How can you confuse finesse with obedience, discretion with ignorance, tenderness with submission, seductiveness with prostitution, woman with weakness?27
In all of Morrison’s literature, there is a move to interrupt the culturally entrenched imagery sutured onto the black female body. In the white, masculinist imagination, responses to black sexuality have remained linear, established long before Bartmann set foot on European soil. During the Middle Ages, between 1119 and 1142, religious scholar Peter Abelard wrote to his beloved of the Song of Songs: ‘The bride of Canticles, an Ethiopian, rejoices: “I am black but comely”…she did well to say that because she is black and lovely therefore chosen and taken to the king’s bed chamber…to that secret place…such a wife prefers hidden pleasures.’ Abelard continues: ‘Besides, it so happens that the skin of black women, less agreeable to the gaze, is softer to touch and the pleasures one derives from their love are more delicious and delightful.’28 The sexualised narrative projected onto black women, from medieval descriptions of
27 Toni Morrison’s Desdemona is a dramatic work created in collaboration with director Peter Sellars and musician Rokia Traore. In Morrison’s play, she recreates the tragic figure of Desdemona from Shakespeare’s Othello, focussing not on her death, but on her afterlife, as she speaks from beyond the grave. Her main relationship is with her African nurse, Desdemona (London: Oberon Books, 2011), 16.
28 Abelard, Les Lettres completes, fifth letter, 87, 89-90, in T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham, US: Duke University Press, 1999), 1.
Africa, to the sixteenth century reflections such as that of Jonathan Swift, create a historical legacy of lubricious, venal black female muses.29 Charles Darwin appraised black female bodies as comic signs of inferiority,30 while Freud notably presented an analogy between female sexuality in general and the ‘dark continent.’31
If blackness and its myriad explications consumed men from the Middle Ages through to the Renaissance, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries preceding Bartmann’s exhibition developed the narrative of African women as ‘hot constitutioned ladies’
with ‘lascivious’ appetites, naturalising racial difference and sexual proclivities.32 Black female sexuality shaped the commerce and trade of African bodies through constructions of their ample, fertile and agile bodies, ‘fitted… for both productive and reproductive labour.’33 Paula Giddings notes that ‘a master could save the cost of
29 See, for example, Jonathan Swift’s verse: ‘Geographers in Afric-Maps/ With Savage-Pictures fill their Gaps/ And o’er inhabitable Downs/ Place Elephants for want of towns,’ quoted in Philip D. Curtin, The Image of Africa. British ideas and Action 1780-1850, I (London: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), 198.
30 See Charles Darwin’s argument, titled ‘Attention paid by savages to ornaments – Their ideas of beauty in women.’ Darwin notes that while a woman’s face, to a European, is ‘chiefly admired for its beauty, so with savages it is the chief seat of mutilation,’ the women of Central Africa, for example,
‘perforate the lower lip and wear a crystal, which, from the movement of the tongue, has ‘a wriggling motion, indescribably ludicrous during conversation’: Charles Darwin, ‘Chapter XIX: Part III. Sexual Selection,’ The Descent of Man, and Selection in relation to Sex, 556-585 (New York: D Appleton and Company, 1878), 576.
31 Sigmund Freud argues that we ‘need not feel ashamed’ about our lack of knowledge of female sexuality, metaphorizing women as the ‘dark continent’, a fetishised metaphor of the unknown defined as a lack of a sexual organ: ‘The Question of Lay Analysis’ (1926) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XX (1925-1926): An Autobiographical Study, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, The Question of Lay Analysis and Other Works, trans. James Strachey (London: Norton, 1969), 219.
32 Hobson, 2005, 25.
33 Jennifer L. Morgan, ‘“Some could suckle over their Shoulder”: Male Travelers, Female Bodies and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500-1700,’ William and Mary Quarterly 54 (1997), 185.
buying a new slave by impregnating his own slave, or, for that matter, having anyone impregnate her.’34 Thus, black female hypersexuality ensured a steady flow of supply and demand, procreating a diverse class of gens du couleur, often characterised in such scientific terms as ‘mulattos,’ ‘quadroons’ or ‘octoroons,’ reflecting the degree of blackness with each future ‘whitened’ generation. Colonial writers fundamentally perceived the black woman as a contradiction in terms - traditional thought associated blackness with monstrosity, savagery, and lasciviousness, while womanhood stood for beauty, civilization, and chastity. Therefore, African woman always embodies uncomfortable oppositions - the conflicting repulsion and attraction for the racial Other.35
Bryan Edwards’s 1794 history of the West Indies conveys the paradox of black female sexuality, fetishising the black body in a pseudo-scientific naturalism. Edwards’s narrative considers the case of mulatto bodies, characterising a mixed race Jamaican woman as the ‘Sable Venus.’ By labelling her poetically as ‘Venus,’ Edwards conveys the possibility of European beauty within black epidermis, a degree of whiteness in
34 Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter. The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: Quill William Morrow, 1984), 37.
