Living the Legacy: Pain, Desire, and Narrative Time in Gayl Jones' Corregidora

Recent critical work on Gayl Jones' Corregidora (1975)--a narrative tracing the legacy of rape experienced by slave women through the lives of four generations, the last of whom, Ursa, experiences the effects of that legacy as they surface in her contemporary heterosexual relationships--has categorized it as a narrative of trauma. "Living the Legacy" supplements that definition with theories of bodily pain, arguing that Corregidora is also a narrative contained within a "pained present," symptomatic of a body still in pain rather than of a traumatized subject attempting to grasp a pain which sustains itself through memory. The article shows how Jones constructs the "consensual" heterosexual scene in terms of the formal scene of torture, with its structures of domination, use of interrogation, and appropriation of expressions of pain into vehicles for the dominant party's power/pleasure. This reading intervenes in discourses of pain, torture, and trauma that have typically universalized the experience of a "body" in pain, foregrounding the ways in which systems of racial and sexual oppression produce different experiences and effects of pain for women of color.