Word: slaving
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...Beloved, the highly-anticipated adaptation of Toni Morrison's novel, slavery is explored in a subtle, almost metaphorical fashion. It is an exercise in psychology, exploring the mind of Morrison's steel-willed protagonist Sethe (Oprah Winfrey), a former slave who now lives as a free woman in Ohio in the 1870s. Beloved is a handsome, classy production that is distinguished in every possible way, but it is also a cold film. The screenplay grapples admirably with Morrison's convoluted narrative but can never get to the heart of it. The saving grace of the movie is the renowned cast...
...romanticizing Jefferson's relationship completely underemphasizes the power imbalance between slave and master. While Wilentz does note that "It was not remotely a relationship of equals," he argues that Jefferson's attraction to Hemings was not merely physical: "It is said that Hemings spoke French and, it seems, could interest her lover from the neck...
...impossible to view the assertion that love can occur between a master and a slave without a bit of sarcasm. Love occurs between two people who view each other on equal terms, never between one person who owns and has nearly absolute power over the other. Hemings might have been able to speak French, Italian and Spanish like a native, but enslaved, she remained nothing more than chattel. Regardless of the many years these two might have spent together, their "long emotional and sexual engagement," as Wilentz puts it, can only be reduced to a master forcing a slave...
...power that allowed Jefferson to compel Hemings into his bed. It was power which allowed the affair to go on for so many years. It was power which left Hemings' manumission uncertain. Hemings could have had absolutely no agency in such an arrangement, as no slave in a situation with a white master ever had. Numerous masters engaged in sexual activity with their slaves, threatening that they would be sold or worse if they did not comply. Why do we assume Jefferson should have been any different...
...capable of sexual misconduct. Perhaps because it is too difficult to see "the greatest hero of the eighteenth century" as a hypocrite. But by validating the union of Jefferson and Hemings as one of love, we dismiss the tragic legacy of slavery and the complex and perverted relationship between slave and master...