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93 

The Pervasive Silence of Enslaved Woman and the 
Dichotomy of White Woman as Property and 

Proprietor 
Chantal McFarlane 

 

Chantal Noelene McFarlane is an undergraduate student at the University of 
Toronto majoring in Caribbean Studies and English. Her present area of focus 
includes 18th century British literature and the racial underpinnings of such work in 
their representation of the Caribbean. She hopes that at some point her fascination 
with the history of the Caribbean and her love for literature will allow her to author 

her own understanding of this indefinable archipelago.                   . 

 
Valerie Martin’s Property is a historical fiction that gives a 

representation of the white female consciousness during the time of 
Atlantic slavery. The theme of gender is blatantly brought out in this 
text; it acts as the crux for the novel. Gender during the time of 
slavery should not be conflated with a contemporary understanding 
of it. During this era black women were virtually viewed as unsexed, 
by whites, except when it came to pleasing white masters or 
overseers sexually.  This paper will look extensively at the 
relationship that exist between the main protagonist Manon Guadet 
and Sarah, her house slave, essentially dissecting the black-white 
dynamics as portrayed by Valerie Martin. Its main tenet will be 
looking at what Sabine Broeck calls the ‘ungenedered-gendered’ 
response between black and white women during slavery.  It will use 
Lucille Mathurin Mair’s analysis of women during slavery to support 
the claim that the vast difference between, how the white female 
body and black female body are received is one that is based on the 
institution of slavery. The main criticism of the text will revolve 
around what I perceive to be the blatant silencing of the black female 
and how Manon is read as property and proprietor.  

 
Valerie Martin, in Property, makes known the life of Manon 

Gaduet; in Louisiana during the height of plantation slavery in 
America. Manon, the main protagonist, fulfills her role dutifully as 
wife while having an aloof almost voyeuristic stance within slavery. 
She is seen as orbiting the edge of slavery never a full participant as 
is iterated through her sexual encounters with her husband. Manon 
states emphatically “I offered neither encouragement nor resistance; 
I was there and not there at the same time”.1  This act of being on the 

                                                           
1 Valerie Martin, Property (New York: Vintage, 2003), 56. 



CHANTAL MCFARLANE| 
THE PERVASIVE SILENCE OF ENSLAVED WOMEN 

94 

periphery but at the same time embodying the centre is one that 
becomes analogous to white women’s conceptualization of slavery. 
They were at once there and not there, however, this dichotomous 
spatial characterization becomes problematic as the white woman, in 
Manon’s regards, loses all form of agency during this period which 
was not necessarily so. Lucille Mathurin Mair’s Historical Study of 
Women, concentrates on women in Jamaica during slavery. Her 
findings can be used to characterize the lived reality of women in 
America at the time. Property is representative of most of Mair’s 
claims. Mair states that white women existed at two levels that of the 
“delicate beings, requiring masculine protection and as good 
creatures ... Then, there was as well the level of their own actual 
existence, which often fell short of the idealized perfection.” 2 The 
positioning of the white woman as these delicate beings has made 
them property in the sense, however on the level of their own 
existence they are also proprietor. They traverse the delicate balance 
of owning and being ‘owned’. 

 
 The title of the novel, Property, speaks unequivocally to the 

ownership of slaves on a very literal level as well as more subtle to 
the ownership of Manon by her husband. The various kind of owning 
based on an outright ownership and that of the implicitly owned is a 
theme that one should be very critical of in the novel. The subject of 
property and gender is one, as Lucille Mathurin Mair states, where 
the husband “took instant and complete possession of all” the wife’s 
“personal property”3 and to an extent herself. The immediate 
‘possession’ (possession here does not imply complete ownership) 
that is taken of the white woman’s person should not be conflated 
with the fact that it was the very being of the enslaved that was made 
property, the institution of Atlantic slavery stretched to consume 
every morsel of the enslaved Africans’ identity. The conflation of the 
idea of what it means to be property based on the novel is 
reminiscent of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s Within the Plantation 
Household. Genovese viewed the ‘kinship’ between white and black 
women in plantation housing as one that was mutually intertwined 
“where they shared a world of physical and emotional intimacy.”4  
The intimacy that is characterized by Genovese is one that is mutual 

                                                           
2 Lucille Mathurin Mair, A Historical Study of Women in Jamaica 1655-

1844,(Kingston: UWI Press, 2006), 117. 
3 Mair, Historical Study 151 
4 Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household, (London: The 

University of South Carolina Press), 101. 



