earticle

영어

Dessa Rose by Shirley Anne Williams is one of the neo-slave narratives which revisit slavery and revise the traditional slave narratives as well as the master narratives of slavery. This paper attempts to read Dessa Rose in terms of a powerful counter narrative of a black slave girl. In the first “The Darky” section Dessa disrupts the master narrative dominated by the racist white male writer Adam Nehemiah who wants to “read” her, that is, to find out the cause of slave uprising through interviews with her. Instead of giving what Nehemiah wants, Dessa tells who she is by repetitiously mentioning memories of her beloved husband Kaine. In examining the driving forces which enable Dessa to endure in horrible whipping and brutal circumstances of confinement and finally to escape for freedom, the author puts emphasis more on Dessa’s assertion of herself as a “mother” against the master narrative, which deprives female slaves of motherhood, than on the romantic love of Dessa and her husband Kaine. In particular, Dessa's search for freedom and female subjectivity is completed by her bonding with a white woman, Rufel, and the nurturing of black community. In this respect the liberating relationship dismantles the racial and sexual boundaries; it is a way of fulfilling a black female slave subjectivity. Unlike the master narrative voices of Nehemiah and Rufel, who are eventually consumed by the omniscient narrator, Dessa completes the counter narrative of a black female slave subject by having her grandchildren dictate her narrative as well as acquiring her own narrative voice.