ISP Blog #4 Feminist Literary Criticism

Applying the feminist literary criticism to my novel, the Book of Negroes, is challenging because my novel is about the slave trade in America and it is difficult to separate the treatment of slaves from the way women are treated in the book.

In general, women are represented as weaker than men in this novel. They are valued more for their bodies than their minds. In this text men often view women as a sex object more than anything else. “I held my words. When Master Appleby looked at me, his eyes roamed all over my body. Mamed was staring at me, but straight into my eyes, as if he sought to evaluate and understand me”. It was strange for Aminata to have a man value her as a person more then just a body to use.

Common roles for men in this book are drivers, overseers, government workers, slave traders, and hard labourers. Women were expected to cook meals, clean, take care of children, shop in the market and make cloths.

The strong women were expected to work alongside the men. “She explained while I was working with Mamed, she and the men were hauling stumps from a patch of land. “ Snake biting, bee-stinging, bug crawling no-good dirty work,” Georgia said.’’ Georgia was a physically strong woman so she often had to do the same jobs as the male slaves.

Aminata and Georgia, the woman who cared for her when she first came to America, both ‘caught babies’ for women in labour. They exercised their power by bartering for things they wanted and needed in exchange for their services. Some women in Charles Town were allowed to “self-hire”. This means they could go out and look for work for themselves but some of their profit had to be given to their owner. The consequence of this is that some women were able to earn some money and buy things for themselves.

One big difference in this novel than it was normal for that time, is that Aminata was taught to read by two different men other than her father. It was not common for women to learn to read in that day. However because Aminata was smart and ‘sensible’, her second owner, Mr. Lindo, taught her to read plus some basic math skills.

I believe, from what I have read so far, that the women in this novel have been given more opportunities than most women in that day would have been given. For instance, Georgia bartering when she was asked to catch babies and Aminata learning to read and do math. Though when we hear about how poorly woman were treated back in the day, in this novel I would say they are being treated better then most women were not considering the slavery factor.