The Trauma of Slavery: comparing Beloved by Toni Morrison and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs

If we talk about American slavery, we allude to the historical page that start with the arrival of the first slave ship in Virginia, in 1619, and the legal institution of chattel slavery - in 1641- by the American colony of Massachusetts, also including the moment when Virginia reinforced the institution of slavery, about 1661-1662, with its first law based on the partus sequitur ventrem doctrine, where the offspring follow the condition of the mother. The legacy of slavery is in many ways still present in American life today. This thesis was conceived with the main purpose of comparing and contrasting two milestones novels about slavery: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by Harriet Jacobs and Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison. As a matter of fact, the former belongs to the slave narrative genre in American literature while the latter is an example of neo-slave narrative (which emerged primarily after World War II, particularly flourishing in the late 1960s and 1970s), and their characteristics differ substantially. I will compare the two narratives, how the main characters, Linda and Sethe, are built, make examples from other key texts of African American literature, and how these two narratives express the experience of those characters called “slaves”. After a brief overview of the novels, with help of chaptering, this work will consider each narrative in its structure and its focus and the developing of a female protagonist (analyzing more closely the mother-daughter bond); eventually, I will dwell on the psychological aspects of slavery that manifest themselves both as spirits of missed loved ones and as trauma that continues to haunt slaves even after being or having been freed.