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Giulio Mongelli

Professor Sonia Hernández Santano

English Literature

3 February 2020

“To be free is very sweet”: Mary Prince’s autobiography in Slave narrative

The following essay intendes to review an example of ‘non-fictional autobiography’

belonging to the genre of Slave narrative: The History of Mary Prince. The reason behind the

choice of Slave narrative is not only related to the popularity of the genre but to the closeness of the

genre to the modern novel in English literature since they share a common object of interest, that is,

reality itself and how it can be described in order to depict in words the truth of the society authors

live.

It is worth noticing that ‘first-person narrative’ is the most noticeable trait of 18 th century

English literature, more specifically, of the novels frequently published at the time by the likes of

Defoe, Richardson or Fielding, the masters of modern fiction. Slave narrative made its debut in

political literature at the time for defying the mindset of 18th century English public opinion towards

the ingrained practice of slavery and it was a narrative genre different from standard fiction. The

formal realism of 18th century fiction was deployed to fulfill a social interest: to shake the

consciousness of the readers of the time by showing to them the brutality of slavery, perceived as a

distant institution, far from the ‘civil’ Motherland of the Empire.

By quoting Encyclopaedia Britannica, a Slave narrative is “an account of the life, or a major

portion of the life, of a fugitive or former slave, either written or orally related by the slave

personally.” (William L. Andrewsand) and – among all the stories – The History of Mary Prince is

probably the most representative of its kind.

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The most interesting aspect of the writing described in the Preface in which Thomas Pringle,

editor of her autobiography, states, “the idea of writing Mary Prince’s history was first suggested by

herself. She wished it to be done, she said, that good people in England might hear from a slave

what a slave had felt and suffered” (Prince, iv).

Paul Edwards and David Dabydeen in Black Writers in Britain 1760-1890 point out “white

people were exposed to white literature, whether travel books, plays, poems or novels, which

overwhelmingly observed and described black people from the outside, seeing them as inferior,

often subhuman..” (156) Slave narratives indeed were written by former slaves in search of social

recognition and in their opinion, the only way to achieve it was telling the story of their tormented

life, marked by unpredictable suffering, since their life depended on the will of their masters.

Mary Prince’s life that included incessant abuses as other black writers such as Olaudah

Equiano, but her account is unique since it is the first account of a black woman. Born as a slave in

Bermuda around 1788, viewed by her protectors as, “a person with excellent characters, honest,

industrious, and sober.” (Prince, 35) She suffered the physical and psychological scars of the

experience of slavery: her life’s account as ‘black resister’ fostered the movement for slave

abolition and changed the perspective of ‘Englishness’ or ‘English-gendered superiority’, which

“has been constructed through the active silencing of the disruptive relations of race, gender, class

and ethnicity.” (Saltus, 1)

Throughout her autobiography, it is possible to grasp the pain of a young woman separated

from the family, against her own will. Prince’s mother is a “household slave,” forced to bring her

children to the local market to sell them, as she says in the first pages of the History: “I am going to

carry my little chickens to the market … take the last look of them; may be you will see them no

more” (Prince, 4). In shock, Prince admits that she had never understood the burden of her

condition before that moment. This sums up that her relationship with Mrs. Williams, wife of her

first master, was not a slave-master type because of the tenderness of the poor wife. As tormented
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as Mrs. Williams by the master, she reports “my obedience to her commands was cheerfully given:

it sprung solely from the affection I felt to her, and not from the fear of the power which the white

people’s law had given her over me” (Prince, 2).

Her experiences with cruel masters like the Captain and Mr. D. make her conscious of the

horrors a slave experiences everyday like the fear of violent flogging, beating and sexual violence.

