloved, 274â75). And as Ruth Shays, the daughter of slaves, told an interviewer not long ago: âWhen it comes to the old times, you canâ 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 didnâ know themâ (Gwaltney, 31).
The important recognition of the mask of narrative has given critics a powerful metaphor for the slaveâs 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: âThe slave narrative represents the attempts of the blacks to write themselves into beingâ (Davis and Gates, eds., The Slaveâs 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 âits authors did not and could not create âliterature.ââ5
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 Kantâs 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 âNegro carpenter,â Kant reasons, âit 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 stupidâ (cited in Figures in Black, 19).
Gatesâs 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 ânatureâ of the Negro. This helps to explain why questions of âauthenticityâ and âtruth-tellingâ are self-consciously addressed in the narratives, for example, in subtitles, such as âWritten by Himselfâ or âWritten by Herself,â 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 slaveâs literary authority.
The argument that slaves wrote themselves âinto beingâ has other crucial resonances as well. For instance, literacy becomes the key to the slaveâs 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 âwhite manâs power to enslave the blackâ lay in keeping him illiterate (37). After this eye-opening discovery, Douglass, with great determination and single-mindedness, forges his âpathway from slavery to freedomâ 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 blackâand sometimes whiteâpeople (thereby, of course, contradicting their own arguments about the ânaturally inferior Negroâ). 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 sailorâs 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 masterâs language has also spurred critics to examine the particular rhetorical devices employed in the narratives. Gatesâs 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 âsignifying,â a rhetorical device emphasizing a subversive use of repetition and revision, African American writers have been able to âinscribe their voices in the written wordââinto the Western literary traditionâand 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 womenâs slave narratives came when Jean Fagan Yellin authenticated Harriet Jacobsâs authorship of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself (1861). Yellinâs 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 Douglassâs narrative. The outline of female identity, as perceived in Jacobsâs 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 narratorâs 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 figuresâthe outraged slave mother, the lecherous master, the victimized slave girl, the jealous mistressâfunctioned to further the interrelated causes of feminism and abolitionism.
Hortense J. Spillers locates Incidents within an analysis of slaveryâs impact on âthe symbolics of female genderâ (âMamaâs Baby, Papaâs Maybe,â 80). Brutally leaving its marks on the female body, slavery is the ground for the âoriginating metaphors of captivity and mutiliationâ and the âgrammar of descriptionâ of the African descendant as Other that still imbue the âdominant symbolic activityâ of American culture (68, 70). Moreover, as Spillers argues, slaveryâs disruption of the African family, beginning with the kidnappings in Africa and continuing with the Middle Passage, threw the âcustomary lexis of sexuality [for the slave woman], including âreproduction,â âmotherhood,â âpleasure,â and âdesireâ . . . into unrelieved crisisâ (76). Slave narratives, Spillers suggests, participate in the reconfiguration of the American âcultural textâ in terms of the different ârepresentational potentialitiesâ for African Americans (80).
A Compulsion to Repeat
Any study of slave narratives must rely on some assumptions about the vexed concept of the âselfâ which stands at the center of autobiography. Where does the sense of âselfâ 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 oneâs own life. As Eakin argues, âpoststructuralist criticism on autobiography characteristicallyâand mistakenlyâassumes that an autobiographerâs 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 formâ (30). Instead, he believes, the making of autobiography involves not so much an attempt to reflect the world as to transform itâand so also, oneself in the world; it is evidence of âa simultaneous acceptance of and refusal of the constraints of the realâ (46). Accordingly, to write an autobiography is to act on the desire to repeat oneâs past in order to âsupplementâ it, because the past is and was ânever acceptableâ (46, 51).
Eakinâs suggestive commentary posits a view of desire in the writing of autobiography that is analogous to Freudâs key notion of the âcompulsion to repeat.â This is Freudâs 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...