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Mastering Slavery: Memory, Family, and Identity in Women's Slave Narratives (review)

Building on the analyses of male slave narratives by Henry Louis Gates and William L. Andrews, and drawing on her background in psychoanalytic theory, Jennifer Fleischner 's Mastering Slavery sets out to decipher the ways in which the narratives of four African American women were "profoundly shaped by... conscious and unconscious links to slavery" (80). Fleischner argues that each narrative is a coded dramatization of "ongoing internal and external efforts to construct a sense of self and a relation to audience." Hers is an enterprise fraught with hazards because of the diverse character of the four autobiographies. Harriet Jacobs and Elizabeth Keckley grew to adulthood in slavery, but Keckley devotes most of her book to the years she spent as a seamstress for the Lincoln White House. Kate Drumgoold, the third author, experienced slavery directly only as a very young child; and Julia A. J. Foote, an itinerant preacher who was the daughter of former slaves, colors much of her story in religious terms. Trying to uncover common thematic and rhetorical constructions in such