The Outraged Mother : A Reading of incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Beloved

Abstract

Harriet A. Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself and Toni Morrison’s Beloved basically share the form of slave narratives, in that they deal with the escape from slavery to freedom. This paper aims to examine the way in which the process of escape, in physical and psychological aspects, can be most fully understood considering the double bondage of women slaves who were both sexually exploited and racially oppressed. Slavery constantly threatened slave women with the suffering of sexual harassments, in turn making any human ties untenable. Especially, women slaves were often driven to do violence on their own children in actuality as well as in imagination, as is illustrated in Linda and Sethe. However, Linda and Sethe embody the archetypal type of the “outraged mother,” which is a primary archetype in the narratives of contemporary Black American women writers. The outraged mother embodies one who dares a heroic action fuelled by outrage at the abuse of her people and her person. This archetype of outraged mother is fully developed in Linda and Sethe. Their intense and decisive endeavor to save themselves derives from their strong motivation for protecting their children. As a result, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Beloved show the endeavors to cope with the problem of slavery by transforming a personal story into a historical text, without attenuating personal pain. The struggles can be seen as the attempts to redefine the traditional view of motherhood in terms of its social context.