It started with a vision of torture.
According to Harriet Beecher Stowe, the genesis of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, arguably one of the most influential books in history, came in Feburary 1851 when she attended communion service. After taking the bread and wine and thinking of the Last Supper and the Passion, a vision hit her, “blown into her mind as by the rushing of a mighty wind.”
The Mondo 70 film blog has an interesting series of posts (from 2009) on exploitation classic (?) Goodbye Uncle Tom (I previously discussed the Italian director’s cut), including one that directly addresses the depiction of sexuality in this film.
I’ve described Tom as an attempt to show compassion toward the victims of slavery. But someone might well question whether it’s compassionate to stare at someone’s absolute subjugation and humiliation — or to have people re-enact the subjugation and humiliation of their ancestors. After all, as some racists believe, the Bible relates that Noah cursed Ham and his son Canaan, turning their descendants black, because Ham stared at Noah’s drunken nakedness. [Filmmakers] Jacopetti & Prosperi’s reading of scripture raises the stakes even further. They have a white preacher state that Ham and Canaan were cursed for castrating Noah. This may have been another, even more subconscious warning to the audience about the implications of what they would see in Tom.
…
The sensuality and sexuality is an important part of the story of slavery as told by Jacopetti & Prosperi. Slavery as practiced on the plantations had an inevitably sexual aspect because of the intimacy shared by slaves and masters. Tom makes the controversial and perhaps unacceptable suggestion that sex was not only a way for masters to dominate slaves, but also a way for slaves to negotiate their standing with masters. We see a heavy-footed Mammy castigating a girl for going to bed with Massa while still a virgin, and a supposed 13 year old girl urging the man behind the camera (in the Director’s Cut this is supposed to be a historical person relating an actual experience, but in the American version it may be one of our time-travelling narrators) to take her maidenhead. She helpfully offers the man a whip in case he needs that to get into the right frame of mind.
Goodbye Uncle Tom seems to fall into the same pit as other, 19th century attempts to humanize slaves by showing them as capable of suffering, but neglects to show them as capable of any other response to their conditions. The flipside of suffering is rage (masochism to sadism) and the film suggests that those are the only two responses for blacks, and it is only a matter of time until 300 years of pent-up rage explodes in helter-skelter.
Quentin Tarantino has turned in the script for his next film, Django Unchained.
According to one review of the script:
Django is a freed slave, who, under the tutelage of a German bounty hunter (played by Christopher Waltz the evil Nazi officer in Inglorious Basterds) becomes a bad-ass bounty hunter himself, and after assisting Waltz in taking down some bad guys for profit, is helped by Waltz in tracking down his slave wife and liberating her from an evil plantation owner. And that doesn’t even half begin to cover it! This film deals with racism as I’ve rarely seen it handled in a Hollywood film. While it’s 100 percent pure popcorn and revenge flick, it is pure genius in the way it takes on the evil slave owning south. Think of what he did with the Nazis in Inglorious and you’ll get a sense of what he’s doing with slave owners and slave overseers in this one.
As Tarantino himself said earlier:
I’d like to do a Western. But rather than set it in Texas, have it in slavery times. With that subject that everybody is afraid to deal with. Let’s shine that light on ourselves. You could do a ponderous history lesson of slaves escaping on the Underground Railroad. Or, you could make a movie that would be exciting. Do it as an adventure. A spaghetti Western that takes place during that time. And I would call it ‘A Southern.’
The reason I’m writing about this and other topics only loosely tied to BDSM is that it’s about the discourse of slavery. There are lots of ways to write and talk about slavery. You have Roots, which is the big budget, mainstream TV miniseries treatment, in the earnest melodrama mode. You have Goodbye Uncle Tom, which is the exploitation/enraged quasi-documentary/polemic mode. You can argue that one’s more politically progressive than the other, but you can’t completely discount the other. It is saying something about slavery, and we need to listen to it, at least.
Over on the DoubleX blog, Debra J Dickerson has misgivings:
But I do worry that Tarantino will over rely on stock incidents of slavery porn: whippings, auction blocks, rapes. Slavery and white supremacism were so much more complicated than that. Why does the master holding Django’s wife have to be cruel? He’d have left her there if she’d been working only under Union rules and spent her evenings sipping mint juleps on the veranda in complete equality with Massa? Slavery wasn’t evil because some masters were. Slavery was evil because, however humane its conditions, it is a crime against humanity. Making the wife’s owner a beast … it worries me.
