Women in Chains: The Legacy of Slavery in Black Women's Fiction

Conclusion

149 Conclusion In these texts, motherhood becomes a lens from which to gaze at issues of gender and sexuality. For Jacobs, her task was to address the exclusive nature of the cult of true womanhood, which was based on a purity that female slaves were frequently unable to sustain due to forced concubinage. Wilson also interrogates this ideal womanhood, but with a slightly different slant. While Jacobs is particularly interested in the issue of purity, Wilson sidesteps that issue by desexualizing Frado and focusing instead upon the issues of motherhood and domesticity. Both Wilson and Jacobs depict single mothers who reconfigure the traditional family. Although Wilson avoids the issue of purity, Harper and Hopkins create characters who are concerned with purity. Harper’s Iola is presented as an icon of true womanhood who happens to be black. Harper assures her readers that this is an ideal that black women can achieve. Hopkins’ Sappho, however, is not pure in the traditional sense and like Jacobs’ Linda must reconfigure the ideal of true womanhood. Although Harper and Hopkins address the issue of purity differently , they have similar views of domestic relations. Their characters are not (or do not remain) single mothers, but their marriages are presented as egalitarian matches that are not as invested in a separate-spheres ideology. Although these writers focus on different 150 Conclusion issues, all of these issues are related to the characters’ conception of womanhood. Linda and Sappho’s concerns about their purity are related to their sense of femininity, while Frado and Iola’s concerns about domestic relations are connected to their views of the female role. The twentieth-century texts are not as explicitly concerned with the cult of true womanhood, but they are invested in some related concerns. Sethe, Dessa, and Ursa are each concerned with their womanhood, which for all of them is in some way connected to motherhood. Sethe and Dessa’s visions of freedom are bound up with their views of motherhood. They seek freedom for their children and to be better mothers, but in the process they also realize that as women they are more than mothers. Ursa, on the other hand, must come to accept her barrenness and realize that even though she cannot bear children, she is still a woman and a sexual being. Thus for all of these texts I would argue that the legacy of slavery lives on in them as the female characters must cope with depictions of femininity that are in some way at odds with the history of slavery. All of these writers “pass on” the maternal as they remember black female slavery. In these acts of rememory, the writers create projects that in Hortense Spillers’ words, gain “the insurgent ground as female social subject.”1 Their texts not only record but exemplify the “culturally forbidden maternal mark.”2 Slavery sought to eradicate the black maternal role, but instead it engendered a maternal line of descent. Rather than apologize for what has become termed a pathological situation, these writers celebrate the power of the maternal once it is defined by the woman and not by society. Maternity becomes a means to acknowledge femininity and humanity . These female characters come to realize that not only are they women and mothers, but also persons in their own right. The legacy of slavery has not crippled black women, but it has affected their self-concept. ...