Grotesque Touch

Women, Violence, and Contemporary Circum-Caribbean Narratives

Amy King

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781469664651
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Women Authors
• Index: Literature

In this book, Amy K. King examines how violence between women in contemporary Caribbean and American texts is rooted in plantation slavery. Analyzing films, television shows, novels, short stories, poems, book covers, and paintings, King shows how contemporary media reuse salacious and stereotypical depictions of relationships between women living within the plantation system to confront its legacy in the present. The vestiges of these relationships--enslavers and enslaved women, employers and domestic servants, lovers and rivals--negate characters' efforts to imagine non-abusive approaches to power and agency. King's work goes beyond any other study to date to examine the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, ability, and nationality in U.S. and Caribbean depictions of violence between women in the wake of slavery.

CHAPTER ONE

Sensational Violence

But the rage of the white ladies still pursued them with redoubled fury, for what is so violent as female jealousy?

—LEONORA SANSAY, Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo, 96

In Leonora Sansay’s epistolary novel Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808), white Creole women and Black women order violence against each other out of jealousy, which ends in death, during the Haitian Revolution. Sansay relates scenes of violence that predictably “other” all the colony’s inhabitants, describing a white Creole woman as demonic in Letter II for ordering an enslaved person to behead her husband’s (suspected) Black lover and leave the head on a platter, where her husband would see it (70). Later in Letter IX, the novel describes a Black woman who was “a very devil” throughout the revolution, as she ordered the murders of white women whom her husband, a chief of some social standing, pursued (92). While this woman apparently stabbed a white man, which prompts the narrator to call her “fury in female form” (92), the novel does not describe her physically inflicting violence on white women. Sansay’s novelization of the end of French rule in Saint-Domingue paints a chaotic picture of a culture disordered by its Caribbean locale. Sansay, a writer from an emerging United States, gives her audience a salacious model against which to define themselves, a trope that continues in U.S. popular culture and political discourses.

This chapter begins with Sansay’s novel because it makes titillating the violence of “female jealousy,” one of the catalysts for women’s violence across all chapters in Grotesque Touch. As the historiography of women’s experiences under enslavement shows, white women’s constrained social place has traditionally framed how historians discuss violence. According to Deborah Gray White, for example, white women in a southern U.S. context “were powerless to right the wrongs done them, but some did strike back, not always at Southern patriarchs, but usually at their unwitting and powerless rivals, slave women” (41). The obsessions, deceptions, and resulting violence wrought by white women feature in autobiographies of formerly enslaved women and fictional texts alike.¹ However, in its portrayal of jealous women’s murderous ire, Secret History stays within certain social expectations for women at the time. In both descriptions of white and Black women’s violence inflicted on other women, they order someone else to enact it; these women avoid physically touching their female foes who belong to a different race and (racialized) class. The women are, in effect, removed from this violence due to a strict logic of gendered social place. Sansay’s novel is an early example of women using their social positions to remove themselves from some physical acts of violence. Secret History thereby demonizes white and Black women in a Caribbean locale while, at the same time, the novel upholds a sense of the women’s gendered place in society. The women’s actions maintain a gendered line that presupposes that men, and men alone, would have the power to physically inflict pain and death.

Moving into twentieth-century texts, this chapter examines narratives that continue to “other” the women involved in scenes of violence, as in Sansay’s novel. I look beyond the recurrent trope of jealousy to examine more closely the dynamics and limits of power and intimacy in scenes when white women lash out against enslaved women. Throughout these depictions (including the most tantalizing), white women claim identities through physically enacting violence with a weapon. To pick up a whip, or any other instrument of torture, admits agency in that act of violence; in doing so, women who commit such acts mirror the prerogatives of men who enslave. In this chapter, I specifically examine tropes of sadistic white women in plantation pulp novel cover artwork and exploitation films of the 1960s and 1970s, as these women enact physical violence via a whip to gain white men’s power. Closely reading a scene of violence between women as enslaver and enslaved, this chapter uses the exploitation film Mandingo (Richard Fleischer 1975) to illustrate a conservative depiction of a white woman that plays up sensationalistic stereotypes.² Then, the chapter provides a counterpoint to these stereotypes in the film 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen 2013), in which a woman who enslaves actually increases her power on the plantation by manipulating the system’s economies of grotesque, corrupted intimacies. Throughout, I sketch a constellation of violent scenes between women to show how visual, written, and audiovisual texts depict white women negotiating power structures in order to claim their sense of agency in plantation regimes.