Dickerson outlines a variety of scenarios of betrayal and emotional cruelty fostered by the institution of slavery: the children sold away from their parents, husbands from wives, the moment when you realize that person you grew up with owns you, and so on. These are emotional hurts, and arguably deeper than lash marks.
But they’re the core of a dramatic movie, not an action movie. And Tarantino wants to make an action movie.
However, for all it’s action-movie style and glamour, I think Kill Bill did have something to say about gender relations, emotional manipulation and abuse, sexuality and sexual violence. Note that, while Volume 1 ended with a giant battle and a duel, Volume 2 ends with a dramatic scene, of Bill and the Bride talking over a table. The actual fight is over in less than twenty seconds. Tarantino revels in the form of the action movie, but what’s ultimately driving the entire story is the interpersonal dynamic, the mutual betrayal, between the Bride and Bill.
Thus, I think that Tarantino will come up with an emotional drive for his story, and one that is more complex than a straightforward captivity/revenge/women-in-distress narrative. Or rather, he could. (I keep thinking of the scene in Pulp Fiction, when Tarantino inserts himself as a character, who drops multiple N-bombs in front of a black man who happens to be a professional killer, and gets away with it.)
Dickerson’s reference to “stock incidents of slavery porn: whippings, auction blocks, rapes” suggests just how easily writing about slavery can slide over into the exploitative or pornographic. Django Unchained could slip and fall into that. Or we could view it as just another way of writing about slavery.
Blassingame, John W. The Slave Community Oxford University Press 1979
Blassingame’s psychological study of Atlantic society has a tangential relationship to the evolution of BDSM. What it does give is insight into slavery as it was seen by whites, and particularly the distortions whites lived with in order to make the peculiar institution work.
The three archetypes, derived from white literature and folklore, are Jack, Nat and Sambo.
io9.com has published a rare (and lengthy) email interview with John Norman (aka philosophy professor John Lange), creator of the Gor series.
Norman comes across largely as you would expect from his prose: long-winded, a bit pompous, and preferring monologue to dialogue. This is a guy who would interrupt one of the innumerable scenes of a woman being enslaved to spend a half-page discussing the etymology of her name and how to pronounce it.
In the early years of the 16th century, to combat the rising tide of religious unorthodoxy, the Pope gave Cardinal Ximinez of Spain leave to move without let or hindrance throughout the land, in a reign of violence, terror and torture that makes a smashing film. This was the Spanish Inquisition…
Monty Python
I’ve only seen clips of the notorious Goodbye Uncle Tom (IMDB, Wikipedia, Google Video), an Italian pseudo-documentary that purportedly shows a recreation of the antebellum South with a focus on slavery. I decided to review the whole thing, and rented the director’s cut on DVD, which is not dubbed into English.
There are startling, horrifying spectacles recreated in this film, beginning with the horrors of the Middle Passage and running through the process of sale and labour, a perverse initiation narrative. There are periodic rapes and other abuses and mutilations. The overwhelming impression is an homogenous mass of brown humanity, undifferentiated by sex or age. How exactly they managed to get so many extras willing to be naked is beyond me.
Clotel is an 1853 novel written by escaped slave William Wells Brown. This is a classic abolitionist novel, much like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and it also borrows from the sentimental novel with separated lovers and broken-up families. It’s rather anecdotal and melodramatic, but it does explicate the idea that the institution of slavery creates misery, and furthermore, that this is not restricted to blacks.
It does give a good sense of what life was like in the ante-bellum South:
“Yes,” interrupted Huckelby [an overseer of slaves]; “them’s just my sentiments now, and no mistake. I think that, for the honour of our country, this slavery business should stop. I don’t own any, no how, and I would not be an overseer if I wern’t paid for it.”
(Were there amateur slave overseers?) I can easily imagine some white person in the ante-bellum South saying that with a mild shrug. It indicates just how entrenched the peculiar institution was in the culture of the South, so much so that people who didn’t care for it still couldn’t really do much.
