"Not my mother, not my sister, but it's me, O Lord, standing …": Alice Walker's "The Child Who Favored Daughter" as Neo-Slave Narrative - Critical Essay

(1) Joanne Braxton (379-87) argues that Frederick Douglass's narrative offers little complexity to the experiences of black female slaves who negotiate both racial and gender dynamics to survive. She posits that Jacobs's narrative establishes "the archetype of the outraged mother."

(2) Walker blurs the lines between family relations in this story. The generic naming of family relations reiterates her position that the politics of power, even within families and among blood relations, is negotiated along gender lines. Brother, lover, father, and husband fight to establish male authority over aunt, sister, lover, wife, and mother who all struggle for authority over themselves. Walker's title speaks of a daughter who, in her father's eyes, resembles--either in physical appearance, in behavior, or her attractiveness to him--his sister, or daughter's aunt who is called "Daughter" by daughter's grandfather and father. In the story, Walker challenges what it means to be a "favored" daughter or favorite child based on a parent's futile efforts to control the favorite child. The father's behavior becomes more "childlike"--his jealous outrage, his name-calling, his threats and acts of violence--than his daughter's.

(3) This wife-as-slave and husband-as-master scenario is acted out in Octavia Buffer's neo-slave narrative/slave novel Kindred (1979) about an interracial married couple--Kevin is white and Dana is black--miraculously snatched from their 1970s California home back to plantation life in 1800s Virginia. With much irony, Buffer shows how the couple's survival in another time and place depends upon their ability to play the roles of white male master and black female slave. Kevin settles quite comfortably into his role while Dana, a modern woman of the 1970s, has to make many dramatic adjustments to survive.

See also the wife/slave and husband/master analogy in Judy Syfers's satire "I Want a Wife," wherein Syfers argues that anyone, male or female, would want a wife that is all--lover, secretary, chauffeur, housekeeper, childbearer, nanny, cook, servant, bookkeeper. This concept of wife as husband's slave is parodied in the Warner Brothers Looney Tunes cartoon, "Wild Wife" (Nickelodeon Studios, 1956), about a mother and wife who retaliates on her insensitive husband for diminishing her exhausting day of errands and chores while he spends his day more importantly at the office.

Biblical passages reiterate the notion of marriage as a kind of parent/child or master/servant relationship where it is wives' Christian responsibility to submit to their husbands:

   Wives, be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the
   head of the church, He Himself being the Savior of the body. But as the
   church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be to their
   husbands in everything. (Ephesians 5: 22-24)

   In the same way, you wives, be submissive to your own husbands so that even
   if any of them are disobedient to the word, they may be won without a word
   by the behavior of their wives, as they observe your chaste and respectful
   behavior.... For in this way in former times the holy women also, who hoped
   in God, ... being submissive to their own husbands. Thus Sarah obeyed
   Abraham, calling him lord. (1 Peter 3: 1-2, 5-6)

   Let a woman quietly receive instruction with entire submissiveness. But I
   do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to
   remain quiet. (1 Timothy 2: 11-12)

   Let the women keep silent in the churches; for they are not permitted to
   speak, but let them subject themselves, just as the Law also says. And if
   they desire to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home; for
   it is improper for a woman to speak in church. (1 Corinthians 14: 34-35)