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

by Fleischner, Jennifer

• ISBN13: 9780814726532
• ISBN10: 0814726534
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1996-07-01
• Publisher: New York University Press

Summary

InMastering 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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
Prologue	1	(10)
Introduction	11	(22)
The Family Romances of Lydia Maria Child and Harriet Beecher Stowe	33	(28)
``We Could Have Told Them a Different Story!'': Harriet Jacobs, John S. Jacobs, and the Rupture of Memory	61	(32)
Objects of Mourning in Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the Scenes	93	(40)
Enduring Memory: Kate Drumgoold and Julia A. J. Foote	133	(42)
Epilogue	175	(10)
Notes	185	(28)
Works Cited	213	(14)
Index	227