Runaway Women Slaves: From Slave Narratives to Contemporary Rewritings

Abstract

This essay deals with the theoretical treatment of slave narratives written by women through an overview of the recent critical debate on this topic. It then considers two texts, Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself f published in 1861 and Toni Morrison’s Beloved published in 1987, both exemplary texts respectively of the autobiographical writing by slave women and of the ‘neo-slave narrative’, contemporary novels where the historical phenomenon of slavery still deeply influences contemporary society. Neo-slave narratives profoundly differ from slave narratives being the former fictional renditions and the latter autobiographical accounts of supposedly true events. Their differences notwithstanding, neo-slave narratives testify to the unending vitality of one of the first and most influential traditions in African American literature and culture, and to the centrality that the history and the memory of slavery still have in molding the United States.