earticle

영어

The History of Mary Prince is the first narrative of the life of an enslaved African- descended Caribbean woman in the British West Indian colonies. Published in England in 1831, this valuable autobiography has been read as the literary ancestor of much of Caribbean women's writing today. This paper aims to examine textual production of The History of Mary Prince, focussing on the multi-layered text, and the assertion of the cultural identity, in terms of the postcolonial and gender relations. Unable to purchase her freedom from her owner, Prince dictated her life story to Susanna Strickland, and Thomas Pringle edited her narrative for publication as an anti-slavery tract. This paper is to restore authorial agency to Prince as the primary voice and activist force in the narrative rather than assign that role to Pringle. The combination of oral and written forms and the number of voices operating in the narrative suggest the need for a multi- layed theory of reading. Therefore, firstly, this paper reads it against the grain of the colonial archive as a new form which reflects precisely the cultural limitations and contradictions inherent in a situation where oral and literate cultures meet. Secondly, from silence to a recognition of the power of the word and of the voice, the internal development of the narrative is analyzed. While Prince's original language, Creole, is partially lost in translation from an oral to a written text, the central focus of her narrative is slavery as a lived historical and cultural reality. Through her distinct voice, the slave narrative as evidence of victimization and document of legal history, is transformed into a triumphant narrative of emergent Caribbean cultural identity and the gendered subjectivity.