Controlling the Images of Black Womanhood: The Contemporary African-American Women's Novel

Year 1997, Issue: 5, 69 - 80, 01.04.1997

E. Lâle Demirtürk

Abstract

Since the times of slavery, the African-American woman has always been the racial and sexual Other in a white supremacist society. The economics of slavery has produced the normative stereotypical mental representations of black women in society as “Jezebel,” “Mammy” and “Sapphire.” “Jezebel” is oversexed and promiscuous; she is the sexual partner of the white master and therefore immoral. As Sally Robinson puts it, “The discursive and social positioning of the black female slave as sexual and ‘immoral’ object becomes a strategy for safeguarding the position of the white male master as exempt from ‘moral’ responsibility” 140 . “Mammy” is the asexual maternal slave who takes care of cooking and the white children, while also teaching the black children their assigned place Collins 78 . Being the “merry nigger,” she is not a threat to the white status quo. She is different from the image of “Aunt Jemima” who is only a cook. “Sapphire” is the destructive woman who feels contempt for the black man Jewell,From Mammy to Miss America and Beyond 44 .

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