Mastering Slavery: Memory, Family and Identity in Women's Slave Narratives (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS Fleischner, Jennifer. Mastering Slavery: Memory, Family and Identity in Women 's Slave Narratives. New York: New York Univ. Press, 1996. 240 pp. Paper: $15.16. Since the publication of Sander Gilman's Freud, Race & Gender (1993), critical attention toward psychoanalysis and race has gained increasing visibility . Psychoanalysis has been regarded as the domain of Europeans and Euroamericans, presumed to have little significance to or influence over the lives of minorities. However, Jennifer Fleischner's Mastering Slavery begins unveiling the "psychologically coded strategies of remembering and representing in slave narratives by ex-slave women, from the Civil War through post-Reconstruction" (p. 3). Fleischner's study examines the slave narratives of Harriet Jacobs and her brother John Jacobs, Elizabeth Keckley, Kate Drumgoold, and Julia A. J. Foote. In her efforts to explore the dynamics of interracial sisterhood in the texts of antislavery white women writers, Fleischner offers poignant readings of Lydia Maria Child's "The Quadroons" (from Child's Fact and Fiction : A Collection ofStories, 1846) and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Fleischner's psychoanalytic readings of these seven works remind us of how the legacies of slavery reverberated throughout the lives of both black and white nineteenth-century women writers, and how these legacies manifested themselves in these women's texts in complicated ways tangential to identity. In her readings of Child and Stowe, Fleischner demonstrates how each one's perception of interracial sexuality and nineteenth-century racial ideologies regarding identity varied from imaginary race and gender liaisons to white domination. Where Child sought a romanticized and idealized vision of interracial sisterhood by casting slavery's wrongs within the domains of white men and demanding "feminine virtue" and equality for all women (p. 39), Fleischner argues, Stowe's analogue for slavery is a romantic, racialized vision of black docility, moral superiority, and colonization that is dependent on "white maternal domination" (p. 58). In reading Harriet Jacobs' slave narrative Incidents in the Life ofa Slave Girl: Written by Herself(1861) against her brother John S. Jacobs' narrative "A True Tale of Slavery" (1861), Fleischner reveals how neglecting or ignoring the connections between these two narratives limits our understanding of Jacobs as a mother, daughter, granddaughter, sister, and sexually traumatized "other." Fleischner contends that Jacobs' decision to escape slavery is as dependent on her relationship to, and respect and internalization of, her father's and brother's resistance to slavery as it is on her identification with her mother, grandmother, and aunt. We must thus read her and her brother's 126Reviews narratives as complements of each other, paying close attention to the information that each narrative represses and reveals. Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (1868), Kate Drumgoold's A Slave Girl's Story (1898) and Julia A. J. Foote's A Brand Plucked from the Fire: An Autobiographical Sketch (1 879, 1886) disclose individual and familial memories of slavery; displaced and repressed anger; the construction of good and bad, black and white maternal imagoes; and mourning. Fleischner contends that Keckley's preoccupation with materialism is her attempt to distance herself from the legacies of slavery as well as from mourning the loss of her mother. Her title "behind the scenes" not only indicates her relationship as seamstress and confidante to Mary Todd Lincoln, but also represents the repressed scenes of slavery which Keckley fervently attempts to ignore, or whose significance she attempts to downplay. Fleischner contends that mourning is as endemic to Drumgoold's narrative as it is to Keckley's. Drumgoold's early loss of her mother and placement in her mistress' home manifests itself in Drumgoold's conception of herself as a "sickly slave." Foote, too, must contend with the loss of mother when she is hired out as an indentured servant to a white family, and she realizes that her mother fails, or is unwilling, to protect her from being beat by the white woman for whom she works. The legacies of slavery and the complicated relations of white surrogate mother to the black child/woman are thus highlighted in both Drumgoold's and Foote's narratives. Where Drumgoold seeks...