Genealogies of Sympathy: Reclaiming the Maternal in Frederick Douglass's Narrative and Toni Morrison's Beloved

Abstract

This essay seeks to reappraise the long-standing claim that Douglass's 1845 autobiography presents enslaved women predominantly as victims. Building on the analysis of Douglass's Narrative, I examine Toni Morrison's Beloved and emphasize the debt of trauma theory to antebellum conventions of sympathy. The paper aligns two texts that have traditionally been read in diametrically opposed ways from feminist perspectives. Specifically, I argue that Douglass's Narrative places the acquisition of literacy, often considered the slaves' proof of humanity, in domestic and maternal settings. In this context, the text portrays female slaves as salvific figures. In the second part, I suggest that Morrison's Beloved, similar to its antebellum predecessor, carves out domestic and maternal spaces for reading the inscriptions of past suffering on the characters' bodies. In resorting to and reshaping tropes of reading and women's victimization in Douglass's 1845 Narrative, Beloved performs its own act of intertextual sympathy.