Property
Author: Valerie Martin
Publisher: Doublday (original) / Vintage (trade paperback)
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
Valerie Martin’s Property delivers an eerily mesmerizing inquiry into slavery’s venomous effects on the owner and the owned. The year is 1828, the setting a Louisiana sugar plantation where Manon Gaudet, pretty, bitterly intelligent, and monstrously self-absorbed, seethes under the dominion of her boorish husband. In particular his relationship with her slave Sarah, who is both his victim and his mistress.
Exploring the permutations of Manon’s own obsession with Sarah against the backdrop of an impending slave rebellion, Property unfolds with the speed and menace of heat lightning, casting a startling light from the past upon the assumptions we still make about the powerful and powerful.
TL;DR Review
Property forces white women to take an uncomfortable look at their role in the history of slavery. It’s not exactly “fun” to read, but it is masterfully crafted and effective.
For you if: You want to read historical fiction that’s written to address racism, not merely portray it.
Full Review
“The sight of him was like a door slamming in my face. I even heard the catch of the latch, though perhaps it was only Sarah’s baby swallowing hard.”
Property won the Women’s Prize in 2003, so I read it as part of the #ReadingWomen challenge. I was initially suspicious of a book about slavery having been written by a white woman, but there’s a blurb of praise by Toni Morrison on the front cover, so I stayed open-minded.
It turns out that Property is a chillingly narrated, unflinching first-person look at the role white women played in the history of slavery, particularly the way they contributed to cruelty toward enslaved women. Valerie Martin says, “White women: We did this. Don’t look away.”
It’s written from the point of view of a woman named Manon, whose husband is the worst kind of cruel plantation owner. She hates him, but not because of the way he treats his slaves; because he shamed her by regularly “sleeping with” and having two children by Sarah, her maid. Meanwhile, during this book, slave rebellions brew nearby and a yellow fever epidemic threatens.
Manon is fully unlikeable. She’s quite terrible, in fact. She is entirely self-centered, and clearly doesn’t think of Sarah or the other slaves as human at all. She is annoyed — and allows it to confirm her view of them as inhuman — when slaves are unsympathetic to her discomfort or don’t say thank you, even though Manon herself never says the word please even once. She even envies them their “simple lives,” saying they just get to run and be brought back all at white people’s expense without a thought to how it impacts them, or how Sarah can slip inside when they arrive somewhere and be “spared” the obligation to greet people. And she has absolutely no idea why Sarah would still want to escape once Manon’s husband is no longer a threat.
Manon’s husband is terrible. And Manon absolutely has valid grievances against him for the way he treats her. But seeing the way he treats Sarah, filtered through Manon’s blind and unsympathetic eyes, we lose all sympathy for her.
All that doesn’t make this book “fun” to read, exactly, but the expertise of Valerie Martin’s craft and purpose can’t be denied. And that makes it entirely worth reading. Especially for white women. To reckon with our own blindness to intersectionality, to show how easy it is to dehumanize and deny others in order to attempt to bring forth our own grievances, and to admit the way we have historically used Black women as stepping stones for our own gain relative to white men.
Trigger Warnings
Rape and sexual violence
Graphic violence
Racism
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