Slave Narrative and the Female Voice in Abolitionist Writing

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             This paper will examine the impact of the woman's slave narrative on the abolitionist movement. The primary focus will be The History of Mary Prince, but I will also examine Mattie Griffith's Autobiography of a Female Slave and Hannah More's poem, "The Sorrows of Yamba; or, The Negro Woman's Lamentation."" Each of these texts challenged the beliefs of English colonialists and abolitionists alike, while rendering strong anti-slavery messages that transcend controversy and exemplify the how invaluable the female voice was to the campaign. .
             Before exploring the woman's slave narrative, it important to grasp what the slave narrative is, as well as its basic components. Obviously written to evoke sympathy and support, works in this genre tend to follow a certain formula. African-American studies scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., explains the slave narrative in these terms:.
             The Black slave narrators sought to indict.
             both those who enslaved them and the meta-.
             physical system drawn upon to justify their.
             enslavement. They did so using the most .
             enduring weapon at their disposal, the .
             printing press. Often serving an apprentice-.
             ship in rhetoric and oratory on the anti-.
             slavery lecture circuit, a small group of .
             talented and articulate ex-slaves published.
             narrative accounts of their lives in the .
             house of bondage (6).
             This definition is interesting because of the ways in which it complicates each of the slave narratives I will address. Let us look at Gates' explanation in terms of Prince's narrative first. .
             A crucial point omitted by Gates is that slave narratives written by women were quite unique in their treatment of sexuality. Accounts of sexual abuse at the hands of their masters, or the intentional exclusion of this element, set female slave narratives in their own category. American slave women were encouraged to graphically describe the sexual abuse they suffered to evoke sympathy. The English, on the other hand, purposely excluded these tales in order to portray the slave woman as a morally unblemished victim.