Miss Rufel

In Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose (1986), Miss Rufel—a southern white lady and mistress of an unfinished plantation—serves as a revisioning of the abolitionist. In her home, which is an unfinished replica of a stop on the Underground Railroad, she is first antithesis, then coconspirator, and ultimately friend to the novel's protagonist, the runaway slave Dessa Rose. Through Miss Rufel, Williams deconstructs the stereotype of slave and mistress and suggests that the traditional roles that white and black women play cannot hold together when the economic structure of slavery falls apart.

Williams deconstructs Miss Rufel conceptually and spatially by divesting her of those agents that ensure her place as mistress, including her husband Bertie, who as master of their plantation represents the rigid constraints of southern society. When the terms by which slave relates to mistress are redrawn in this manner, what results is an equation of mistress with slave. Miss Rufel can see how she is a slave to the castes of economics, class, gender, and color. Yet hers is a precarious position: She cannot function as mistress without the runaways who run her farm, providing economic security in exchange for food and shelter from reenslavement. Therefore Miss Rufel as ex-mistress and revisioned abolitionist is a fitting metaphor for Williams's economic, spatial, and conceptual deconstruction and reconstruction of slavery, for it is primarily through the interactions between Rufel and the runaways that slaves and mistress become free.

Bibliography

• Marta E. Sanchez, “The Estrangement Effect in Sherley Anne Williams' Dessa Rose,” Genders 15 (Winter 1992): 21–36

Mildred R. Mickle