Reclaiming Silenced Voices: Literary Blueswomen and the Transformative Power of the Blues

This dissertation arises from an interest in American slavery, one of the bloodiest chapters in the history of the United States of America. After having read Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, a peculiar aspect captured my attention: music sang in the plantation. Those Spirituals and Work Songs were perceived by the white masters as joyful and as ways to express the slaves’ gratitude towards their owners. On the contrary, as Douglass himself shows, chants like “Rosie” were actually expressions of profound sadness, sorrow, and misery. According to many scholars, those songs represent the heart of the blues, the musical genre that developed after the Abolition of Slavery, during the Reconstruction Era. For decades, the blues has been canonized as a predominantly male-dominated cultural expression. My feminist sensibility demanded exploring a possible counterargument to this traditional assumption. Therefore, this academic research focuses on the cathartic role of the blueswomen and it is driven by the desire to explore the often-disregarded intersection between this African American Musical Heritage, Black Feminist Thought, and Black Literature. In addition to this, it aims to explore the blues’ potential as a powerful tool for Black women’s emancipation, including their journey towards economic independence, their ability to articulate and express their sexuality, and their path to freedom from racial and gender chains. Another objective is to also highlight how the blues transcends its merely musical boundaries to become a foundational epistemology – namely a way of knowing, surviving and reclaiming one’s freedom – for Black women in real life and in fiction. The argument is structured into three chapters. The first lays the historical groundwork for this study by exploring the dynamics and characteristics of the “peculiar institution” which is American slavery - focusing on enslaved women’s conditions and the creation of African American music. Furthermore, in order to provide a critical framework, two main critical works are investigated in the second chapter. The first one is Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought and the second is Angela Davis’s Blues Legacies and Black Feminism. The second chapter also aims at showing how the blues has contributed to shaping the American neo-slave narrative genre. In fact, the Blues was much more than a thematic resource: it was employed as the foundation of African-American texts’ architecture and structure. To deeply explore this mingling between literature and the blues, Andrew Scheiber’s Blues Narratology and the African American Novel, Gates’s The Signifyin(g) Monkey, Carby’s “It Jus Be’s Dat Way Sometime”, and Valerie Smith’s Neo-Slave Narratives are examined. All the theoretical elements analyzed in the second chapter provide the critical lenses through which a close reading of the selected literary corpus is conducted. The first narrative examined is Gayl Jones’s Corregidora, a brief novel that reveals the healing power of the blues for blueswomen. Secondly, the analysis of The Color Purple by Alice Walker focuses on the character of Shug Avery, a blues singer with an enigmatic and intriguing attitude that perfectly embodies the features of the Blues Woman described by Angela Davis. Thirdly, to highlight how the blues’ rhythm, polyphony and repertoire have shaped contemporary everyday life in Black urban communities, Gorilla, My Love by Toni Cade Bambara is investigated. In conclusion, this dissertation has shown how the blues can function as a resource through which Black women articulate their experiences, assert agency, and resist intersecting forms of racial, gendered, class, and sexual oppression.