In addition, she acknowledges, “slavery hardens white people’s hearts towards the blacks; and

many of them were not slow to make their remarks upon us aloud, without regard to our grief –

though their light words fell like cayenne on the fresh wounds of our hearts. Oh those white people

have small hearts who can only feel for themselves” (Prince, 5). After years of ill-treatment, Prince

decides to leave the last household’s family in England. Under the protection of the Moravian

Church, in 1828 she asks for help at the office of the Anti-Slavery Society claiming, “I would rather

go into my grave than go back a slave to Antigua, though I wish to go back to my husband very

much – very much – very much! I am much afraid my owners would separate me from my husband

and use me very hard, or perhaps sell me for a field negro; and slavery is too too bad.” (Prince, 25).

Mary’s fear of losing all hopes seems perfectly reasonable in the eyes of Thomas Pringle

who comments on the institution of slavery in some peculiar possessions of the English Empire

saying he finds it “revolting” and adds:

“Slavery is a curse to the oppressor scarcely less than to the oppressed: its natural tendency

is to brutalize both. After a residence myself of six years in a slave colony, I am inclined to doubt

whether, as regards its demoralizing influence, the master is not even a greater object of compassion

than his bondman” (Prince, 38).

He goes through appalling cases of abuses reported on the islands of Bahamas, Mauritius,

Jamaica, and Cape of Good Hope adding, “the system of coercive labour may vary in different

places; it may be more destructive to human life in the cane culture of Mauritius and Jamaica … but
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the spirit and the character of slavery are every where the same, and cannot fail to produce similar

effects. Wherever slavery prevails, there will be found cruelty and oppression” (Prince, 39).

Throughout the Preface, it is easy to discern Pringle’s dedication to the cause. He supplies

multiple forms of evidence like eyewitness testimonials, court reports, bodily scars and character

references only to prove the brutality of slavery as if the narrator brought her suffering to light: we

see his personal involvement as a typical element belonging to Humanitarian Narrative, as

originally conceived by Thomas Laqueur in Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative”.

Persuasion, positionality of the narrator and evidence are the key aspects of this literature as well.

As for Slave narrative, Schroeder states, “the stated aim of humanitarian narratives is to create a

space for imagining pain and, to produce affect, they trace the cause of pain to its origins, offering

concrete evidence of a history of suffering and suggesting the means of relief … to provoke

compassion, indignation, and action (264). Needless to say, Pringle feels his duty to encourage “the

present Government to introduce a Bill into the Legislature making perpetual that freedom the slave

has acquired by the passage here … to declare THAT NO SLAVE CAN EXIST WITHIN THE

SHORES OF GREAT BRITAIN” (Prince, 41).

Any comparison between ‘fictional autobiography’ in novels and ‘non-fictional biography’

(like Slave narratives) needs to start with the definition of ‘real’ as intended by the authors.

Apparently, both narratives center themselves on the condition that total authenticity (or an air of

total authenticity at least) to be achieved: Defoe and Richardson’s narrative technique is based on

the fact that novel is “a full and authentic report of human experience.” (Watt, 28), in which “the

narrative method whereby the novel embodies this circumstantial view of life may be called its

formal realism.” (Watt, 28); the same can be said about Slave narratives but in this case authenticity

is achieved differently.
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Stories of fictional characters like Defoe’s Moll Flanders or Richardson’s Pamela require

indeed formal realism as a literary convention to achieve authenticity, whilst Slave narrative is a

politically oriented literature due to their political and social agenda: as for Prince’s political

agenda, Whitlock argues:

“Prince’s autobiography is a particularly complex instance of oppositionality at work in the

text, for there is both the explicit agenda of the anti-slavery intelligentsia, her champion who

employ her text as an instrument in their campaign for reform” (14).

In short, formal realism as a literary convention could be enough to prove authenticity in

novels but in Slave narrative the process of authenticity is unusually detailed because the

autobiographical text must be followed by authenticating documentation (like a bill of sale), a

preface, an introduction and an appendix..

