SOURCE: Williams, Lorna V. “The Representation of the Female Slave in Villaverde's Cecilia Valdés.” Hispanic Journal 14, no. 1 (spring 1993): 73-89.

In the following essay, Williams discusses the models of motherhood and nurturing imposed on female slaves by their white masters in Cecilia Valdés.

In the antislavery narratives written by Anselmo Suárez y Romero, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, and Antonio Zambrana, the plot centers on the male protagonist's relocation to the countryside, which is motivated by the unequal struggle for sexual mastery between men from two radically different social spheres. In Cecilia Valdés, Cirilo Villaverde (1812-1894) invokes another causal model. Instead, a female slave is banished to the sugar plantation for invoking a paradigm of maternity that violates the slaveholder's notion of what constitutes an appropriate model of maternity for the slave.

However, for Villaverde's slave, mothering is not the indissoluble bond that it is...