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Florida State University Libraries Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2017 "What's Love Got to Do with It?": The Master-Slave Relationship in Black Women's Neo-Slave Narratives Jodi L. Price Follow this and additional works at the DigiNole: FSU's Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES “WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT?”: THE MASTER-SLAVE RELATIONSHIP IN BLACK WOMEN’S NEO-SLAVE NARRATIVES By JODI L. PRICE A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2017 Jodi L. Price defended this dissertation on March 10, 2017. The members of the supervisory committee were: Maxine L. Montgomery Professor Directing Dissertation Maxine Jones University Representative Dennis Moore Committee Member Susan Candace Ward Committee Member The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the “chorus of women” that have supported me throughout this process and without whom it would not have been possible. You encouraged me to ask questions I didn’t know needed asking and encouraged me to have conversations I didn’t know I needed to have. I would like to especially thank Dr. Maxine Montgomery, whose question my first semester at Florida State about Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day generated this entire project. I would also like to thank Dr. Cassandra Jackson who also posed a question to me ten years ago about Gayl Jones’s Corregidora that I have finally been able to answer. In addition, I could not have completed this project without the help, guidance, and dedication of Dr. Dennis Moore, Dr. Candace Ward, and Dr. Maxine Jones. Thank you all for you overwhelming support. I also want to thank my brother, Jason, for paving the way for this degree and for always listening. I want to thank my mother for always telling me that education would set me free and the rest of my family for all of their support and encouragement. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... v INTRODUCTION ..........................................................................................................................1 1.“A NEW SALLY HEMINGS”: HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION AND CANON- BUILDING IN BARBARA CHASE RIBOUD’S SALLY HEMINGS .........................................16 2. “I SAID NOTHING”: UNSPOKEN SACRIFICES AND RESISTANCE IN OCTAVIA BUTLER’S KINDRED ................................................................................................................. 46 3. “STILL THERE WAS WHAT THEY NEVER SPOKE”: SILENCE AND DESIRE IN GAYL JONES’S CORREGIDORA ..........................................................................................................76 4. “TRADITION IS FINE, BUT YOU GOTTA KNOW WHEN TO STOP BEING A FOOL”: DISMANTLING WESTERN AUTHORITY IN GLORIA NAYLOR’S MAMA DAY .............106 EPILOGUE .................................................................................................................................140 WORKS CITED .........................................................................................................................148 Biographical Sketch .....................................................................................................................156 iv ABSTRACT A growing impulse in American black female fiction is the reclamation of black female sexuality due to slavery’s proliferation of sexual stereotypes about black women. Because of slave law’s silencing of rape culture, issues of consent, will, and agency become problematized in a larger dilemma surrounding black humanity and the repression of black female sexuality. Since the enslaved female was always assumed to be willing, because she is legally unable to give consent or resist, locating black female desire within the confines of slavery becomes largely impossible. Yet, contemporary re-imaginings of desire in this context becomes an important point of departure for re-membering contemporary black female subjectivity. “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” is an alternative look at master-slave relationships, particularly those between white men and black women, featured in contemporary slave narratives by black women writers. Although black feminist critics have long considered love an unavailable, if not, unthinkable construct within the context of interracial relationships during slavery, this project locates this unexpected emotion within four neo-slave narratives. Finding moments of love and desire from, both, slaveholders and slaves, this study nuances monolithic historical players we are usually quick to adjudicate. Drawing on black feminist criticism, history, and critical race theory, this study outlines the importance of exhuming these historic relationships from silence, acknowledging the legacies they left for heterosexual love and race relations, and exploring what lessons we can take away from them. Recognizing the ongoing tension between remembering and forgetting and the inherent value in both, this study bridges the gap by delineating the importance of perspective and the stories we choose to tell. Rather than being forever haunted by traumatic memories of the past and proliferating stories of violence and abuse, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Octavia Butler, Gayle Jones, and Gloria Naylor’s v novels reveal that there are ways to negotiate the past, use what you need, and come to a more holistic place where love is available. vi INTRODUCTION While the beginnings of colonialism led to notable European artists and poets conceptualizing the black female body through art and odes to the Sable Venus, the black woman as a sexual and desirable object was largely omitted from American representation (Honour 178). Despite the fact that there were more black women in America than Europe and anti-interracial sex laws were in the North American colonies since 1630, representations of the sexual black female didn’t infiltrate American art and literature until the nineteenth century.1 In fact, if or when black female sexuality made its way into American discourse it was largely as a result of miscegenation anxiety. As Elise Lemire observes, from 1802 to the Civil War this anxiety revealed itself in three distinct waves: 1802’s Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings scandal, the 1830s immediate abolitionists, and 1863’s Emancipation Proclamation.2 Black female sexuality largely wasn’t described unless it was being coupled with white anxiety over black equality. For example, in these three waves that Lemire outlines, when black female sexuality was discussed it was as a political jab to indict white men for their preference for black women. By publicly shaming white male desire for black females, the Federalists and anti- abolitionists sought to quell discussions of black freedom and equality based on the assumption that abolitionists wanted emancipation only because of their desire for black females. Instead by heightening black women’s association with slavery, dissenters could solidify the differences 1 There is only one full nude of an African American woman from the nineteenth century that was created by a visiting Swiss artist, Frank Buchser. His 1867 piece, “Black Girl in a Stream” was exhibited in New York but failed to sell. African American artists also avoided the female nude, for it wasn’t until the twentieth century that that black female body was considered an appropriate subject. While the black male nude was much more pervasive, and frequently used by abolitionists, Hugh Honour argues that this is because the black female body could never convey “philanthropic” thoughts because of her relationship with “libidinal” thoughts (Collins “Economies”102). 2 Lemire’s overview includes depictions of interracial coupling created in New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, but I am privileging these waves as national anxieties. 1 between whites and blacks and cite the naturalness of segregation and unnaturalness of interracial love. These originary associations of this body with slavery in the foundations of American discourse mark a difficulty in distinguishing black female sexuality from the context of slavery and even to fully understand it outside of the white imaginary. Since “[t]he institution of slavery is now widely regarded as the source of stereotypes about the black woman” (Carby 20), a growing impulse in American black female fiction then is the reclamation of black female sexuality within novels about slavery. Akin to Carol Henderson who contends that in order for “African American [women] to reconstitute their humanity, they must return to the site of that violence” (Scarring 38), black women writers are returning to the source of stereotype and trauma—slavery—in order to disassociate the black female from her historical shackles and embrace an unencumbered sexual subjectivity. As Farah Jasmine Griffin notes in her 1996 article “Textual Healing: Claiming Black Women's Bodies, the Erotic and Resistance in Contemporary Novels of Slavery,” “black women writers have started to explore female bodies as sites of healing, pleasure and resistance” (521). While this has become an important endeavor, Griffin also notes its challenges: “[T]he burden of a historical
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