35 Sander Gilman explains how blackness is simultaneously desirable and pathologised in Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes off Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), 76-127. Robert J. C. Young argues that a polarity of attraction and repulsion seems integral to racism and that Africans especially evoke this reaction in Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 90-117. T. Sharpley-Whiting has produced an in-depth study of the primal fear and attraction evoked by black women in Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 1-15.
her mixed heritage that allows for the possibility of worship. The first edition of Edwards’ text includes a poem by Isaac Teale, an Anglican clergyman whom Edwards's uncle had employed to tutor his nephew, drawing implicit analogies between the Sable Venus and the portrait by Botticelli:
The loveliest limbs her form compose
'The Sable Venus. An Ode' requires in-depth analysis because it is only beginning to receive critical attention, initially published anonymously before utilised by Edwards.36 The text opens with a poetic persona recounting a trip to Mount Helicon, where, in addition to Apollo and the nine muses, the male speaker finds the ‘sable queen of love,’ and asks for a song in her honour.37 The narrative that follows conveys the Venus’ fantastical voyage from Angola to Jamaica in a chariot, adorned with precious materials, drawn by flying fish and accompanied by a host of sea creatures.
Significantly, the poet recounts how the goddess incites passion in all who see her, including the god Neptune, by whom she bears a child resembling Cupid.
36 Barbara Bush discusses the poem and the stereotype of the black woman as erotic fantasy; she places this representation alongside two other pervasive stereotypes: the violent rebel and the passive, asexual labourer; see ‘“Sable Venus,” “She Devil,” or “Drudge?” British Slavery and the
“Fabulous Fiction” of Black Women's Identities, c. 1650-1838,’ Women's History Review 9.4 (December 2000).
37 Edwards, 1794, stanza 2 line 4.
The Ode’s reversal of racial strata, celebrating African beauty, has received varying responses, dependent on whether the reader views the text as sincere or facetious.
Regulus Allen has compared the introductions of two recent anthologies of slave poetry to highlight this point: in James G. Basker's Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems about Slavery, 1660-1810, the introductory notes state: ‘If the poem is to be
believed’ it forms ‘an ardent admir[ation] of black beauty’ comparing ‘black women favourably with white beauties.’38 On the other hand, Marcus Wood prefaces the poem with the overt statement: ‘this is a nasty piece of work.’39 Wood reads the ode as a parody, asserting that it ‘ironically celebrates the delights of interracial sex between sailors and black women on the middle passage (slave rape) and then of slave owners and black women within the Caribbean (slave rape, and slave prostitution).’ In a similar vein to the literature surrounding the Hottentot Venus, the text presents the dual potential to simultaneously celebrate and disparage, shaping black female sexuality by the complexity of identification as much as it is determined by the force of representation.
38 James G. Basker, headnote to ‘From The Sable Venus: An Ode (c. 1760 1763),’ in Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems about Slavery, 1660-1810 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 146.
39 Marcus Wood, headnote to Isaac Teale, The Voyage of the Sable Venus, from Angola to the West Indies (1765), first printed in Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies [1793]), in The Poetry of Slavery: An Anglo-American Anthology ]1764-1865] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 30-31.
The second volume of the third edition of Edward’s history, published in 1801, also includes an image by Thomas Stothard, Esquire, of the Royal Academy, titled ‘The Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies.’40 Problematising blood discourses, the portrait is a complicated manifestation of a cultural narrative. Perhaps a warning against white men who might be enslaved by their conquering Venuses, Jenny Sharpe suggests that the portrait is, instead, a narrative of anti-conquest that
‘eliminates the violence of slavery from the picture,’ a triumphant Sable Venus holding the reins to her own voyage across the Atlantic, instead of journeying in the cargo hold of a slave ship.41 Hugh Honour, in a similar stance, states: ‘No more preposterous misinterpretation was ever perpetrated of the Middle Passage,’ the main premise being the ‘physical charm of the black woman.’42 An interracial encounter, whether to warn against the destabilisation of white supremacy, or to indulge the fantasy of racial mixing, continued to mask the exploitative act of slavery and other systems of servitude and sexual assault whilst reinforcing a sexualised representation.
In Stothard’s image, there is a wealth of classical detail, void of African gods and goddesses. The figure of the black Venus stands in contrast to the eleven white figures,
40Figure 3, Thomas Stothard, The Voyage of the Sable Venus, from Angola to the West Indies, in Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commerce, of the British Colonies of the West Indies II (London, 1794), facing 27.
