ABSTRACT

Throughout American literature, images of black women as slaves, sex objects, and labourers show how black bodies have been historically transmuted into items of consumption. Since black women have had to provide for children as well as intimate partners (often without consent) and white masters, they have been in the service of satisfying appetites other than their own. This chapter uses three works of black women’s fiction to illustrate the specific plight of the black woman as an edible object: Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and Octavia Butler’s Fledgling (2005). The choice of these three novels is an effort to map the nefarious effects of slavery upon American black women across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries since Hurston’s novel debuted in 1937 and Butler published Fledgling in 2005. While Beloved and Their Eyes Were Watching God were selected for this chapter as they are widely read, canonized neoslave narratives, Fledgling is a work of science fiction that has some overlap with the magical realist elements in Beloved. Although the black female protagonists in these books exist in different geographic locations and time periods, the parallels in the way that they are sought out as bodies to be consumed is strikingly similar. While other earlier and later novels authored by black women can be examined for the presence of female edibility, the three texts in this chapter are unarguably saturated with the language of hunger and eating.