Women in Chains: The Legacy of Slavery in Black Women's Fiction. - book review

African American Review, Spring, 2002 by Missy Dehn Kubitschek

Venetria K. Patton. Women in Chains: The Legacy of Slavery in Black Women's Fiction. Albany: State U of New York P, 2000. 194 pp. $49.50 cloth/$1 6.95 paper.

One of the SUNY Series in Afro-American Studies, this book begins with chapters providing historical background on the lives of enslaved women, examining the Cult of True Womanhood, and considering the intersections and mutual influences of the slave narrative and the sentimental novel. The subsequent chapters analyze works by Harriet Jacobs, Harriet E. Wilson, Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Sherley Anne Williams, Gayl Jones, and Toni Morrison. The book focuses on motherhood as the site of black women writers' ongoing critique of dominant gender conventions and their effort to construct another gender. The work's discussion of individual novels is accurate enough, but almost wholly derivative.

Although Patton deals with an interesting array of writers, the selection seems arbitrary, particularly since it excludes so many major writers within the book's ostensible purview--Octavia Butler, Zora Neale Hurston, Paule Marshall, Gloria Naylor, Ann Petry, and Alice Walker. As a result, the analysis jumps directly from Hopkins's 1900 Contending Forces to Jones's 1975 Corregidora. Too often the analysis offers statements about issues well known to a professional audience: "To some extent slaves were encouraged to follow Anglo-American role models because they were judged by the same standards, but slavery restricted their ability to follow these examples," or "For these writers, morality is not always a strictly black and white issue but one filled with shades of gray." The book frequently states the obvious and often repeats it, reiterating at least six times that enslaved women were shut out from participation in the Cult of True Womanhood. Few readers will be enlightened by its conclusion: "The legacy of slavery has not crippled black women, but it has affected their self-concept."

From time to time Patton's remarks are of use, for instance the meanings of the names that Dessa Rose is called. Here, however, broader patterns of critical thought sink beneath waves of critical citations and summaries; the book's coherence is point-to-point rather than structural.

Occasionally Patton proceeds with unrecognized contradictory premises. In one paragraph she maintains that "black female writers have different critiques of race relations than black men because their experience of racism is always filtered through the lens of gender bias as well." But in the next paragraph, she contends that "just because a woman writes within the same genre as a man does not mean that she will necessarily bring anything different to the genre."

At times Women in Chains attempts to extend other critics' ideas in occasionally untenable ways. At the end of the final chapter, Patton cites Deborah McDowell's insights that nineteenth-century black women's novels do not focus on the oppressions of slavery per se but upon black women's agency within an oppressive system. Patton rehearses the racist stereotypes of women slaves and then asserts that "female slaves rejected this definition of themselves. Female slaves constructed a vision of gender that incorporated African traditions, American traditions, and the history of slavery to formulate a different gender." This large historical claim closes a chapter discussing Corregidora, Dessa Rose, and Beloved, twentieth-century rememories of enslaved women's lives. The materials to support or attack such a claim may not exist; if they do, they lie in repositories other than contemporary novels--from oral literature not intended for white audiences, from spiritual autobiographies, from the WPA oral histories, etc . Granted that autobiography and fiction were inseparable in nineteenth-century black literary production, granted that Our Nig sought to show that in the writer's North, "slavery's shadows fall," still, of the four writers that Women in Chains considers, only Harriet Jacobs was actually enslaved. What we perceive in these texts is not what we know enslaved women did, but what we hope they did.

The SUNY Press has done Patton a disservice by publishing her work with no apparent copy-editing. Sentences such as "they seek freedom for their children and to be better mothers" or phrases like "Harper's different background from Stowe" should simply not appear in a scholarly book. Patton has something of a tin ear--most listings from an internet search for "women in chains" would not be literary or cultural criticism. Many excellent thinkers have lacked perfect pitch, however, and it's the copy editor who should be embarrassed by a mixed metaphor in print ("the pedestal was merely a gilded cage").

For at least two decades the academy has piously wrung its hands over the fate of university teachers who are pressured into publishing too much, too early--and, I would add, too isolated from the help of editors and other scholars older in their careers. Women in Chains is not, by my lights, a good book. The academy and its publishing adjuncts are not, on the other hand, good ecosystems for young scholars.