Holding the Whip-Hand

Natalie Zacek

doi:10.1163/2405836x-00601007

Abstract

Abstract This article examines two female slaveholders, one real and one fictional, to explore the relationship between gender and slave management in both history and popular culture. Annie Palmer, the “White Witch of Rose Hall” plantation in Jamaica, although the creation of folklore and journalistic exaggeration, has functioned for a century and a half as a symbol not only of the evils of slavery but of the idea that female slaveholders’ cruelty threatened the system of slavery in a way in which that practiced by males did not. In New Orleans, Delphine Lalaurie, an elite woman renowned for her elegance and piety, became a figure of monstrosity after a house fire of 1834 revealed that her French Quarter mansion held a chamber of horrors for the enslaved, and offered a similar example of the dangers of female power in slave societies. Examining these women’s continuing presence both as historical figures and as characters in novels, television shows, and other creative productions, this article illuminates the strange career of the slaveholding woman, a figure execrated in her own era and misunderstood or ignored in contemporary historiography, yet simultaneously the subject over centuries of prurient cultural fascination.

Highlights

In October 2013, Delphine Lalaurie rose from the dead
Annie Palmer, the “White Witch of Rose Hall” plantation in Jamaica, the creation of folklore and journalistic exaggeration, has functioned for a century and a half as a symbol of the evils of slavery but of the idea that female slaveholders’ cruelty threatened the system of slavery in a way in which that practiced by males did not
Despite the sometimes unnerving fascination that many tourists, television viewers, readers, et al show for Annie Palmer and Delphine Lalaurie, and with the horrifying acts of abuse with which their names have become synonymous, these stories support a belief which echoes that of many antebellum defenders of slavery, that it was these individuals who were evil, rather than the institution of slavery itself

Summary

Introduction

In October 2013, Delphine Lalaurie rose from the dead. In the opening episode of Coven, the third series of the American Horror Story franchise, this New. A metropolitan French visitor to Louisiana in the early nineteenth century warned his readers that creole women were devoid of self-restraint; while their “slow and languid gait” indicated their “apathetic indolence,” should a slave attract their ire, “in an instant they are armed with a formidable whip; it is no longer the arm that cannot sustain the weight of a shawl or reticule.”[41] in the abolitionist anthology America Slavery As It Is, co-editor Theodore Dwight Weld stated that slaveholding women possessed the emotional sensitivity associated with genteel femininity, but not the necessary selfcontrol; “their sensibility changed to fury must needs feed itself for a while on the hideous spectacle; they must, as to revive themselves, hear the piercing shrieks, and see the flow of fresh blood; there are some of them who, in their frantic rage, pinch and bite their victims,” transforming themselves from delicate ladies into savage beasts.[42] While the institution of slavery generated the wealth that allowed some white women to become “ladies,” the social formations that it created placed so many restrictions upon these women that many spent their adult lives mostly bored and dissatisfied, and these emotions sometimes caused them to ignore society’s demand that they behave at all times as “innocent of any hint of hunger, temper, or passion,” encouraging them to treat enslaved people with exceptional harshness and, sometimes, appalling cruelty. Anya Jabour documents the feelings of loneliness and boredom experienced by plantation owners’ wives and daughters, who complained of a frequent “want of Society” which often left them feeling “very dull”; see Jabour, Scarlett’s Sisters: Young Women in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 88

Conclusion

Works Cited