CARIBBEAN QUILT | 2013 
 

 

95 

however in this ‘mutuality’ the black woman has to be complicit 
whether she wants to or not. Thus the concept of mutuality changes 
meaning as enslaved woman is openly compromised. The mutuality 
of their interactions has to be weighed based on the fact that the 
enslaved woman always played a secondary role, as in Property 
where it is clearly laid out that Sarah is the slave and Manon is 
married property which gives her quite a significant leverage.  

 
The stringent conditions between black female and white 

female relation during the time of slavery is blatantly represented in 
Valerie Martin’s work. It elucidates the very concept of “property” as 
evidenced by its title and how this notion transcends both black and 
white experiences to make it an all encompassing one. This however 
gives rise to the criticism that the idea of property is one that is 
suspect to gradation. That is, in respects to understanding that both 
Sarah and Manon are constructed as property, Sarah is more ‘owned’ 
than the latter. The novel opens with an epigraph from an A.B.C. of 
Halifax dated 1832. Martin only incorporated a snippet of the entire 
thing which continues: “Property which is considered the most 
valuable by the owners of it, is a nice thing; and for the right thereto, 
to be called in question by an unphilosophical set of political 
mountebanks, under the influence of supernatural agency or deceit, 
is insufferable.”5 The need to keep one’s property beyond everything 
else is shown in Property which takes away from the mutuality of 
kinship between black women and white women, as it is Manon who 
has Sarah hunted to bring her back to slavery. The epigraph in full 
highlights this, however the snippet that Martin gives fails to 
incorporate the fact that the very idea of property is very contentious 
as shown above. 

 
What is most problematic in Property is that Manon will be 

read as property as well as Sarah, the distinction between the two 
needs to be made explicit which the novel quintessentially fails to do. 
This coupled with Sarah’s evident silence becomes more 
problematic. The pervasive silence that is used to embody Sarah’s 
character is one which shows a distinction between her and Manon 
and reinscribes the historic muteness of the black female as 
performed by historians. 

 

                                                           
5 Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slavery, (Columbia: Columbia Uni. Press, 

1963), 302 



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THE PERVASIVE SILENCE OF ENSLAVED WOMEN 

96 

Property received the Orange prize for literature in 2003; a 
statement by Ahdaf Souief is that the novel “looks at the 
relationships of power and ownership among people living in a 
system which is manifestly evil”6 this characterization of the novel is 
one that is in its understanding almost a universal truth. Souief fails 
to acknowledge that the lens through which the relationship is being 
looked at is overtly one sided. This consideration is essential in 
analyzing the novel.  

 
It is clear that Martin constructs the character of Manon to 

be an almost shrewd unfeeling woman living under the shadow of 
her husband whose joy for life has been sapped by the sheer 
understanding of slavery. This understanding is contentious as 
Manon partakes in the “manifestly evil” system with hardly a regard 
for her slaves, her joy for life is sapped not by the realities of slavery 
but by the fact that she does not love or respect her husband in any 
light. The voyeuristic stance that she takes does not mean that she is 
opposed to the happenings. The opening of the novel has her peering 
through her proverbial spy glass and watching the perverted 
homoerotic violence that is being perpetrated against the young boys 
who are enslaved, her statement “I couldn’t watch anymore” does 
take away from the fact that such violence was carried out constantly 
and her role is of a participant especially in her treatment towards 
Sarah. 

Sabine Broeck cast a critical eye on the relationship that 
exists between Manon and Sarah. Broeck uses the poignant scene in 
the text where Manon sucks the milk from Sarah’s breast.  She states 
“The slave literally, in this scene, becomes an un-gendered breast to 
fulfill the white woman's dreams both of power, and of the physical 
comfort of body nurturance — which seems to be an ingenious 
textual signification on the hundreds of scenes of black mammies 
feeding white babies in American cultural memory, nursing them 
into masterhood”7. This understanding that Sarah is suckling Manon 
into masterhood is pivotal to the understanding of the text. As it is 
directly after this that Manon becomes master, losing her husband 
and being a widow. Broeck further elaborates that “The gendered 
subjectification of the white woman — her freedom as an agent of her 
own desire — is literally sucked from the black woman's body, 
contingent on the de- subjectification, and thus the de-gendering of 

                                                           
6 Valerie Martin, Property (New York: Vintage,2003), 
7 Sabine Broeck, “Property: White Gender and Slavery,” Gender Forum an 

Internet Journal for Gender Studies 14 (2006) 



