Property: White Gender and Slavery — Page 5:
21 By way of a neat narrative ploy, Martin amply exposes that white priority of interest. By having the master be killed in the slave uprising, and leaving Manon Gaudet as a propertied widow with the proverbial room of her own (based on the sale of the plantation, and the inheritance of her mother, conveniently deceased in a cholera epidemic in New Orleans), Gaudet finds herself in the privileged and exceptional position of being able to master her own affairs. And master them she will. She will go to considerable, and financially unwarranted, lengths in recapturing the runaway Sarah to exert her ownership over the woman. Her ostentatious reason to have wanted Sarah back is the woman's competence as a servant on the protagonist's white body, captured, tellingly, by Manon's statement: "No one could dress my hair so well as Sarah…" (206). However, the scenario I am going to discuss here reveals that Gaudet's investments in her property go far beyond the usefulness of being served and extend to a masterful enjoyment of trans-aggressive sexual freedom which, at the beginning of the novel, she could but follow as a powerless voyeur.
22 After her mother has died, Manon is sitting awake in her house, being watched by the slave Sarah who is sucking her baby, wondering why her husband let Sarah keep her child, instead of selling it immediately. Watching Sarah's milk leak from her breast, it comes to Manon like a revelation: "It was for his own pleasure, I thought" (89). In a fantasy of wishing her husband dead before the fact, she takes on his position, assaulting Sarah by kneading her breasts, and sucking her nipples for milk. Having turned the tables on her husband she gleefully imagines that he, this time, is looking on "with an uncomfortable position that something was not adding up" (82). She thus successfully accomplishes the act of her own, gendered, liberation, by the trans-aggression of confirming, and acting out the slave woman's splitting off of gender. The slave literally, in this scene, becomes an un-gendered breast to fulfill the white woman's dreams both of power, and of the physical comfort of body nurturance — which seems to be an ingenious textual signification on the hundreds of scenes of black mammies feeding white babies in American cultural memory, nursing them into masterhood, as it were, as well as on Toni Morrison's scene of the white men taking Sethe's milk in Beloved.
23 Gaudet's sentences contracts white freedom into a microcosm of pleasure, willfulness, possession and power: "I closed my eyes, swallowing greedily […]. How wonderful I felt, how entirely free. My headache disappeared, my chest seemed to expand, there was a complimentary tingling in my own breasts" (82). One needs to be keenly aware of the fact that this is neither a scene of utopian women-bonding, nor of lesbian cross-racial desire, but entirely one of domination, and potential violence:
I opened my eyes and looked at Sarah's profile. She had lifted her chin as far away from me as she could, her mouth was set in a thin hard line, and her eyes were focused intently on the arm of the settee. She's afraid to look at me, I thought. And she's right to be. If she looked at me, I would slap her. (82)
The gendered subjectification of the white woman — her freedom as an agent of her own desire — is literally sucked from the black woman's body, contingent on the de- subjectification, and thus the de-gendering of the enslaved human being who has become her serviceable flesh, as it were. It appears as if Valerie Martin, with this compromising scene, has cast Hortense Spillers' observations in literary terms, thus filling a blank in white gender studies' perceptions of the gender/race nexus in American history. Martin does not list Spillers' text in her acknowledgement of material she consulted upon writing her novel; however, her reading of the nexus of sexuality and gender under slavery corresponds to Spillers' argument with striking clarity. Spillers observed that slavery, under which gender, and " the customary aspects of sexuality […] are all thrown in crisis […]" provides a realm of sexuality
that is neuterbound, because it represents an open vulnerability to a gigantic sexualized repertoire that may be alternately expressed as male and/or female. Since the gendered female exists for the male, we might say that the ungendered female — in an mazing stroke of pansexual potential — might be invaded/raided by another woman or man. (222)
24 Of course, this argument does not mean to read the novel as a text of documentary value about the life of Southern white women to any representative degree. Rather, it is meant to probe suggestively into configurations of gendering, and ungendering under slavery which white gender studies need to include in their theoretical horizon. As my reading of Property has tried to demonstrate, a largely unexamined nexus of impulses and effects of violence and desire constituted white women's emotional and psychic investments within the affective orbit of slavery (to paraphrase Fox-Genovese's term), and by the very fact of having been left unexamined, paradoxically has carried over into post-slavery racialized constructions of gender. Gender studies, despite politically correct affectations of the race and gender mantra, have widely avoided to read a growing corpus of black gender theory as theory and to apply it to a cultural analysis of white women. Going back to the history of slavery and its implications — paying the referential debt to history, as Shoshana Felman once called it — could, however, improve (white) gender theory far beyond any explicit, or implicit facile appeals to universalism, or a helpless, and misleading reliance on the analogous pairing of gender, and race.