SOURCE: "The Estrangement Effect in Sherley Anne Williams' Dessa Rose," in Genders, No. 15, Winter, 1992, pp. 21-36.

In the following essay, Sánchez provides a textual analysis of Dessa Rose, examining how Williams uses voice, narration, and parody as means of creating a sense of estrangement in the novel.

In Dessa Rose, Sherley Anne Williams offers us a complex and nuanced exemplum of a slave narrative written by a woman. This is an especially noteworthy achievement in light of the fact that extant and published slave narratives in the historical record were written by black men. Black women wrote less than 12 percent of published slave narratives. By daring to call forth from the historical past the "voice" of "[d]e nigger woman … de mule uh de world," as Zora Neale Hurston so aptly put it almost half a century ago [in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1971)], Williams complicates a...