Prince’s case is arguably a different kind of writing from authors like Defoe and

Richardson’s, who defied the morality of the time at the expense of obedience to traditional critical

standards. Moll Flanders is a theft, a criminal, therefore she is the worst moral example for a

respectful society who praises didacticism in literature and feels aversion for characters coming

from the lower strata of society but Watt argues:

“The high incidence of crime in our civilization is itself mainly due to the wide diffusion of

an individualist ideology in a society where success is not easily or equally to all its members …

[she] is a characteristic product of modern individualism in assuming that she owes it to herself to

achieve the highest economic and social rewards, and in using every available method to carry out

her resolve” (93).

Defoe’s characters are prostitutes, pirates, highwaymen and shoplifters and are undoubtedly

“ordinary people who are normal products of their environment, victims of circumstances which

anyone might have experienced” (Watt, 93).

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Contrary to the spirit of the typical English novels, the individualistic perspective is almost

incompatible to Slave narrative since the focus is the position of one member in the community they

live, as pointed out by Adetayo Alabi (5). In Slave narratives, responsibility ties each individual into

society because everyone is bound to exoert a service in the name of their community.

It is legitimate to think Prince’s desire to share her suffering with the English readership is

so intense that she acts purposefully as a link between two different worlds, between metropole and

colony, in an attempt to reconnect the supposed ‘other’ with the center of the empire. The

protagonist reminds us of this gap numerous times in her History:

“Oh the horrors of slavery! – How the thought of it pains my heart! But the truth ought to be

told of it; and what my eyes have seen I think it is my duty to relate; for few people in England

know what slavery is. I have been a slave – I have felt what a slave feels, and I know what a slave

knows; and I would have all the good people in England to know it too, that they may break our

chains, and set us free” (Prince, 12).

Writing The History resulted to be a long-time working process since the ‘construction of

truth’ relates to the weight of the message conveyed. It comes as no surprise that each person

involved in the process of writing paid considerable attention to how Prince’s narrative would have

been received by the reading audience so each detail in the narrative has been pondered to inspire in

the reader the same original intentions the author had in mind at the moment of writing. However,

the uniqueness of the text stems from some features that cannot escape from the eye.

First of all, it is worth noticing that The History is not comparable to other Slave narratives –

usually handwritten by the protagonist – because, narratively speaking, Prince’s voice has been

transcribed by Susanna Strickland, Prince’s ‘amanuensis’, as faithful as possible to Prince’s original

oral tell. Pringle himself states:

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“The narrative was taken down … by a lady who happened to be at the time residing in my

family as a visitor [Strickland]. It was written out fully, with all the narrator’s repetitions and

prolixities, and afterwards pruned into its present shape; retaining, as far as was practicable, Mary’s

exact expressions and peculiar phraseology. No fact of importance has been omitted, and not a

single circumstance or sentiment has been added. It is essentially her own, without any material

alteration farther than was requisite to exclude redundancies and gross grammatical errors, so as to

render it clearly intelligible” (Prince, iv).

In fact, the role of Strickland in the narrative is not – by no means – marginal. In her

correspondence, Strickland confirms she has written down Prince’s story from her own dictation

without any intention of romanticize it. Strickland’s transcription obeys to the principles of oral

narration, as Whitlock states in The Intimate Empire (18).

Considering the contributions of two more different people to the History (Pringle and

Strickland), we wonder how strong Prince’s voice is in the work. Saltus is confident that “despite

the thickness of the narrative by competing voices (the teller, the transcriber and the editor) …

Mary Prince is able to make a claim for herself as a speaking, acting, thinking subject” (3).

Mary Prince’s writing is not only conceived as a report of a sequence of facts and happenings, but

also as a confessional writing characterized by opposing moral intentions and fights between mind

and spirit. The History’s narration is effective on the readership due to the vivid description of

abuses and brutalities but as well as for the intimacy of the story. Allard for example, points out the

moral debate taking place in Prince’s mind: she asks herself whether her actions have been right in

the eyes of God, whether saying lies to her mistress about her lessons at the Moravian church

constitutes a terrible sin, whether she is a sinner in the eyes of her God and her masters, as if God

Himself assimilated her masters’ voice (792).

