Runaway Women Slaves: From Slave Narratives to Contemporary Rewritings

In my essay I will primarily deal with the theoretical treatment of slave narratives written by women through an overview of the recent debate on why women had a “different story to tell” from those of formerly enslaved black men. I will then consider two texts, Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself published in 1861 and Toni Morrison’s Beloved published in 1987, both exemplary texts respectively of the autobiographical writing by slave women and of the “neo-slave narrative”, contemporary novels that illustrate the centrality of the history and the memory of slavery to United States individual, racial, gender, cultural and national identities.