OUTRAGED MOTHERS

In her 1989 essay "The Outraged Mother," critic Joanne Braxton quotes Toni Morrison's claim that the African-American literary tradition is characterized by "the 'oral quality' of that body of writing and 'the presence of an ancestor'." Braxton goes on to say that "the ancestral figure most common in the work of contemporary Black women writers is an outraged mother. She speaks in and through the narrator of the text to 'bear witness' and to break down artificial barriers between the artist and the audience."

To what extent does Braxton's theory apply to Harriet Jacobs's _Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl_? How do Jacobs's uses of maternal figures relate to some others that we have seen this semester? How useful are 19th C. texts by non-Black writers for understanding Jacobs's own ideas about motherhood?