To some extent, Mary Prince’s story describes a confessional autobiography in connection

with this subjective and individualist spiritual pattern, common to modern novels. Interestingly,
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Watt argues that the experience of confessional writing – as intended by novelists like Defoe –

comes from the introspective tendency of Puritanism, so it is acceptable to think spiritual

introspection has always been perfectly integrated into the logics of modern novels based on the

pattern of ‘confessional memoir’(72).

It seems difficult to judge the History with no regard to the political and social implications

the author intentionally declares. The purpose inspiring Prince’s activism will not disappear by the

original structure of the narrative because it means depriving the text of its essential message of

hope for a more responsible society. Prince’s experience is definitively groundbreaking since it is

the first account of a black slave woman who manages to voice the frustration of a ‘race’ against the

blind establishment of the English empire.

However, the History can be read from multiple points of reference because of the universal

nature of subjugation towards minorities. the History represented a manifesto for Anti-Slavery

movements and the impact of its publication certainly spurred more and more debates about the

compatibility of slavery as common institution in 18 th century English society but, at the same time,

the text embodied the political aspirations of women, in a time when civil rights – as we know them

– haven’t met any legal recognition yet.

In her study, Allard refers to the analogies between Prince’s History and Wollstonecraft’s A

Vindication of the Rights of Woman written in 1792 and argues:

“Prince learns about the horrors of slavery and the sweetness of freedom through her

embodied experiences as a slave and a free woman, respectively. On the other hand, Mary

Wollstonecraft describes white middle-class wives as slaves in her 1792 publication, A Vindication

of the Rights of Woman, even though wives experience the freedom that Prince desires” (790).

It seems legitimate to consider her as someone more than an ‘abused victim’; she was

arguably a prototype of a ‘figure of resistance’, ‘enlighted slave’ and ‘political activist’.

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WORKS CITED LIST:

- Prince, Mary. “The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself”.

The Project Gutenberg. N.p. Web. 24 Feb. 2006. 21 Jan 2020.

˂https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17851/17851-h/17851-h.htm˃

- Andrews, William L. “Slave narrative.” Encyclopaedia Britannica Online.

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Web. 21 Jan 2020.

˂https://www.britannica.com/art/slave-narrative˃

- Allard, Laura. “Yet, to their senses, are women made slaves”: The Embodied Politics of

Slavery in The History of Mary Prince (1831).” The National Conference On

Undergraduate Research (NCUR). Asheville, North Caroline: University of North

Carolina Asheville. April 7-9, 2016. NCUR proceedings. Web. 21 Jan 2020.

˂https://www.ncurproceedings.org/ojs/index.php/NCUR2016/article/view/2069˃

- Saltus, Roiyah. “Mary Prince’s Slave narrative in the context of Bermuda, her ‘native

place’ (1788-1815).” MaComère – Journal of The Association of Caribbean Women

Writers and Scholars 7 (2005): 167 – 182. ResearchGate. Web. 21 Jan 2020.

˂https://www.researchgate.net/publication/256363228_Mary_Prince's_slave_narrative_i

n_the_context_of_Bermuda_her_'native_place'_1788-1815˃

- Edwards, Paul., Dabydeen, David. Black Writers in Britain 1760 – 1890. Edinburgh:

Edinburgh University Press, 1991. Print.

- Schroeder, Janice. “Narrat[ing] Some Poor Little Fable”: Evidence of Bodily Pain in The

History of Mary Prince and Wife – Torture in England.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s

Literature, Vol.23, No. 2 (Fall, 2004), University of Tulsa, pp 261 – 281, JSTOR. Web.

21 Jan 2020.

˂https://www.jstor.org/stable/i20455184˃
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- Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Berkeley

and Los Angeles, California: Univ. of California Press, 1957. Print.

- Alabi, Adetayo. Telling Our Stories: Continuities and Divergences in Black

Autobiographies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Print. 

- Whitlock, Gillian. The Intimate Empire. Reading Women’s Autobiography. London:

Continuum,

2000. Print.
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