Martin, Charles D. The While African American Body. Amazon
There’s a “missing link” I still need to find, the historical point at which people started thinking about white people as slaves. I found it, or one point of it, in the eroticized parodies of mid-19th century slave narratives published in the late 19th century. I still need to find more evidence to strengthen this point, where black shades into white.
Martin’s book explores this strange borderland between the races. Europeans were fascinated by “white negroes” or “leopard children” in scientific or entertainment venues, which could be Africans with conditions like albinism or vitiligo, or Africans in partial or total whiteface, or white people with partial blackface. The separation of the sign (“white skin”) from the signified (the social construction of “whiteness”) was both fascinating and terrifying, particularly to new American immigrants who were not secure in their “whiteness”.
Nussbaum, Felicity. Torrid Zones.
Lee, Debbie. Slavery and the Romantic Imagination.
Richard Burton postulated the “Sotadic zone”, in which male-male sexuality was normal and accepted south of certain latitudes. This equation of sexuality and geography was a common subtext of 18th and 19th century discourses, and still prevalent today. Sexuality was equated with other cultural traits, such as sloth versus industry, reason versus emotion, and these traits were equated with particular geographical regions. (Nussbaum, Pg. 8-9) “Androgynous, transgressive, ‘monstrous,’ lesbian, and working-class women – indigenous and colonizing women – are all linked metaphorically to bawdy women and are located on the fringes of respectability akin to brute savagery.” (Nussbaum, pg. 10)
It wasn’t only men who “exploited” the imaginative space of the Orient for sexual purposes. Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (1724) imitates the Turkish slave women she sees on her Grand Tour in her dress and dancing, gaining power and agency via performing as “England’s caricature of the Turkish harem woman” (Nussbaum, Pg. 35) at masquerades. Likewise, Lady Montagu’s description of Turkish baths had a strong frisson of lesbianism. (Nussbaum, pg. 139)
Our modern conceptions of normal gender and sexuality were still being sorted out at this point in Western history. Homoerotic relationships between women were seen as part of initiating women into sexuality with the eventual goal of heterosexuality and marriage. “Same-sex desire, initiation into heterosexuality through homosexuality, or bisexual activity [in women] did not fix sexual identity but instead influenced public opinion of a woman’s character that was itself defined by the visible–that is, by cross-dressing or by publicly acceptable intimacy between women.” (Nussbaum, Pg. 147) (Cf. the Brittany-Santana relationship in Glee. Kurt goes through agony because of self-identification as gay despite a lack of actual sexual experience, while Brittany and Santana freely screw around but maintain their performance of normative gender as cheerleaders)
Another way people related to the African or Oriental slave was by acts of imagination, notably for our purposes in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) (Lee, pg. 34) He cites the example of imagining ourselves into a suffering slave on the rack, feeling his bodily experience.
Could the true experience of suffering be conveyed to the person who had not literally suffered so? Or did it only fall into stereotype?
Abolitionist poems relied so heavily on stereotypes that it is impossible to imagine the movement without the standard register of diseased ships, growling captains, clamoring crews, greedy planters, lush tropical isles, shackled slave men, and dejected slave women grabbing after their children. Although these images all had some basis in reality, writers invoked this cliched catalog for some specific reasons. Like dinnerware and sugar bowls, stereotypes existed through duplication and thrived through mass consumption. The etymology of the word stereotype, in fact, refers to the printing plate used to reproduce many copies of the same material, and therefore emphasizes how abolitionist poets who employed the slave mother stereotype were in the business of sentimental reproduction.
Lee, pg. 212
You could also apply that to pornography, mass production of familiar types. Mary Prince’s slave narrative The History of Mary Prince (1831), describes her beating in great detail (Lee, Pg.215), but she also stops several times in her narrative to say her suffering is “too, too bad to speak in England” (Lee, Pg. 216). This recalls Harriet Jacobs’ difficulty getting her own un-expurgated slave narrative published a few decades later. Prince (who dictated her story that was transcribed and edited by others for abolitionist purposes) keeps “intruding” into her own story, reminding the reader of the actual person who experienced this and preventing the usual free flow of identification between author and text.
Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast features a great spoken essay on slavery in history. While it only loosely ties into this blog’s topic, it is a good primer on just how huge a phenomenon slavery is and how profound an effect it had on American and European history. The eroticized view of slavery in BDSM fantasy and practice is just one, minor epiphenomenon of slavery.
