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Callaloo 24.1 (2001) 253-275



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The Body as Evidence
Resistance, Collaboration, and Appropriation In The History of Mary Prince

Barbara Baumgartner


We don't mind hard work, if we had proper treatment, and proper wages like English servants, and proper time given in the week to keep us from breaking the Sabbath. But they won't give it: they will have work--work--work, night and day, sick or well, till we are quite done up; and we must not speak up nor look amiss, however much we be abused. And then when we are quite done up, who cares for us, more than for a lame horse? This is slavery. I tell it, to let English people know the truth.

--Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince (1831)

In this concluding paragraph of her autobiography, Mary Prince identifies the key components of slavery: incessant work, unrestrained abuse, silenced voices, and broken bodies. The first slave narrative published by a woman (Ferguson, Introduction 1; Gates xv), Prince's thirty-eight-page text chronicles her personal experience of servitude in the British West Indies. Still legally owned by a white slaveholder when narrating her story, Prince appears, however, to have transcended at least one of the defining features of slavery: with the publication of her narrative, Prince speaks out against the institution and its proponents whose relentless demands have consumed the health of her body. Yet a curious silence characterizes the first part of her text. Despite her graphic depiction of the physical brutality inflicted upon her under slavery, Prince rarely attempts to describe her bodily pain during these episodes or their undoubtedly painful aftermath. In the part of the text that relates the most physically destructive and arduous periods of her life, Prince characterizes herself as a passive, silent victim, recording the "unmaking" of her world. 1

While Prince's physical abuse and her experience of pain initially appear devastating, her body ultimately provides her with the means of creating a new order of experience, a new subject position from which she can speak and, in some sense, transcend the brutality that had previously shaped and defined her. Once she leaves these conditions of extreme hardship and obtains a place of relative safety, Prince begins to refuse to complete her assigned tasks because of her poor physical condition. The slave's broken down body, which would normally be construed as a sign of slavery's power to debase, mutilate, and destroy, ironically serves as a key locus of opposition; it enables her to refuse to capitulate to further demands of servitude. Prince makes meaning and sense out of her suffering through the telling of her story, rereading the residual marks of slavery left on her body and inscribing a new and different text. No longer the powerless object of her own life or within her story, Prince uses her physical pain as the [End Page 253] central site of resistance, manipulating her place within the system of slavery by deploying, interpreting, and appropriating her body for her own purposes.

Interpretation and appropriation are also a part of the textual history of The History of Mary Prince. Prince dictated her narrative to a white woman, identified in the text as Miss S--, and her life story is edited by a white man, Thomas Pringle, who tacks on a variety of supplemental materials. While Pringle's presence is evident on nearly every page, Miss S-- is barely detectable. The traces left in the text of the relationship between Prince and Pringle, and Prince and Miss S-- are indicative of two different types of collaborative relationships, and the former one is much more combative than the latter. While Prince focuses on her pain and her body as a site of resistance, Pringle presents Prince's body as a highly sexualized one. The nature and structure of Prince's narrative defy the ideal of the solitary author and bring Prince's authorial status into question, which probably accounts, in part, for the scant scholarly attention this narrative has received, 2...

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