Women in Chains: The Legacy of Slavery in Black Women's Fiction, and: Dreaming Black/Writing White: The Hagar Myth in American Cultural History (review)

Women in Chains: The Legacy of Slavery in Black Women’s Fiction. By Venetria K. Patton. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. 194 pp. $16.95 paper.

Dreaming Black/Writing White: The Hagar Myth in American Cultural History. By Janet Gabler-Hover. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000. 196 pp. $34.95 cloth.

In the twenty years since the publication of Barbara Christian’s pioneering Black Women Novelists, the study of African American women’s writing has seen significant growth. Subsequent discussions have furthered Christian’s work by considering the dominant culture African American women write within and against. Venetria K. Patton’s Women in Chains: The Legacy of Slavery in Black Women’s Fiction and Janet Gabler-Hover’s Dreaming Black/Writing White: The Hagar Myth in American Cultural History continue in this mode. With varying degrees of success, these works demonstrate how African American women writers engage with writings by white American women and, in doing so, redefine and reconfigure representations of race and gender in the American cultural imagination.

     In Women in Chains Patton examines seven texts by African American women whose representations of maternity “seem emblematic of a traceable legacy of slavery and gender conventions” (xv). While previous scholarship has analyzed separately the various elements of motherhood in each of these texts, Women in Chains becomes an important resource illustrating the continued interrelationship of slavery, gender, and maternity in the lives of African American women by compiling them in a single work. Beginning with a discussion of attempts by slaveowners to “degender” African women, Patton asserts that slave women drew upon the practices of traditional matrifocal African societies and the labor demands of slaveowners to reconstruct gender roles so that African American women were considered mothers, and thus women. Though she is careful not to overstate either the presence of African survivals in African American culture or the egalitarianism of traditional African societies, Patton substantiates that nineteenth-century African American women’s gender representations were informed by African cultural concepts that recognized the centrality of women as mothers and sexual beings.

     Patton also argues that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was an important catalyst for the African American woman’s novel and its reconstruction of female roles. Though at times she overemphasizes Stowe’s influence, Patton maintains that Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig respond to Stowe’s “mother rule” ideal by presenting images of white women with perverted maternal values alongside images of single African American mothers who are “mother-savior[s]” (47, 62). In this manner, these writers employ sentimental discourse to critique racial and gender constructs and depict African American women as self-defined subjects. Similarly, Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces and Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy revise Stowe’s tragic mulatta figure by portraying African American women who thrive both as mothers of their children and of the African American community. While reclaiming her abandoned child of rape redeems Hopkins’s Sappho, Iola’s maternity in Harper’s text is displayed through her commitment to the African American community. Thus, Hopkins and Harper conflate motherhood with womanhood and, simultaneously, establish African American women’s political consciousness as mothers of the race.

     Twentieth-century African American women writers, Patton demonstrates, expose the inherent problems in defining womanhood through motherhood. Using Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose, and Gayl Jones’s Corregidora, Patton highlights the complex intersection of gender, maternity, and sexuality. Patton contends that these texts all respond to the assumption that developed during slavery: “that slave women are not mothers; they are ‘natally dead,’ with no obligation to their offspring or their own parents” (123–24). Seen through the lens of slavery’s circumscription of...