Property: White Gender and Slavery
[M]odern life begins with slavery […]. Slavery broke the world in half, it broke it in every way. […] It made them into something else, it made them slave masters, it made them crazy. You can't do that for hundreds of years and it not take a toll. They had to dehumanize, not just the slaves but themselves. (Morrison, in Gilroy 221)
1 The images the Deep South will evoke are likely to be titillating &madsh; even though the contemporary public has learned to distance itself from all too naive and stereotypical mind frames. Nevertheless, the sensationalist imagery of abolitionism has had a long and persistent life in a mixture of Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Awakening, Gone With the Wind and Roots: hysterical wasp waists and piles of white, pure, feminine muslin, porches filled with rustling Mammy-underskirts, mint juleps, strained female idleness and male self-importance, alongside scenes of nameless terror: back breaking labor in cotton fields, auction block, whippings, a baby child's mother sold down the river. It is only outside the reign of the grippingly affective, that Deep South historiography may offer facets of the social and cultural practices of slavery pointing beyond clichés which are distinguished mostly by their value of political correctness, but which otherwise leave even a white critical readership, like academic gender studies, unimplicated.
2 The chronotope of the Deep South keeps recreating itself in conflicting representations, which seem to exist simultaneously in strangely unconnected and non-scrutinized ways. The aim of this article is to take up such scrutiny. The impulse to this kind of questioning reaches back to earlier contributions in Black feminist scholarship, such Angela Davis' groundbreaking Women, Race and Class from 1981, but also to the nineteenth century legacy of black women's address of issues of gender trouble in their slave narratives, and other writings (Painter, Mullen). The questions I want to raise are meant to address particular limitations of US-gender research/theory and to possibly reach beyond, by emphasizing the importance of dialogical approaches "across race" and asking for a theory that does not argue in the abstract beyond historical contingency. "Question" here has to be taken quite literally; the article may function rather as a construction site of inquiry than as an ultimately satisfying set of research results. The following considerations are the beginnings of some sort of path finding into a research project based on the assumption that white Southern ladies had reasons to value the system of slavery — despite their own ambivalences. From this perspective the focus is on the problematic workings of white women's function as allegorical embodiment of white dominance on the one hand as well as their subjective agency, their involvements in the violence and desire of the racial divide of slavery, on the other. Of course, this requires a theoretical grounding which the space of this article permits to sketch out only in roughest form. The first part of the article therefore means to frame what is actually an extensive project of study as a kind of opening, a suggestive plea for debate, discussion and cooperative results. Its second part engages a cross reading of Judith Butler and Hortense Spillers by way of clearing mental space for a re-reading of the complexly charged scene of race/gender and gender/race as conditioned by slavery, it will suppose the need for contemporary gender studies to address this charged scene. In its third part, I will engage a literary text by a contemporary white female writer which tries to come to terms with the legacy of an inextricable connection of white femininity to slavery.
Slavery and Gender
3 The assumption of freedom, i.e. the generative semiosis of an individual human subject as the owner of a right to freedom, was the self-authorizing gesture of modernity par excellence, just as it has provided the philosophical and epistemological foundations for emancipation movements such as feminism. Yet this assumption required a massive break within cultural memory. It required a self-inscription of western modern subjects as not-enslaved and, at the same time, as opponents to slavery at a historical point at which modernism fostered the slave trade most profitably, and was at the same time fostered by the latter in surprisingly effective ways. In their basic denial of transatlantic slavery critical philosophies of modernity were marked by split consciousness; the Enlightenment in particular, with its impetus for individual self-ownership, self-responsibility, subjective and objective right to freedom and productive self-realization, learned to operate within a system of a large-scale parasitism. Social critique used the slave trade and slavery in a very creative, but also mostly metaphorical way. Slavery in the abstract provided the modern symbolic with an intricate apparatus for the formulation and critique of mechanisms of social inclusiveness, exclusiveness, and liminality. (Broeck, Slavery and Early Modernity; Gilroy, Patterson, Davis, Problem of Slavery)
4 The social and cultural practices of trade and slavery changed the history of sexuality in the transatlantic realm, in which a voyeuristic drama for the submission of people unfolded. This encouraged the development of a large-scale white pornographic perspective and allowed for a permissivity of white male rape, by which whole generations were corrupted (Painter, Spillers). It is also necessary to speak about the almost absurd degree of fusion of economic motives and human greed, which turned female human beings into breeding machines in order to maximize profit and social control — which has had a profound effect on the representations and self-representations of black women until the present day. Most crucially in my context, slavery must be seen as a culture of ownership, — or, where white women, adolescents and children are concerned, co-ownership of people, a culture of an aggressively defended right of access to de-subjectified beings, to so-called chattel, their labor, and their reproduction. The elements of white dominance over black add up to a picture of an extreme precariousness of social and individual relations, as Orlando Patterson and other scholars (Patterson, Mullen) have so amply configured. What interests me about these relations is the process of idealization and splitting of gender.
5 The status of white women within the plantation complex is difficult to assess. It was aggressively marked by an almost schizoid antagonism between not having civil rights on the one hand and being extremely privileged, socially and culturally, on the other. After decades of neglect, Deep South historiography has, over the last thirty years, become gendered: anthologies and monographs have been published on a variety of aspects of white female life and gender relations in the antebellum South, ranging from studies of white women in Southern politics, to domesticity, to motherhood, to male-female power relations, class distinctions among white women, women's cultural, particularly literary contributions and more (see e.g. Scott, Clinton, Faust, Juncker). Many of these studies by white researchers, with the notable exception of Elisabeth Fox-Genovese's work, are characterized by what I would call the unacknowledged desire to counter-write the abolitionist myth of the lazy, hysterical Southern Belle with representations of white women fully integrated into social functions, responsibilities, and ethical obligations; their lives bound into structures of production and reproduction in which they played a crucial and distinct role vis-à-vis white men to whom they still remained legally and culturally subjugated. Black women, if they appear at all in those publications, appear marked as such, marginalized from those reconstructions of the centrality of gender divisions and relations for plantation society, often pluralistically and rather naively subsumed under politically correct multicultural approaches to gender studies issues like mothering. Strikingly absent are specific studies which might confront the parasitical configuration of dominance and oppression which enabled white women's position in the plantation system vis-à-vis Black women, and black men, for that matter. An inquiry is necessary as to how white women pursued their own privileged status, how they defined their own mistress — (or co-master-) — position within the slave system, how they judged the investment of their femininity for the physical and cultural representation of white dominance, and how they reacted to the splitting off of black female slaves from their gender. The discourse of domesticity will have to be re-examined with an eye to the role of white women's structurally legitimate and largely exploitative access to black women's labor, their emotional resources, and sexual availability played in the production of both the iconographic constitution of white lady-hood and white women's subjective readings of their situation. Historian Nell Painter's investigations have prepared a road map: her essays should be read as signposts for further necessary archival scholarship on letters, diaries and correspondence; one might also suggest tracing those complex contradictions in a web of literary representations — even if that might entail a reading for what Toni Morrison would call ornate absences; a further object of interest could be the small number of contemporary counter fictions, such as The Wind Done Gone (Randall) and Property (Martin) which have imaginatively tried to fill in those representational lacunae, the latter of which I will take up in this article.