{"id":775,"date":"2014-02-09T19:12:03","date_gmt":"2014-02-09T17:12:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=775"},"modified":"2014-02-09T19:12:03","modified_gmt":"2014-02-09T17:12:03","slug":"the-gentleman-planter-an-oximoron-fanny-kembles-journal-of-a-residence-on-a-georgian-plantation-1838-39","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2014\/02\/09\/the-gentleman-planter-an-oximoron-fanny-kembles-journal-of-a-residence-on-a-georgian-plantation-1838-39\/","title":{"rendered":"THE GENTLEMAN PLANTER, AN OXIMORON: FANNY KEMBLE\u2019S JOURNAL OF A RESIDENCE ON A GEORGIAN PLANTATION 1838-39<\/em> <\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Following the thread started by my reading Solomon Northup\u2019s memoir Twelve Years a Slave<\/em> (1853), prompted by Steve McQueen\u2019s film adaptation, I came across a list of films about slavery. This included Enslavement: The True Story of Fanny Kemble<\/em> (2000), an apparently mediocre TV movie. I knew about Kemble as a famous Victorian English actress but had no idea she was also the author of a key text in the history of slavery in America, on which this film is based: Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation 1838-9<\/em>. <\/p>\n

Kemble (1809-93) married one of the richest American bachelors, Pierce Butler, who retired her from the stage. She probably knew about the origins of Butler\u2019s immense fortune. Yet, whether this was the case or not, Kemble was certainly appalled by the slaves\u2019 situation in her husband\u2019s rice and cotton plantations in the Sea Islands of Georgia. As anyone interested in the history of slavery knows (but I did not), Fanny\u2019s diary is quite unusual: it offers a unique testimony by a white mistress of the black slaves\u2019 misery \u2013a foreign, reluctant mistress who maintains throughout an adamant abolitionist stance, confirmed by her brief but intense experience of (moderately) sordid slave life.<\/p>\n

For me, the most interesting aspect of the journal is Kemble\u2019s sympathy for the enslaved women, in particular the mothers. She is specifically concerned that the regime of ruthless human exploitation by which her husband\u2019s plantation was run required mothers to return to the fields only three weeks after giving birth. Fanny is appalled by how the care of the newborn babies was left in the inappropriate hands of barely older siblings, and, above all, by the harm done to the women\u2019s bodies with this ill-treatment. For which none other than her husband was responsible.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a particularly poignant passage in which \u201ca gang of pregnant women\u201d petition Butler for an extra week of rest. Kemble finds herself unable \u201cto listen to the details (\u2026) for I am unable to command myself on such occasions, and Mr.\u2014\u2014 seemed positively degraded in my eyes, as he stood enforcing upon these women the necessity of their fulfilling their appointed tasks.\u201d She claims that he\u2019d be more \u201chonourable\u201d if covered in the dirt of the \u201cthe coarsest manual labour\u201d than he is in his disgusting role as master. She expresses the \u201chope\u201d that her stay among his slaves \u201cmay not lessen my respect for him, but I fear it; for the details of slave holding are so unmanly, letting alone every other consideration, that I know not how anyone, with the spirit of a man, can condescend to them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fanny eventually lost her love and respect for Pierce, and they separated in 1845. She went back to the stage and the couple faced a very scandalous divorce process in 1849. By the time Fanny published her diary in 1863 \u2013to aid the cause for emancipation, in the middle of the American Civil War\u2013 Butler, an extravagant spendthrift, was already a ruined man. The sale in 1859 of his 436 slaves made it to the books of American history as the largest sale of human beings in the United States.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m highlighting this passage out of all the striking passages in Kemble\u2019s memoir because she expresses here a shocking truth about the American gentleman planter that, although widely known, is hard to read straight from his wife\u2019s pen: that he was no gentleman but, like all slave holders, \u201cunmanly.\u201d Apparently, Butler did not rape his female slaves but Kemble is, nonetheless, horrified that the same (gentle)man who treats with respect white ladies in society has no qualms to mistreat black women so appallingly. That white ladies were, nonetheless, by no means free citizens is proven by how Butler deprived Fanny of the custody of their two daughters when they divorced.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the only way I can express my renewed shock at the obvious duplicity of American gentlemanliness is by asking my reader to take Austen\u2019s Darcy and imagine him a slaveholder \u2013as many men of his class were indeed in his day. The Bront\u00ebs, a few years younger than Kemble, were, of course, closer to this unappealing reality, as we can see by Rochester\u2019s behaviour towards his wife Bertha and the suspicion that Heathcliff has, ironically, become a gentleman by employing himself in the Liverpool slave trade. <\/p>\n

The difference between Fanny Kemble and the southern ladies \u2013whose slave-inspired \u201cinelegant pronunciation\u201d and class-bound \u201cextremely sickly\u201d appearance she criticises\u2013 is that Kemble chose to end her complicity with the un(gentle)manly men running the plantation system at a high personal cost. The southern ladies, in contrast, were fully (or mostly) complicit. Fanny is dismayed by hearing the languid ladies describe their men as, in her words, \u201cidle, arrogant, ignorant, dissolute, and ferocious as that mediaeval chivalry to which they are fond of comparing themselves.\u201d <\/p>\n

A chivalry which was taken as a very shaky foundation for the basis of gentlemanliness on both sides of the Atlantic but that, seeing what happened in the American south, hardly masked the monstrous patriarch beneath. <\/p>\n

How terrifying\u2026 still today.<\/p>\n

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\n<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Following the thread started by my reading Solomon Northup\u2019s memoir Twelve Years a Slave (1853), prompted by Steve McQueen\u2019s film adaptation, I came across a list of films about slavery. This included Enslavement: The True Story of Fanny Kemble (2000), an apparently mediocre TV movie. I knew about Kemble as a famous Victorian English actress […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[212],"class_list":["post-775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-victorian-literature","tag-gender-studies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=775"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}