Property: White Gender and Slavery — Page 4:
16 With her, as Toni Morrison called it, "prised and clean-limbed" prose (in a back cover blurb on the Abacus edition of the novel) Martin's novel may serve to fill an imaginative void in theoretical conceptualizations of gender, and gender splitting. Looking at plantation slavery as the constitutive US-American microcosm for gender articulation, her text squarely places property that is the existence of human beings as possessions for other human beings at the center of analysis. To critically represent a white female perspective of possession from within, as it were, becomes as much a daring act — given the overall negligence which characterizes white gender studies' attitudes towards the problematics of white women and slavery — as it remains an urgent desideratum. Of necessity, this perspective needs to reconstructed in the realm of imagination; it may only be accessed by a careful re-consideration of the in-between-the-lines of white women's diaries, letters, and memoirs, as well as African-American slave narratives; first, the silences kept by Victorian standards of decency, and later, a profound lack of political interest in re-examining white women's position have not exatly facilitated an entry of this perspective into the cultural memory of white gender studies.
17 Of course my reading in this context does not claim to do the novel justice in terms of literary analysis proper; on the contrary, I am looking only at a rather select aspect of it, namely its representation of the social, cultural and psychic implications the material fact of property has for the positioning of the white mistress, and her black slave on an axis of gender; and what it could mean for white gender studies to pay attention to those implications. Which is also to say that I will not in any detail trace the novel in its intertextual connectedness to both, African-American writing, theoretical and literary, about slavery, as well as to antebellum white literature. What interests me is the problematics of the splitting of gender, into white female human beings who have gendered subjectivity, and black slaves who do not; and the trans-aggressivity this splitting endows white women with, by way of enabling unchecked access to their slaves' physical existence as possession. In this scenario, the black slave woman figures as a monstrous crossing between a dis-subjectified, de-gendered sexual beast, and a movable, serviceable body-thing. By way of constructing her tale as a first-person narrative of the white mistress, which does not allow for any changes of perspective beyond the protagonist Manon Gaudet's narcissistic reflections, Martin — consciously running the risk of misreading — forces readers into an instructive, but uncomfortable identification with that position of white gendered subjectivity. The art of reading Gaudet's tale, she seems to insist, lies in the empathy a reader will need to picture the point-of-view of the slave by way of willfully positioning herself as possession of a white woman, and by — from that position — mentally responding to the questions a strategically ignorant Manon Gaudet keeps asking throughout her tale: "My husband is dead… why would she run now, when she was safe from him? It did not make sense" (137). And, getting the very last sentence of the novel, wondering at what good a free life in the North might have possibly meant to the now re-possessed Sarah, she muses: "What on earth did they think they were doing"? (209)
18 The two scenes I want to look at specifically are positioned at crucial points of the narrative's plotting. The first one is the novel's opening sequence; it establishes Manon Gaudet's position within the plantation orbit as a white possessor, and at the same time, as a subject at her master husband's mercy. It also creates a voyeuristic white female gaze on white male violence, and sexual exploitation of black slaves which, by way of being voiced by the narrative's protagonist, envelops the reader in Gaudet's precarious oscillation between envious desire, repugnance and a rather aloof disdain for male spousal misbehavior. This opening sequence is of strategic importance to the text because it already positions its heroine as a willing — though passive — participant/observer, literally a spy through the looking-glass, in what she calls her husband's "games" which will in the course of the novel, slide into her active usurpation of the right to a deliberate masterful trans-aggression in her own sexual "game" with her slave servant.
19 I will need to quote the pertinent passages from the novel at some length, in order to visualize the problematics for those readers who are not familiar with Martin's text. This is the first scenario: Gaudet repeatedly watches her husband — unbeknownst to him — at one of his favorite pastimes with his property. On the plantation's lake, he forces young black boys to perform water gymnastics for him which entail their unconsensual sexual arousal, and his brutal corporeal punishment of them as a consequence; the master, in turn, experiences orgiastic pleasure caused by both, an enjoyment of the boys' forced sexualisation and by the unchecked reign of his own violence which does not even have a need to be framed as illicit sadism, because its object are things in his possession. Not only the boys themselves, but also their slave mothers, regularly have to bear the brunt of his desires, because they will be punished for their offspring's forced performance. Manon Gaudet's very phrasing of that ritual reveals her own position as profoundly complicit with the masterful pleasure — what separates her interest from his is not any kind of empathy for the boys subjected to the ritual, or for the boys' families, but rather an angle of scandalized, envious fascination with the master's freedom which throws her own rights and claims as a presumably loved wife into sharp relief, and subjugates her to under his moods and whims:
They have to keep doing this, their lithe young bodies displayed to him in various positions. […] The boys rub against he other, they can't help it […]. It isn't long before one comes out of the water with his member raised. That's what the game is for. This boy tries to stay in the water, he hangs his head as he comes out, thining every thought he can to make the tumescence subside. (4)
Her next words give away Manon's conjugal implication in the master's pastime; even though she clearly recognizes the violence employed against the boys' integrity, it does not occur to her to question the enlightened racist prerogative on which it is premised: "This is what proves they are brutes, he says, and have not the power of reason. A white man, knowing he would be beaten for it, would not be able to raise his member." (4) She may call her own stance "incredulous" in the face of her husband's self-centered and willfully misdirected desire, in effect, however, Manon shares a gleeful satisfaction with him upon the execution of his fancies:
He has his stick there by the tree […]. Sometimes the offending boy cries out or tries to run away, but he's no match for this grown man with his stick. The servant's tumescence subsides as quickly as the master's rises, and the latter will last until he gets to the quarter. If he can find the boy's mother, and she's pretty, she will pay dearly for rearing an unnatural child. This is only one of his games. When he comes back to the house he will be in a fine humor for the rest of the day. (4)
20 The second scene under scrutiny here, as provocative as it is productive, needs an attentive reader to deal with her shocked, and always already implicated awareness of white female titillation. The white master and husband having died, Manon Gaudet is enabled to follow her very own designs on and with her black property, and the novel follows her exploitative, and vengeful dealings with Sarah and Walter (the half-wit, deaf master's bastard son with Sarah) in some detail. Time and again the text deconstructs its own premises, as it were, because behind Manon's narcissistic but shrewd readings of Sarah's righteous anger at her abuse at the master's hands, it does allow readers to obtain glimpses of a possible line of joint gendered interests against the white patriarch. The text makes it very clear — drawing on a wealth of documentary material that Southern historians like Nell Painter have of late unearthed — that the ubiquity of white male liaisons with African-American slaves within the white plantation household was the crucial and unforgivable vexation for white women to drive them into opposition to the white male prerogative of freedom at their own expense (Painter). This deeply entrenched mad white female hatred of white male power to do what pleased the patriarch might have enabled a reconfiguration of gender so as to include African-American female slaves within its claims, but — as the text makes equally clear — it did not because it was thwarted by white women's own possessive investments in their slaves, and the need to maintain the position of white ownership and control over and against a — however germinal — potential of gender based alliance.