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Toni Morrison ’ s Re-writing of the Eighteenth-Century Slave Narratives in A Mercy

This study is to discuss Morrison’s rewriting of the eighteenth-century slave narratives in A Mercy. Morrison’s A Mercy is set in the same period as are the eighteenth-century slave narratives. All the eighteenth-century slave narratives echo a single voice. The generic field includes captivity, sea adventure stories, criminal confession, conversional narratives, and picaresque novels. It describes the concrete detail of lives spent under slavery and aims to criticise the injustices of the slave trade and slavery on the basis of Christian principles. Therefore, it can be read as a religious genre within the norms of civilized or Christian identity. However, Morrison echoes multiple voices in A Mercy. Her non-named chapters alternate between Florens’s first-person narratives and third-person narratives from the perspectives of other characters. Unlike the eighteenth-century slave narrative writers, she exposes the pernicious separations between elect and damned, white and black produced by the binary logic of the American exceptionalism that is based on Puritanism and Protestantism. As a black female writer, she also exposes white slave owners’ sexual violence, an issue overlooked by the eighteenth-century male slave writers. Finally, Morrison doesn’t conclude her novel with a happy-ending. At the end of the novel, her racial characters aren’t freed from slavery. Their lives don’t echo the evangelic happiness of the eighteenth-century slave narrative writers.