Mastering Slavery Memory, Family, and Identity in Women's Slave Narratives [Paperback]

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.

Fleischner offers intricate, multilayered readings of nineteenth-century women's writings about the institution of slavery. In treatments of autobiographical accounts by former slaves, Fleischner traces narrative paths of great personal loss and mourning for family, for home, for memory, and shows how these intriguing texts manifest their authors' negotations with identity and family, race and gender. Mastering Slaveryopens further the many difficult questions that women's texts about slavery raise concerning the relations of gender and race to social networks of power. Mastering Slaverycasts new light on the psychological dynamics of the slave narrative. Especially welcome is the way Jennifer Fleischner restores such writers as Elizabeth Keckley, Kate Drumgoold, and Julia A. J. Foote to their rightful place alongside Harriet Jacobs as founding mothers of a literary/historical/psychological tradition that reaches down to the present time. Though Nathan Huggins, Nell Painter, Gerald Early, and Deborah McDowell have called for psychological readings of the slavery experience, Jennifer Fleischner is the first literary critic to fully engage with the literature of tlS!