Island Squalls of Indignation: The Rhetoric of Freedom in The History of Mary Prince

Mary Prince's pivotal slave narrative, The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave Related by Herself, has been the subject of numerous literary analyses that range from debates over the authenticity of Prince's authorial voice to the lacunae in her text and their possible significances. Antje M. Rauwerda believes that "the agency ascribed to [Prince] . . . may be more representative of the agendas of external creators of the text than Prince herself" (397). Rauwerda also argues that the narrative's exclusions signify the ways in which Prince's text could have been manipulated (399). Like Rauwerda, Moira Ferguson believes that the omissions in Prince's text are "part of a larger pattern of omissions" (3). Ferguson also contends that Prince's amanuensis and her editor in particular, as well her pre-publication supporters in general, most likely co-opted Prince's voice to further their own abolitionist goals (26). These critics' assertions do not change the overall import of Prince's narrative, nor do they attenuate the legitimacy of the subjects she presents in her text. Despite vigorous deliberation of these and other important issues, critics have not fully examined the ways in which Prince's subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle mutinies against her oppressors exemplify a growing inner freedom that Prince gains for herself even while still a slave. By exerting her will and disrupting the masterslave dialectic, Prince establishes personal isles of independence despite the societal fetters that bind her. These minor defiances culminate in a final pièce de résistance that engenders her freedom from slavery and is critical for us to understand fully the import of her story.

First published in 1831, The History of Mary Prince debuted at a time when polemical disputes about slavery reigned in both the old and new worlds. Prince, straddling the continents as a British colonial slave from Bermuda in a free England, represents in her history not only the cruelties of slavery but also the possibilities of liberation. Born into bondage on the island circa 1788, Prince experiences injustices that were typical of that time. She is sold away from her family, beaten repeatedly, overworked to the point of near death, sexually abused, and denied basic rights afforded slaves by Britain's de facto slave code, an unofficial policy that determined the entitlements slave owners should provide for their chattel, somewhat like France's Code Noir.¹ Although Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1808, slavery itself was still legal in the colonies.² Helen Pyne-Timothy notes that Prince "belonged to the truly minuscule territories of Bermuda, Turks Island, and Antigua, where the plantation system could not flourish and the institution of slavery took unusual (in the sense of undocumented) forms" (11). Pyne-Timothy rightly believes Prince's voice assumes even greater significance "particularly because it comes from these marginal spaces" (11). In early nineteenth-century Bermuda, the slave community may have been small in comparison with larger British West Indian colonies in the Greater Antilles, but it existed nonetheless in the same brutal and inhumane environment that characterized slavery in the larger colonies. Although Prince had a surplus of horrifying experiences from which to draw, her autobiography, devoid of gratuitous sensationalism or titillation, impacted her British audience in such a way that the publisher issued three editions in the first year of printing. In fact, the effect of Prince's work and the importance of her autobiography are such that her narrative, Pyne-Timothy continues, "may justifiably be read as the literary ancestor of much of Caribbean women's writing today" (11).

Prince's narrative reveals what Sandra Pouchet Paquet calls "an authorial voice that fuses the public self-consciousness of the slave narrative with the private self-consciousness of the slave" (131). The narrative also reveals Prince's own self-consciousness, or what we might call that unmistakable slave-consciousness. Prince's voice records not only the master's domination of the slave and the violence he or she is willing to commit to keep the slave subjugated but also narrates an...