41 Jenny Sharpe, Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archaeology of Black Women’s Lives (Minneapolis:
University of Missouri Press, 2003), 49.
42 Hugh Honour and Jean Vercoutter, The Image of the Black in Western Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 33.
riding in a scallop shell and sitting on a velvet throne. Six cherubs adorn the sky while two fan the Sable Venus with ostrich plumes and peacock feathers. In the sea, two dolphins pull the scallop shell, while to the right, Triton blows on a horn. On the left, Cupid draws a bow and aims an arrow at Neptune, who holds a flag of the Union Jack in place of his trident. The Shakespearean influence is clear, recalling Enobarbus’
recollection of Cleopatra and the dangers of the exotic Other:
The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne, Burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that The winds were lovesick with them…
It beggar'd all description: she did lie In her pavilion, cloth-of-gold of tissue, O'erpicturing that Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature: on each side of her Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids, With divers-colour'd fans, whose wind did seem To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool, And what they undid did.
Her gentlewomen, like the Nereides, So many mermaids, tended her i' th' eyes, And made their bends adornings. At the helm A seeming mermaid steers: the silken tackle Swell with the touches of those flower-soft hands That yarely frame the office. From the barge A strange invisible perfume hits the sense Of the adjacent wharfs. The city cast Her people out upon her; and Antony, Enthroned i' th' marketplace, did sit alone, Whistling to th' air; which, but for vacancy, Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too,
And made a gap in nature.43
43 William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. Ania Loomba (London: Norton Critical Editions, 2013), Act 2.2.233-262.
An image of mythological amplification, Enobarbus elevates the ‘strumpet’ to a goddess, as Stothard glorifies and simultaneously represses the enormity of the slave trade, revealing as it conceals, what Henry Louis Jr. Gates calls ‘the projection of fantasies from its collective unconscious.’44 Britain is left waving the flag just as Neptune rules the waves and Rome quells the threat of Egypt. The chains become pearl bracelets and the slavers whip a set of reins, normalising and idealising the slave trade. Forming a crude contrast to William Blake’s 1799 engraving, Flagellation of a Female Samboe Slave,45 or George Cruikshank’s 1792 ironical engraving, whereby a
fifteen year old slave girl is hung upside down by a hook and punished for maintaining her modesty, nudity and illicit sexuality cling to the victimised slave in the same way that they cling to the Black Venus.46 The images bear, in Moten’s words,
‘the lineaments not only of the most abhorrent and horrific deprivations and violations but also of the most glorious modes of freedom and justice.’47 It presents an entry into subjecthood which, reconfigured as a ‘loss,’ also presents an ‘augmentation’
against the backdrop of racial-historical that determines language and subjectivity.
44 Henry Louis Jr. Gates, Wonders of the African World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 16-17.
45Figure 4, William Blake, Flagellation of A Female Samboe Slave, after J. G. Stedman, for J. G.
Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years Expedition, Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, 1796.
46Figure 5, George Cruikshank, ‘The abolition of the slave trade, or the in humanity of dealers in human flesh exemplified in Captain Kimber’s treatment of a young Negro girl of 15 for her virjen (sic) modesty’ (London: S.W. Fores, 1792), Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
47 Moten, 2003, 178.
Associated with Venus, the goddess of carnality, I would argue that the black female body is rendered a sexual commodity that inspires destructive carnality and lust.
Whether presented as the beautiful or the bizarre, the figure of the Black Venus is a racialised subject measured against European standards of beauty, equating the fairest with the whitest.48 A black figure can therefore never fully embody the ideal, as
‘blackness’ and ‘beauty’ form a paradox. If the Sable Venus presents subjectivity, formed, and endowed with the double encounter (discovery and expulsion, desire and revolution), it is a subjectivity that is determined to be false, where ‘fairness’ is absent, a ‘gap in nature’ according to Shakespeare’s Enobarbus, ‘strange’ and
‘invisible’. With such representations amid revolutionary changes, it is little wonder that the Hottentot Venus emerged in 1810, only three years after the international slave trade was banned and six years after Haiti formed as the first independent black nation, calming the anxieties of the white supremacist nation. Placing her on a sideshow pedestal, Bartmann’s body justified colonial expansion into Africa, dependent on the reproductive abilities of enslaved women, and on the theoretical presentations of real and imagined Venuses.
48 Kim F. Hall locates the earliest usages of ‘fair’ as a term of complexion and hair colour in the late sixteenth century, which coincides with England's entry into the Atlantic slave trade; she argues that it was constructed in opposition to the ‘dark’ appearance and morality that Europeans associated with the colonial Other, in Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995).