On reading the first sentence of Sharon Block’s book chapter, “Violence or Sex? Constructions of Rape and Race in Early America,”–“Is rape an act of sex or an act of violence?”–I thought, oh no. As someone who has not only “been schooled” but who has “schooled” people in my previous (military) workplace that it is an act of power not sex, as a defense against people who state that women who dress a “certain way” “ask for it,” so as not to let rapists off the proverbial hook due to their emotions just getting the better of them, I see what Block is getting at with regard to the legal implications throughout the years, since the colonial period of American history, in which this false binary can in fact prove a negative one despite the feminist movement’s best intentions. It has resulted in a workplace educational culture that splits up sexual harassment from sexual assault–and this split discounts the experiences of women who were harassed on a daily basis and focuses mostly on assault. It is very difficult to prove workplace harassment much less get management to recognize it, in the military where I worked. It is hard to get them to punish assault, as well. It is impossible to separate power from sexuality in sexually based violence, due to our culture’s sexualizing of violence and violencing of sexuality (i.e., pornography) that is a direct descendant of slavery culture. 

I really appreciated Wendy Anne Warren’s approach to writing a narrative with just a few sentences, too. I enjoyed reading Hartman’s work as well, which accomplished a similar feat, and I always appreciate Hartman’s gut-wrenching writing style which evokes powerful emotions (I read her Scenes of Subjection in a history of the self course a couple years back–amazing). However, Warren’s approach was less creative writing-y to me (which I love creative writing, especially creative/literary nonfiction, don’t get me wrong!) and I got much more history than theory out of it. Warren’s word choices shift from talking about the two men in question in the article to the female slave. She shifts from verbs of certainty such as “Josslyn expressed no sympathy” to “would have” and “it seems unlikely” or “almost certainly.” The certainties make way for the varying degrees of certainty of taking the time to make suppositions about the life and experience of the female slave. While the archive did not value certainties regarding her, the author, as per Hartman, such as Warren or Hartman can do her justice–to an extent.

“I can only ask uncomfortable questions, verging on prurience, wondering how to reflect on the details of a rape without becoming what Saidya Hartman has cautioned us against, a ‘voyeur’ of pain and terror,” Warren writes (p. 1046). Yet Warren does more than to “ask uncomfortable questions” in this article, which has three pages to go at the point of this statement. The rest of the article focuses on asking these uncomfortable questions such as “was there water available to clean herself?” etc., states that nothing exists to suggest whether she conceived after the rape, and provides additional information on the two white males in this (microhi)story titled “The Rape of a Slave in Early New England.” This article shows that, like the ghost in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the ghost of “a Slave in Early New England” haunts rather than infuses this article with historical presence. The spirit of this historical figure is embedded in this article, the events that surrounded her, continue. to surround and embed her in history, but it is a ghostly presence and not one that has trouble infusing humanity or characterization of the slave. It is notable that the article is named after “the rape,” the violent action that is the impetus for telling this tale. But has the violence already been done? What is the result of this article’s telling? Warren writes at the end of the article that “We have known, for a long time, a story of New England’s settlement in which ‘Mr. Mavericks Negro woman’ does not appear; here is one in which she does.” Does she? I’m not sure. Speculation surrounding her, the “questions” that Warren “can only ask” encircle her; but I am not sure that “she” appears herein or if her victim status is merely perpetuated, as that is all that remains in the historical record. Can articles such as this one do “justice”? I, like Hartman and Warren, am not sure. 

Warren continues to summarize Hartman’s seminal “Scenes of Subjection” (p. 1046): “Speaking of nineteenth-century slave punishments, she reminded us that ‘only more obscene than the brutality unleashed at the whipping post is the demand that this suffering be materialized and evidenced by the display of the tortured body or endless recitations of the ghastly and terrible.’ And yet, describing a rape without inquiring into its circumstances seems to draw the same curtain over the act that one historian did in the early twentieth century; he omitted ‘Josselyn’s story of his interview with Maverick’s servant girl,’ finding it ‘perhaps a little questionable for discussion here, even in this supposedly modern age.'” (Warren 1047) What is the “proper” balance between “drawing the curtain” and participation in “endless recitations of the ghastly and terrible”?

It seems inappropriate to draw the curtain, as Warren puts it, reminding me of Lovelace in Clarissa when he writes to his friend after raping Clarissa, “I can go no farther.” “He could go no farther” could either describe his act (whether he finished the violent act to its completion) or that he can go no farther in describing it to him because it is too upsetting, or some other reason. This is a frequent theme in eighteenth-century British literature regarding violence toward women and how to follow propriety/norms while describing it. When the act is taboo, women’s delicacy forbids them from describing what has happened to them, thus rendering them like children without adequate vocabulary to describe abuse. Her story is not told and she does not go to court to prosecute him due to societal constraints against her and what is “proper” for her to say and do in public. The private and the public spheres are here in conflict and this does not serve the victims of rape. I cannot help but think of the announcement that Dr. Marrero sent out (“What does it mean to learn history? Dr. Joanne Freeman … has a compelling answer”). What happens when we fail to reckon with the historical events that are uncomfortable. There is a balance between not living in “denial” and not participating in pornographic displays of violence and torture. What that is, is the historian’s craft. 

Works Cited

Block, Sharon. “Violence or Sex? Constructions of Rape and Race in Early America.” New World Orders: Violence, Sanction, and Authority in the Colonial Americas, eds. John Smolenski and Thomas J. Humphrey. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. 

Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small axe 26, June 2008, pp. 1-14.

Warren, Wendy Anne. “The Cause of her Grief”: The Rape of a Slave in Early New England.” The Journal of American History, vol. 93, no. 4, Mar., 2007, pp. 1031-1049.