Douglass and Jacobs wrote their narratives in the pre-emancipation era, and their main ambition was to place their writing into the service of abolishing slavery. Like her precursors, Morrison points to the unspeakable experience of slavery, but in addition she stresses its terrible consequences. Beloved’s meandrous events extend from the narrative present in the post-Civil War era (1873), to the narrative past in the pre-Civil War times (1855).¹³ Infused with magic realism, at the boundary between harsh reality and Gothic fantasy, Morrison’s novel both rewrites a complicated literary inheritance and brings into focus the author’s innovative strength that actualizes the past.

Furthermore, Sethe’s unspeakable story that draws our attention to the methods of docilization imposed upon slaves has similar points with Douglass’ and Jacobs’ autobiographies. Both nineteenth century authors lay stress on either physical or psychological torture as a means of destroying any sparkle of freedom in slaves. The African American critic bell hooks broadly analyzes the “methods of terrorization” that “succeeded in forcing African people to repress their awareness of themselves as free persons and to adopt the slave identity imposed upon them” (1981, 19).

Douglass repeatedly presents us with various ways of “taming” the black body (through the lack of food, clothing, and sleep), or the black psyche (through the denial of any free choice). Probably one of the most excruciating moments probing the white master’s sadism can be found in Douglass’ two descriptions of young female slaves beaten by their masters. In the first description, he insists on Esther’s story: a young beautiful slave who continues to see her black lover in spite of her master’s forbiddance. The master chokes any manifestation of Esther’s love and free will, breaking her spirit by whipping her handsome body. In the second instance, Nelly, a slave mother, is whipped in front of her children, as a lesson for her unabashed pride. Unlike Esther who yields without resistance, Nelly fights back and thus challenges her master’s authority.

In Beloved, like in Douglass’ text, the reader becomes engaged in a voyeuristic enterprise, in which the body of an African American woman is exposed as a site of traumatic events. Sethe’s pregnant body that has been tortured by her white masters becomes a text inscribed with the terrible events of a past whose traces cannot be erased. The symbolical chokecherry tree grown on her back as a result of her whipping refers to her past that still haunts her future, since “it grows there still” (Sethe’s remark, 17).

In her suggestively entitled essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Hortense Spillers comments upon the way in which the black female body during slavery carries the marks of the visible mutilations and violations, as physical identity has to be reshaped and all signs of resistance destroyed. Sethe’s story is symbolically written upon her body, which is marked by her otherness as a mother, a slave and a fugitive. Each of its parts bears the imprint of different events: her breasts are deprived of milk, her back is torn open, and her feet are hurt by the effort of running. Importantly, the symbolism of Sethe’s stolen milk retraces a whole slave history, during which the milk of black women was seen as a marketable product to be exchanged. Sethe’s story is juxtaposed upon the story of her mother, a slave obliged to feed the master’s white children and to neglect her own. In comparison with her mother, Sethe’s case is more radical since the stealing of her milk is committed for no practical reason, but only for the cruel delight of the white men who want to choke in her all the remnants of independence. Paradoxically, the inverse happens: as a result of this brutal treatment, Sethe’s consciousness awakens and she runs away from Sweet Home.

The significant relationship between womanhood and motherhood is to be found in Jacobs’ text, too. Morrison draws upon Jacobs’ experience that directly deals with a runaway female slave whose desire to escape signifies maintaining both womanhood and motherhood. In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Jacobs’ narrative persona, Linda Brent, designs a double stratagem in order to elude her white master’s continual harassment. First, she willingly makes “a plunge into the abyss” and gets involved in a relationship with another white man, Mr. Sands (hoping that he would liberate her and their children). Her main argument for her behavior explains the degrading character of slavery, which does not protect the unsheltered purity of slave women regarded as means for increasing property. Second, when realizing that her first plan would never succeed, she hides in her grandmother’s garret for seven years, and writes letters to Dr. Flint that make him believe that she is in the North.¹⁴