Two years following the London and Edinburgh publications of The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, in 1833, The Emancipation Bill was passed in the British House of Lords; in 1834, a law went into effect throughout the British Caribbean that helped establish apprenticeships for ‘free’ black; and in 1838 England abolished slavery in the Caribbean completely. All of these arbitrary dates point to the undisputable fact that Prince’s narrative was more than a popular bedside reading material. It provided the Anti-slavery and Abolitionist Movement of England with the needed instrument to re-instate the visibility of slavery as a demeaning human condition, thus challenging the legal system to act upon its final demise. Namely, the triangular relationship between Prince as the narrator’s oral counterpart, Thomas Pringle, her editor and publisher, and the whole English-reading audience, in London as well as in the West Indies, is weaved in so carefully all throughout the twenty-three page long account of Mary’s life as a slave, making it this all the more painstaking to put the hems aside and look for possible loose threads. And yet there are many such threads, most of which could be fully seen and understood if one looks beyond the confines of the text, especially if one takes a closer look at the testimonies of Mary’s trial and the documents in support of the proslavery propaganda of the times.
Henceforth, I am increasingly interested in the unseen and the unspoken elements in Prince’s text, mostly because I believe that these are the elements which constitute the life of Mary Prince as an enslaved woman, a chain of events that cannot be juxtaposed to or extracted from extensive comparisons to the life of Frederick Douglass as a male slave. Before I take a look at the published criticism, which in turn, exploits further the issue of Prince’s sexual relations to her owners (and to other free white makes), as well as those with her husband, I would like to recall an important reading from my childhood. In the course of my primary school education, our readings in Macedonian literature focused, almost to a fault, on the importance of having and maintaining a national literary heritage. We were thus exposed to the sounds of Macedonian folk songs, Macedonian fables, Macedonian dances, all (in a way) narratives (some written, others mostly oral) testifying to the existence of a Macedonian culture, long before the legal constitution of the Macedonian state. Remembering these seminal works of and by my people, both from the perspective of a time and space disjunction, I recall the emphasis that all of them placed on a woman’s chastity as her highest virtue. Historically, I fully understand the importance of one such human (not simply feminine) characteristic. Since women were the most vulnerable ‘segments’ of the Macedonian nation within the Ottoman Empire, every attempt on the behalf of ‘the weaker sex’ to hold on to her Christian values (and all that implied) was applauded and consequently turned into a narrative. Most of said narratives dealt with brave, victorious women, defeating their masters and securing their freedom, by the power of their moral values, their faith in God as their guide to eternal salvation in heaven. However, the seventh grade reading list cautiously excluded the presence of several powerful female slave narratives, some related by the women themselves (later written down by an educated male friend), and some written by the survivors themselves. What all of these few texts share in common is unstated in the other ‘appropriate’ reading materials on the subject. For one, all of the women survived their enslaved status, some embracing the Islamic faith, thus using their respective relationships to their ‘husbands’ to buy off their freedom, after a number of years. Most stayed on in urban areas since they were not welcomed back by their peasant parents and family. Most were financially independent, and if not at the inception of their lives, but certainly with time, became literate. All of these remarkable qualities, otherwise characteristic of the urban 19th century Balkan male, rendered these women invisible to their peers, making them thus equally inaccessible to present readers. Nonetheless, they are inevitably alive, in the archival documents of trial records, of claims and cases that testify of these women’s existence and their struggle for social credibility.
Why the unilateral cultural memory has decided to leave them conveniently out of the master text’s narrative could be seen as a case of memory screening. To borrow from Freud’s discourse, a ‘screen memory’ is one that substitutes for another memory that is too painful or disturbing to retrieve. So, we examine ‘forgetting’ as an active process of repression, we can see why that which is forgotten or erased from a female slave narrative, or deemed illegible and immoral by the editor/publisher, corresponds to the female slave’s challenge of her master’s right of ownership. I was fortunate to come across an article by Jenny Sharpe, titled ‘Something akin to freedom: the case of Mary Prince’ (A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Spring 1996, Vol. 8), that closely examines ‘through the historical example of Mary Prince, that slave women used their relationship with free men to challenge their masters’ right of ownership.’ Sharpe immediately points out that one such reading of the female slave narrative, moreover of the female slave’s existence and her final liberation, cannot be solely based on a thorough examination of Prince’s History. Therefore, Sharpe includes in her extensive study of the paradigm, the conventional slave testimonies, as a part of the proslavery propaganda documents, as well as court case transcripts. Sharpe is also instrumental in deconstructing the abolitionists’ grasp of the slave narrative as a genre, tracing the literary conventions that they inscribed on the narratives they sponsored, especially looking into their influence on Prince’s life story. (These include: the portrayal of Mary at the beginning of her enslaved life as one of God’s offspring before the Fall, picturing her initial masters as benevolent slaveholders (her mistress), so as to make a clear distinction between inherently cruel men and women, which they were not, and the institution of slavery as a corrupting force, which it definitely was; then, as Mary’s desent into slavery (as if she were not a slave before) emerges, there is the initial description of the brutal enforcement of power and strength, through the graphically represented beating of a female slave, which establishes, in turn, the voice-agency of Mary Prince in the eyes of the reader as a reliable one; since Prince is the embodiment of the victim to be saved rescued from her slumberous agony of an enslaved and heathen existence, there is also the inevitable religious conversion as a turning point in her life, leading her to her freedom, by appealing to both the free black community and the larger white public.)
Furthermore, Sharpe discloses Prince’s sexual relationships with free men as she denounces certain critics’ practice of equating the sexual misconduct practices with her enslaved position. Consequently, Sharpe does not look at Prince and the other female slaves of the narrative as objects of pity; she’d rather use an expression that comes from another female slave narrative, Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. The expression is ‘something akin to freedom’. Sharpe uses it to ‘denote the absence of a proper name for the contradictory status of limited choice under slavery.’ Therefore, through her Freudian model of examining silences as meaning-productive, Sharpe involves a re-reading of Prince’s narrative: ‘instead of being centered on an autobiographical text like the slave narrative, a black female subjectivity cuts across seemingly incompatible documents in which Prince appears, not as a narrative ‘I’, but as ‘the woman Molly’ and ‘she (witness)’. In this respect, I understand Sharpe’s analysis as one inclusive of the contemporary autobiographical reading of the slave narrative, on the helps expand the notion of how we read ‘personal(ized) texts’, how we approach them, what we bring with us as we pass judgments, and what we see in their actors/orators/narrators to be valuable for determining their (and our own) cultural value. And I support it.
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