Popular plantation pulp novel covers from the 1960s and 1970s commonly feature a white man (or, more rarely, a white woman) wielding a whip and standing above an (assumed) enslaved person. Here, I focus on those images that feature a violent white woman, as this trope (white woman with whip in hand) mixes taboos of interracial sex and gendered violence. Building on Thavolia Glymph’s Out of the House of Bondage, I assert that while depictions of violent white women “contradicted prevailing conceptions of white womanhood—and still do” (5), this sensationalized trope removes an enslaver from intimacy with enslaved people. These pulp covers forgo depicting skin-to-skin touch (and the personal connections that touch implies) to instead deal in suggestion, desire, and separation.

As Susan Stryker says more generally about pulp paperbacks in the mid-twentieth century, they were “born from a seamless fusion of form and function” and “became near-perfect commodities—little machines built to incite desire at the point of purchase, capture it, and drive it repeatedly into the cash nexus at 25 cents a pop” (8).³ Although the plantation pulps I examine were published in the United States and United Kingdom after the so-called golden age of pulp publication—and they likely cost a dollar or more instead of a quarter—their cover artwork markets the novels in the same manner, here using the plantation in U.S. and Caribbean settings as shorthand for unnatural desires. Indeed, Ramón E. Soto-Crespo theorizes such twentieth-century narratives as revolving around a “circum-Atlantic trash subject”; he claims this “large archipelago of island sagas” acts as an “archive of trash forms [which] covers a region made of separate yet connected spaces” (“Archipelagic Trash” 303). These plantation pulp novels were popular in the 1960s, and editions were reissued in great quantities in the 1970s, as series upon series were churned out following the popularity of the television miniseries Roots and studio-produced exploitation film Mandingo. John Harrison says in his catalogue of “hip pocket sleaze” that plantation pulps produced in the 1970s combined “with elements from the blaxploitation film genre” and resulted in “a politically incorrect hotbed of racial lust and violence which would not (and most certainly should not) survive in today’s climate” (182).⁴ Yet, these volumes sold, and continue to sell—if not for the formulaic plots, then for the imagery they circulate.⁵

Plantation pulp novel covers, as a rule, imply taboo identities and activities, and as Jessica Adams briefly notes in Wounds of Returning, pulp fictions used “taboo sexuality as a primary element of what got people interested in the plantation” (56). I explore here how a selection of covers connotes power, as the trope of the enslaver wielding a whip indicates separation (both physical and social) because she does not have to physically touch enslaved people to inflict pain. These pulp covers that feature a white woman holding an instrument of torture, then, suggest interracial sex and gender-bending identities, but her stance ensures that the audience understands her social separation. The enslaver remains aloof, detached from enslaved people.

Although examinations of pulp novels have gained popularity in cultural studies, the planation pulp novel subgenre is still undertheorized. This could be due to the pulp publication process itself, which repackages a hardback novel in low-quality paperback binding, a process that makes a novel more accessible to a general reading audience and tends to ensure a series’s continuation (and generic transformation) in paperback form. For instance, U.S. writer Kyle Onstott’s quasi-historical-novel-turned-infamous-exploitation-film Mandingo first appeared as a hardback in 1957, whereupon its life as a pulp novel (as people likely remember it today) began in the 1960s. Furthermore, the Falconhurst series (of which Mandingo was the first novel) morphed over the years as a paperback novel series set in the United States and Caribbean until its conclusion in the late 1980s, when the paperbacks were repackaged as romance novels. Plantation pulps published after the filmic adaptation of Mandingo, such as the Dragonard series by Caribbean-born author Rupert Gilchrist (with Caribbean and U.S. settings), more easily fit inside a sexploitation plantation subgenre. In this series, sadistic sex meets racist and sexist dialogue at every turn, though the 1987 B-movie film adaptation of the first novel (Dragonard) dilutes these tropes. Overall, the convoluted publication histories of these series (and any hardcover-to-pulp publication trajectory) complicate publication research. Indeed, probably the most curious trend in the lifespan of such series is that some were reprinted near the end of the twentieth century as collectors’ hardbacks, complete with the sensationalized pulp cover artwork appearing on the dustjackets.

