Relaciones internacionales.indb - HOMINES

IAN ANTHONY BETHELL
As Bush argues, it is not only the gaze that imbricates the slave woman
within a hostile space but also the attitudes used against her. 7 The ironic aspect
of the identification of the slave woman as a lascivious, loose woman
is that she does not have control over her body and therefore cannot control
the images created of her or the abuses heaped on her at the hand of
her owners. 8 Hence, her sexual exploitation is not so much a result of her
wanton ways as it is the outcome of exploitation by and economic gain for
the slave masters and mistresses. 9 Joan Dayan describes this relationship:
The history of slavery is given substance through time by a spirit that
originated in an experience of domination. That domination was most often
experienced by women under another name, something called “love”.
In that unnatural situation where a human became property, love became
coordinate with a task of feeling that depended to a large extent on the
experience of servitude. [...] domination encouraged the brutalization
of “enlightened man” and enflamed his unbridled appetite for lust and
cruelty. 10
Dayan illustrates how ‘love’ in many ways was used as a weapon to subjugate
black women. Because of their position of slave these women could
not go against the master’s wishes without the fear of great abuse and
suffering. The enslaved woman must suffer under the master’s brutal abuse
and exploitation of her. She must also suffer the abuse the mistress heaps
on her for being a ‘loose’, ‘immoral’ woman, although the mistress’s husband
has probably forced the woman into having sexual relations with
him. Notwithstanding this, there were women who did seek out relations
with the slave master either for their own progress or for some other gain.
Meanwhile, Mrs Carmichael’s Domestic Manners and Social Condition
re-solidifies this image of the black female as lascivious when she observes
that:
7
Bush (1990); See also for literary detail of this: Cirilo Villaverde, Cecilia Valdés:
Novela de costumbres Cubanas 3 rd edition, (Mexico, Editorial Porrúa, S. A.,
1986), where the narrator illustrates that, as a mulata, having been educated
out of her class, Cecilia can do nothing. See also: Huguette Dagenais, ‘Women
in Guadeloupe: The Paradoxes of Reality’, in Women and Change, op. cit.,
pp. 83-108.
8
Thomas Tryon (1999); See for a literary depiction of this: J. California Cooper,
Family (New York, Doubleday, 1991).
9
See: Walker (1981), op. cit., p. 42; Lola Young (1990); Bush (1990), op. cit., p.
14 and p. 17; W. D, Jordan, ‘First Impressions: initial English confrontations
with Africans’ in C. Husband (ed.), ‘Race’ in Britain (London, Hutchinson,
1982), pp. 52-53; Robert Young (1995), op. cit., p. 193, discusses the repulsion/attraction
duality presented in ‘Colonial Desire’; Hill Collins (1990).
10
Joan Dayan, Haiti, History and the Gods (Berkeley, University of California
Press,1995), op. cit., p. 56.
• HOMINES • Vol. XX, Núm. x - xxxxx de 2005 295