Gender, Conflict, and Community in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora and Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy

I see greater and greater commitment among black women to understand self, multiplied in terms of the community

Alexis de Veau, quoted in Claudia Tate, Black Women Writers at Work

In novels by women writers of the African Diaspora published in the latter half of the twentieth century, black mothers and mother figures are commonly represented as highly empowered and respected repositories of memory and communal history, of secret lore and knowledges that pass matrilinealy, from mother to daughter. Power within the household and the family is also conferred onto mothers in households where men are absent.¹ The mothers and mother figures in Gayl Jones’s novel Corregidora and Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy deploy their maternal power to mold their daughters according to their worldview; and their maternal discourse becomes a mode of induction into narratives of gender, race, family, community, and nation that teach the daughter her place and her role within those hierarchies.²

Literary representations of mother-daughter relationships inevitably reflect culturally based variations in the patterns and forms of emotional and psychic interchanges between mother and daughter and thereby also depict a spectrum of similarities and differences in influences on the daughter’s psychology and identity development. Thus, in reading Corregidora and Lucy together, I also reflect on the contrasting histories of black women in the African Diaspora, in particular the historical legacies that influence the nature of mother-daughter relationships in postslavery societies—societies that were founded upon the routine and programmatic destruction of familial bonds. Historically and contemporaneously, black women across the African Diaspora have lived, and continue to live, with a high degree of vulnerability generated by the multiple jeopardy of blackness, femaleness, and class position. Black women’s struggle to fashion coherent selves is both necessitated by the histories of slavery, plantation society, and colonization and reflective of those histories.³

The New World history of enslavement and colonization, of sexual exploitation, abuse, and the stigmatization of black and female bodies, produces at one extreme a burden of oppressive stereotypes such as the mammy and the Jezabel and, at the other extreme, pressure to conform to Victorian and Christian notions of proper female behavior. The sexual conduct of black women has been subject to scrutiny and control, not only by white colonial society but also within black communities, which displace the burden of “proper conduct” and bourgeois respectability onto the persons of black women. Writing in the United States, Patricia Hill Collins notes, “In the context of a sexual politics that aims to control black women’s sexuality and fertility, African-American women struggle to be good mothers.”⁴ In the United States and in the Caribbean, black mothers may strive to raise their daughters to adhere to the norms and standards of “respectable” black womanhood to secure their social status as “marriageable” women. At the same time, and as the considerable body of literature and scholarship focusing on relationships between black mothers and daughters reveals, mothers are frequently and powerfully instrumental in molding the subjectivities of their daughters in conformity with inferiorizing communally sanctioned gender norms.⁵

Protagonists Ursa Corregidora and Lucy strive to become conscious of the content of the colonizing narratives received from their mothers during childhood and adolescence that they unwittingly internalized. As both novels illustrate, such narratives instill repressive, culturally determined, gendered behaviors and identifications, producing in both young women a subjectivity “in discontinuity with [her]self.”⁶ In this essay I argue that even as they struggle to break free from psychic repressions learned from internalized maternal discourse, both Lucy and Ursa also strive to realize their yearning to be part of relationships and communities that are free from restrictive gender expectations and oppressive abuses of power. My reading of the two novels examines both the similar and the inherently different cultural and psychosocial forces that impact their protagonists. My argument extends from there to consider key elements of difference in experiences of blackness and femaleness produced in Caribbean and African American contexts.

In addition my reading of the novels seeks to illuminate their authors...