Driven toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio

by Nikki M. Taylor

Overview

Margaret Garner was the runaway slave who, when confronted with capture just outside of Cincinnati, slit the throat of her toddler daughter rather than have her face a life in slavery. Her story has inspired Toni Morrison's Beloved, a film based on the novel starring Oprah Winfrey, and an opera. Yet, her life has defied solid historical treatment. In Driven toward Madness, Nikki M. Taylor brilliantly captures her circumstances and her transformation from a murdering mother to an icon of tragedy and resistance. Taylor, the first African American woman to write a history of Garner, grounds her approach in black feminist theory. She melds history with trauma studies to account for shortcomings in the written record. In so doing, she rejects distortions and fictionalized images; probes slavery's legacies of sexual and physical violence and psychic trauma in new ways; and finally fleshes out a figure who had been rendered an apparition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780821421604
Publisher:	Ohio University Press
Publication date:	12/15/2016
Series:	New Approaches to Midwestern History
Edition description:	1
Pages:	180
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Nikki M. Taylor is a professor of African American history at Howard University. Her other books include Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati's Black Community, 1802-1868 and America's First Black Socialist: The Radical Life of Peter H. Clark.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Series Editors' Preface xi

Acknowledgments xv

Introduction Bodies and Souls 1

1 "Hope Fled" 7

2 Before the Blood 24

3 After the Blood 59

4 "Faded Faces" Tell Secrets-or Do They? 92

5 Driven by Madness, Badness, or Sadness? 110

6 A Kind of Hero 118

Postscript 126

Notes 129

Selected Bibliography 151

Index 159

Editorial Reviews

10/31/2016
Taylor (America’s First Black Socialist), professor of African-American history at Texas Southern University, rehabilitates the image of Margaret Garner, who escaped slavery and, in 1856, murdered her infant daughter rather than see her taken back into bondage. A number of abolitionists saw Garner’s actions as heroic, but popular opinion excoriated her as an unnatural woman and a monstrous mother—a “Modern Medea.” Garner’s story largely disappeared from the public eye until resuscitated through Toni Morrison’s celebrated 1987 novel Beloved. Taylor focuses on the psychological damage that Garner and other enslaved people suffered, and on the extent to which her actions resulted from this unending bodily and spiritual abuse. Deploying perspectives from feminist analysis and trauma theory, Taylor vividly portrays the sufferings Garner and her family endured under slavery and in their attempt to escape from it, placing their experiences in the wider context of the antebellum Midwest. For those familiar with the experiences of enslaved women in relation to sexuality, motherhood, and violence, little here will come as a surprise, but readers of Morrison’s novel will likely appreciate the ways that Taylor illuminates the gendered experience of enslavement and the dialectic by which the victims of violence may in turn become its perpetrators. Illus. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

"Taylor vividly portrays the sufferings Garner and her family endured under slavery and in their attempt to escape from it, placing their experiences in the wider context of the antebellum Midwest.... Readers of [Toni Morrison's Beloved] will ... appreciate the ways that Taylor illuminates the gendered experience of enslavement."--Publishers Weekly

"[Taylor] uses exhaustive research to provide a nuanced view not only of Garner and her fateful act but also of the broader psychosis and trauma that slavery unleashed upon women. ... Driven toward Madness offers a compelling and heart-wrenching window onto the horrors faced by enslaved women in the United States."--Troy Jackson, Journal of American History

"Taylor's book is a must-read for anyone interested in African American history, women'shistory, midwestern history, or Black feminist theory."--International Journal of Africana Studies

"In this brief book, Taylor sets the context, reviews the known actions, and applies a genuinely multidisciplinary set of tools to understand a mother maybe driven to madness. The author peels away layers of analysis of Garner as archfiend or feminist and abolitionist hero to discover what she calls an intensely personal act, even if one fraught with political consequences. Summing Up: Recommended."--CHOICE

"Taylor crafts a book that should be read by all who have an interest in understanding the roots of slavery and oppression of women during the pre-Civil War era. It should also be read by those seeking to understand the depth of pain and depravity faced by women living under the tyranny of American slavery."--Library Journal (starred review)

From the Publisher

★ 12/01/2016
The events delicately detailed in Taylor's (African American history, Texas Southern Univ.; Frontiers of Freedom) work may be familiar to some as the subject of Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved. Taylor presents here a well-written and thoroughly researched account of Margaret Garner, an African American slave who attempted to escape from Kentucky to the free state of Ohio with her family in 1856. The story of Garner, who killed one of her children to prevent them from a life of slavery after being captured in Ohio by their owners, is quickly related by Taylor. Much of the book is a reexamination of Garner's trial and an examination of the conditions of her traumatic bondage. The author's background as a historian of the period brings a fresh look at this unfortunate event. VERDICT Taylor crafts a book that should be read by all who have an interest in understanding the roots of slavery and oppression of women during the pre-Civil War era. It should also be read by those seeking to understand the depth of pain and depravity faced by women living under the tyranny of American slavery.—Amy Lewontin, Northeastern Univ. Lib., Boston

Library Journal