Maternal Metaphors of Power in African American Women’s Literature: From Phillis Wheatley to Toni Morrison by Geneva Cobb Moore (review)

In Maternal Metaphors of Power in African American Women’s Literature, Geneva Cobb Moore examines how black women writers deploy the trope of motherhood to restore black subjectivity in reformative and performative acts of power in resistance to the dehumanizing forces of white hegemony. The book is divided into two parts. The first, “Slavery and Abolitionism, Freedom and Jim Crow America,” interrogates the ways in which black women writers have attempted to recuperate black subjectivity from centuries of enslavement followed by decades of Jim Crow policies. Moore discusses literary foremothers such as the poet Phillis Wheatley, slave narrator Harriet Jacobs, and diarist Charlotte Forten Grimké, who employ distinctly different genres and draw from varying and divergent life experiences to lay the groundwork for later authors like Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston to resist social erasure by inventing black models of maternal agency and female empowerment. In part two, “A Conflation of History Past and Present,” Moore focuses on more contemporary works by Paule Marshall, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison that unsettle the idea of progress in American race, class, and gender politics from slavery to the twenty-first century.

Beginning with Wheatley, an enslaved woman, Moore shows that critical readings of her work ignore Wheatley’s double-voiced critique and parody of slave holding “Christianity.” Moore traces Wheatley’s use of goddess figures mined from Greek classics as symbols of female/maternal empowerment and enlightenment in a liberational poetics, which highlight her early feminist inclinations. Citing critics as diverse as Paul Gilroy, Robert Reid-Pharr, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), and Betsy Erkkilä, Moore argues that despite charges that Wheatley co-opted racist ideology, her body of work retains nonliterate African cultural forms and spiritual practices. In combining knowledge from her African mother and her lessons in Western literary traditions, Wheatley was able to transcend her enslaved status to travel and speak within the United States and Europe, publishing her poems to wide critical acclaim. Wheatley, Moore argues—though she was treated as an exception to the supposed black intellectual inferiority—established “the precedence for Douglass and Jacobs of literate slaves becoming writers and authors and entering the public discourse on issues affecting their lives and identities” (p. 28). As literary foremother to black writers, Wheatley represents, for Moore, an embodiment of black maternal resistance and agency.

The subsequent chapter on Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl (1861) argues that Jacobs’s modes of resistance and mothering performances mirror “the madness” of slavery’s relational dynamics (p. 48). Concurring with Saidiya Hartman and Jean Fagan Yellin, Moore credits Jacobs with “radically revis[ing]” the Victorian maternal ideal by seeing herself as an idealized, self-sacrificing maternal figure, despite being unwed (p. 51). Moore’s departure from these critics lies in her Freudian analysis of Jacobs’s maternal ambition to free herself and her children from slavery. Suggesting that the attic-bound Jacobs displayed hypochondria and other symptoms of psychosis (partly caused by sexual frustration), Moore represents Jacobs as a neurotic mother whose devotion to her children displays narcissistic attachment (p. 51). If Moore’s intention is to show the liberational potential of black motherhood even in slavery, then her Freudian analysis obfuscates that reading, representing slave motherhood as axiomatically pathological, undercutting the salvific potential of Jacobs’s self-sacrificing motherhood.

Chapter three interprets the writing of Charlotte Forten Grimké, a free, elite black woman, through the Victorian trope of an idealized maternity that wields celestial authority and agency even beyond the grave. Inspired by her dead “angelic mother” and other women reformers such as Wheatley and Jacobs, Forten Grimké’s private diary writings reveal important connections to influential figures of the era whose public resistance to the subjugation of both race and gender she emulated (p. 74). Despite her work...