A Study on Slave Mother’s Subjectivity Construction in Neo-slave Narrative Dessa Rose

Sherley Anne Williams is a famous contemporary African American woman writer who is keenly concerned with the life of the antebellum enslaved female blacks and their destiny. She realizes that the female black slaves are regarded as others in slavery and objectified by the whites, therefore her work Dessa Rose gives accounts of these female slaves, especially the slave mother Dessa Rose’s misery and fight for freedom and subjectivity. While many scholars and critics have identified the importance of slave mothers’ escape from oppression and objectification, what is left is a more in-depth analysis of their struggle and transformation from object to subject. This essay attempts to explore the causes of the subject consciousness, the protagonist’s struggle for subject status, and the development of her subjectivity construction from the perspective of Marxist philosophy.