Voices of Reticence, Desire, and Resistance in The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave Related by Herself (1831)

Abstract

The essay proposes a re-assessment of the multiple speaking voice in The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave Related by Herself (1831), the memoir of an Afro-descendant woman who lived most of her life as a slave in the British West Indies. The argument revolves around issues of authorship, agency, and authenticity, which will be first examined in relation to Gayatri Spivak’s concept of the invisibility of the female subaltern subject – the latter flexibly wavering in the text between presence and absence. Secondly, these issues and the narrator’s related discourses of resistance and resilience will be investigated through Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-Freudian paradigm of desire and body politic.

Keywords

• the history of mary prince
• reticence
• desire
• restistance
• resilience
• agency