CARIBBEAN QUILT | 2013 
 

 

97 

the enslaved human being who has become her serviceable flesh, as 
it were.”8 The changing of Manon’s own agency is prefigured in this. 
Through this act the novel unfolds where Manon is no longer 
property but proprietor. Manon projects her future through this act, 
“I could see my husband in his office, lifting his head from his books 
with an uncomfortable suspicion that something important was not 
adding up. This vision made me smile.”9 Manon’s vision is complete 
at the death of her husband “He was dead ... I smiled wanly at my 
altered reflection”10, her altered reflection shows that she no longer 
answers to the quintessential gendered norms of  the antebellum of 
the south but has now embodied the true position of white master.  

 
Fox-Genovese states that “Women were bound to each other 

in the household, not in sisterhood, but by their specific and 
different relations to their master.”11 This bond is reflected 
throughout Property. Sarah and Manon are indeed bounded; 
however the links that keep them to the master, who has remained 
nameless throughout the entire text except for his initials after his 
death, is not the same. Their bond is also cut with Manon’s “altered 
reflection.” 

 
Sarah’s petit marronage is nullified in this text as it becomes 

hinged on the loss of Manon. Valerie Martin’s work is 
groundbreaking as it taps into the white female psyche at the time 
without the wanton need of glorification or the need to position the 
white woman as all innocent. What becomes detrimental to the 
development of the novel is the pervasive silence that is Sarah’s 
existence. Valerie Martin is indeed positioning this novel as a break 
from the abolitionist female spectra at the same time the quietening 
of Sarah fully takes away from her female agency; it undermines the 
enslaved African females’ ability to construct any form of resistance. 
Notably throughout this narrative is the reoccurrence of Walter, 
Sarah’s son. Walter stands in as the clear hybridization of the New 
World of new peoples.  He is virtually represented as a “creature” 
that is only capable of loud “babbling” noises. The fact that Sarah 
does not speak and Walter is the only person who does gives the idea 

                                                           
8 Broeck 
9 Valerie Martin, Property (New York: Vintage,2003),76 
10 Martin 134 
11  Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household, (London: The 

University of South Carolina Press), 



CHANTAL MCFARLANE| 
THE PERVASIVE SILENCE OF ENSLAVED WOMEN 

98 

that the only form of communication capable from the enslaved is 
incoherency.  

 
The most readily identifiable symbol in Property is Manon’s 

“spyglass” this spyglass represents several things at once; the fact 
that as readers we will always be distant from the actual event based 
on the fact that it is in the past and the relationship that Manon tries 
to have with slavery. Valerie Martin establishes that perspectives are 
relative as is evidence by the shattering of the glass. “The spyglass 
was dismantled and lay in pieces on the carpet” (134, Martin) the 
dismantling of the spyglass represents the shattering of Manon’s 
distance from the actuality of slavery, her coming into being master 
of her slaves and her removal from the role of property. According to 
Broeck Manon’s “need” for Sarah goes beyond that of the need to be 
served and assert herself as a propertied female and more of a way to 
celebrate her “trans-aggressive sexual freedom” which could only be 
previously explored through her voyeuristic spyglass.  

 
I am not suggesting that this text is polemical however its 

very structure borrows from that of the construction of history 
wherein only the voice of the privileged is heard. The author’s need 
to enlist the unpitying stance of the protagonist is commendable 
however the tension that arises from Sarah’s silence is left to 
question. The only time that she speaks is at the end of the novel, 
which signifies the fact that her thoughts need not be elaborated on 
as it is not profound enough to be transcribed. Property subtly 
acknowledges historic understandings of being owned and the 
varying degrees of being property.   
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

 

 

 

  



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Works Cited 

 

Aptheker, Herbert. American Negro Slavery. Columbia: Columbia Uni. 

Press. (1963) 

 

Broeck, Sabine. “Property: White Gender and Slavery” in Gender Forum: 

An Internet Journal for Gender Studies 14. (2006). (Web) 

 

Bynum, Victoria. Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual 

Control in the Old South.  

London: The University of North Carolina Press (1992).  

 

Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. Within the Plantation Household: Black and 

White Women of the Old South. London: The University of North Carolina 

Press (1988) 

 

Hawks, Joanne V. and Sheila L. Skemp. Sex, Race, and the Role of 

Women in the South Jackson: University Press of Mississippi (1983) 

 

Martin, Valerie. Property. New York: Vintage Books (2003) 

 

 