For example, covers on the novels Falconhurst Fancy and Dragonard Blood display various iterations of the trope of a white woman wielding a whip, from the late 1960s to the early 1980s (figure 1.1). Enslavers appear within a range of authority on these covers, which insinuates a mixture of danger and power to audiences. Nevertheless, they seem to have it both ways: the covers imply sexual misconduct, while they also reaffirm that white women merely adopt white men’s power. Moreover, there is no mistaking a woman’s stance as indicating close relationships with enslaved people. These covers specifically feature a variety of poses as half-dressed Black men square off against or succumb to the white women’s whips. The evocation of interracial sex is here, but also the covers masculinize the enslaver, especially as she cross-dresses and wields a whip on covers for Dragonard Blood (1978 and 1981). Of note is the fact that the artists who painted these and other pulp covers most likely did not read the narratives; instead, according to Jaye Zimet, artists relied on salacious depictions of physically dominant and predatory masculinized women, as were popular on earlier lesbian pulp covers in the 1950s and 1960s (23). The cross-dressing woman on the Dragonard covers—Imogen—does take on a masculinized identity in the novel, as she cuts her hair and dresses in pants while managing her father’s plantation. These covers, however, do not accurately convey Imogen’s appearance—the narrative describes her during a whipping scene as “a mad woman, a china doll with unkempt black hair and blazing blue eyes,” not a buxom blond woman in revealing clothing (Gilchrist 18). However, she does whip enslaved men to enact revenge because, in her words, they are “so manly” (29), and later she dresses in men’s clothing and takes an enslaved woman as a lover. These narrative elements point to the novel’s conclusion that Imogen is unnatural. Therefore, in a novel that features many permutations of sex—mostly coerced—Imogen’s own performances of race, gender, and sexuality take center stage on the covers, as pulp covers notoriously suggest the taboos novels commit within their pages. In a world made abhorrent and titillating by slavery, as the Dragonard series repeatedly implies, her identity is supposedly the most shocking, the most perverse, the most likely to attract readers.

FIGURE 1.1 (Left to right) Cover art on plantation novels Falconhurst Fancy (Pan pulp edition, 1969) and Dragonard Blood (Corgi pulp edition, 1978; Bantam pulp edition, 1978; Souvenir Press Ltd hardback edition, 1981).

To illustrate this trope further, consider the transformation of cover art when hardback novels became pulp productions. The popularity of Guyanese novelist Edgar Mittelhölzer’s Children of Kaywana, initially published in 1952, ensured more hardback editions in the 1960s and, soon after, pulp paperback editions (figure 1.2). I mention the hardback publication dates of Children of Kaywana to stress that later pulp covers differ dramatically from the earlier editions. Children of Kaywana is a sweeping novelization of European colonialism in Guyana (the Kaywana series moves from the 1600s all the way to the twentieth century), and the series (like Falconhurst and Dragonard), is sure to include sensationalistic depictions of sadism.⁶ These earlier hardback jackets for Children of Kaywana do feature women: the cover on the left brings a light-skinned woman to the forefront, while the second cover showcases the character Kaywana, a mixed-race woman whose parents were an Englishman and Indigenous woman. In the novel, Kaywana’s enslaver-class progeny regard her as the ancestor they should emulate. Of note is the fact that the 1960 cover shows a silhouetted whipping scene in the background, yet the perpetrator of the whipping is—by all appearances—a man wearing breeches and a jacket. While the hardcover does not share the aesthetics of pulp cover artwork, this image does peddle the book according to the stereotypical imagery of a topless, wild Indigenous woman in a violent Caribbean setting. Thus, the novel’s cover art has always advertised its narrative in ways that distance readers from this wayward enslaver-class family, a narrative that Soto-Crespo claims ultimately “show[s] how some subjects are despised, untrainable, and unassimilable” in the midst of movements for independence and nation-building throughout the Caribbean (White Trash Menace 66). Through depicting enslaver-class people as such both in the novel and on hardback covers, Children of Kaywana was primed for pulpy replications.

If pulp novel covers are meant to lure readers by hinting at gender-bending spectacle and suggesting “abnormal” sexualities within the novel, then the 1976 Bantam Books pulp cover of Children of Kaywana fits the bill (figure 1.3). The cover specifically circulates an image of a white woman that has remained taboo, for Western cultural norms dictate that white women should not act with such lusty violence, especially against other women. Here we see an enslaver (again, with whip in hand) towering above a scantily clad enslaved woman while a shirtless man watches in the background, presumably holding the reins of his enslaver’s horse. The enslaved woman, whose clothing barely covers her body, averts her eyes from her enslaver’s disdainful gaze. Interestingly, the enslaver dresses more conservatively here than on the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Depicting Violence between Women in Circum-Caribbean Texts
• Chapter One. Sensational Violence
• Chapter Two. Within and Beyond Sadistic Violence
• Chapter Three. Un-Silencing Sexual Violence
• Chapter Four. Violent Denial in Post-Emancipation Households
• Chapter Five. The Horror of Intimate Violence
• Conclusion. Plantation Settings after 2016
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index