Rhetoric and Resistance in Black Women's Autobiography.

Rhetoric and Resistance in Black Women's Autobiography. By Johnnie M. Stover. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, c. 2003. Pp. viii, 244. $55.00, ISBN 0-8130-2676-8.)

This book is primarily an analysis of tour black women's autobiographies that Johnnie M. Stover suggests represent the rhetoric used to resist, manipulate, and expose social, political, and racialized oppression. Arguing that the writing style and resistance language in Our Nig: or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North. Showing that Slavery's Shadows Fall Even There, by Harriet E. Wilson; Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, by Harriet A. Jacobs; Behind the Scenes. Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House, by Elizabeth Keckley; and Reminiscences of My Life in Camp With the 33rd United States Colored Troops, Late 1st S.C. Volunteers, by Susie King Taylor, demonstrate a unique black female voice or "mother tongue," Stover analyzes these works in the context of protest (p. 7). Because these narratives did not "follow the white-male autobiographical tradition or the defining characteristics of the black-male slave narrative tradition" at the time they were written, they were not accepted by white men as a part of an authentic literary tradition (p. 25). Their rebellious rhetorical language and style accentuated and elevated a distinctive black female character by moving her from the margins of discourse about race and domination to the center. The "mother tongue," Stover contends, was a creative integration of "memories of West African [for Stover, this is the Yoruba] verbal arts with African American folktales, slave narratives and European American sentimental, seduction, and adventure narratives" that allowed black female writers to formulate a language and style that catered to their literary voice (p. 73). The tongue represents the ability to speak and write, which empowered black women under an oppressive system that demanded they remain voiceless and uneducated.

Metaphorical allusion is a key rebellious technique in the narratives. The snake, for example, often symbolized the evils of slavery. Using the metaphorical language of the serpent, Jacobs referred to white owners as "venomous creatures" (p. 129). Wilson's Our Nig and Jacobs's Incidents alluded to biblical verse and language in describing white male oppressors. Seduction in the Garden of Eden became a metaphor for one character's sexual surrender to a white lover and ultimate shame and victimization in Our Nig.

Because the book's primary focus is on racial and power dynamics between white men and black women, much is omitted from the discussion. The text fails to indicate how these narratives give voice to the gendered constraints and class limitations or exceptions in the lives of these women and those around them. Literacy set these women apart from most of their black female contemporaries. Where do the majority of enslaved and poor black women fit in the analysis of these texts? Black men are, for the most part, absent from the discussion. Their absence suggests that they were not present in or central to the lives of these women; that maleness privileged them, allowing them greater access to the public domain; or that their power played a part in constraining black women's access to the public domain. While Stover makes reference to the tact that the majority of the readers of these books were white women, there is little discussion or analysis of this point. What did it mean to be a black female writer depending on the generosity of white women, who were often simultaneously the privileged oppressor? What sort of relationships developed between these writers and white women? What exactly did white women hope to gain from assisting with the publication of and purchasing these narratives? Finally, little historical context is provided to center these narratives in the debates and problems of the period. To be sure, the rhetoric of these authors suggests a strong resistance to oppression, but the significance of spatial dynamics and why these women wrote what they wrote are equally important.

University of South Carolina 

WANDA A. HENDRICKS