Portrayal of Women in William Styron’s the Confession of Nat Turner

Abstract

The Confessions of Nat Turner, a novel by William Styron, was based on the 1831 revolt of an African-American slave in Virginia. After first receiving a mostly white American audience of critics, the work has subsequently been caught in the heavy polemical gunfire exchanged between two fundamentally opposed factions for a long period. These two “interpretive networks,” to use Stanley Fish's phrase, have presented significantly different, if not incongruent, interpretations of Styron's text. The philosophical foundation on which the creator's guardians and skeptics have fought endlessly and typically bitterly is built on ideas like true truth, verifiable accuracy, mental verisimilitude, authorial aim, creative trustworthiness, and racial depiction. Even if everything is equal, The Confessions of Nat Turner poses a plethora of fascinating questions. For the reasons for the present article, in any event, I shall confine myself to exploring just one of the essential conflicts of women characters in Nat Turner's tale.