Jennifer Fleischner's Mastering Slavery: Memory, Family, and Identity in Women's Slave Narratives is an excellent psychoanalytic study of slave narratives and a few works from the antislavery movement. It is cultural criticism at its best, as a means of understanding the historical and social contexts in which art is produced. Fleischner has done a superb job of showing how these contexts affected the production of the texts she has studied. In the process she has illuminated the complex familial dynamics that slavery produced.

Slave women became involved in unusually complex family structures. Members of their family (parents, siblings, spouses, and/or children) were commonly sold, offering little prospect of reunion. On too many occasions the master, sometimes the same master who had broken up the family, turned to the slave woman