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Edinburgh Research Explorer 'Monstrous perversions and lying inventions' Citation for published version: Murray, H-R 2019, 'Monstrous perversions and lying inventions': Moses Roper's resistance to the British imagination of slavery and abolition. in A Dix & P Templeton (eds), Violence from Slavery to #BlackLivesMatter: African American History and Representation. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429342684 Digital Object Identifier (DOI): 10.4324/9780429342684 Link: Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research Explorer Document Version: Peer reviewed version Published In: Violence from Slavery to #BlackLivesMatter Publisher Rights Statement: This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in : Violence from Slavery to #BlackLivesMatter: African American History and Representation, on 12 November 2019, available online: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429342684 General rights Copyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policy The University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorer content complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 05. Oct. 2021 HANNAH-ROSE MURRAY “Monstrous Perversions and Lying Inventions”: Moses Roper’s Performative Resistance to the Transatlantic Imagination of American Slavery In the 2013 web series “Ask A Slave,” actress Azie Mira Dungey recorded questions she received from white audience members when she interpreted the life of an enslaved individual at Virginia’s Mount Vernon Historic Site. Grouping these questions under specific themes such as resistance and fugitivity, abolition, labour, and the enslaved family, Dungey answers the queries while portraying an enslaved woman named Lizzie Mae. In the third episode, a white, male character refuses to believe her life is as difficult as she makes out, commenting that “if you look at it honestly, slavery wasn’t that bad … slavery is a good industrious life, where you got room and board for your work.” Lizzie Mae meets this comment with a round of expletives and a witty rebuttal (she built her own house, for example). A line of text passes along the screen, reading “you just can’t make this stuff up” (Dungey 2013). Three years later, in an identical line of argument, Fox News journalist Bill O’Reilly stated that slavery was not a brutal institution, especially for those who built the White House since they “were well-fed and had decent lodgings.” Reilly’s statement was in response to First Lady Michelle Obama’s observation that she woke “up every morning in a house that was built by slaves” (Frenck 2016). In both circumstances, the denial of slavery’s brutality not only deforms its reality but also subsequently discredits black testimony and silences the black voice. Whether in a public heritage space or within the media, the white men in this scenario sought to discredit centuries- old evidence from formerly enslaved people and their descendants. Page 1 of 26 White attempts at repudiating the violent nature of American slavery are nothing new, however. Nineteenth-century abolitionists challenged white pro-slavery defenders who maintained that enslaved populations were content in their condition. Black activists like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, William and Ellen Craft, and Moses Roper refused to accept such racist arguments, and worked tirelessly to convince the transatlantic public that slavery was a cruel and bloody system. However, they were acutely aware that their authenticity and their testimony itself were heavily scrutinized by white abolitionists and their audiences alike. These doubts were rooted in white supremacy, and black men and women often had to make compromises in their written work and public performances to allow for such disbelief. For example, during a lecture series in Nottingham, England in 1851, William Wells Brown displayed his panorama of slavery (a moving painting on canvas thousands of feet long) across three consecutive nights. In the first meeting, he assured audiences that “the utmost care had been taken not to misrepresent or exaggerate the subject in the least degree” and as a result “several sketches had not been transferred to canvas lest they might be deemed liable to such a charge” (Nottingham Review 1851, 3). Brown removed scenes (probably of hideous torture and cruelty) to reduce any criticism he would potentially receive. The public awareness of slavery coexisted with racial stereotypes and pro-slavery arguments that decreed enslaved populations were content. Brown challenged these narratives but found it difficult to convince his white audiences of the true extent of slavery’s barbarity. John Andrew Jackson, another formerly enslaved individual who toured Britain, summarized this complexity. After the phenomenal success of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Jackson wrote that as a white woman Stowe had no concept of what slavery was truly like, writing she “dared only allude to some of the hellish works of Page 2 of 26 slavery” since it “was too foul to sully her pen.” Specifically referring to violence and torture, Jackson declared that the “half has not yet been told” (Jackson 1862, iii). Unfortunately for formerly enslaved African American Moses Roper, his attempts to tell the other “half” of the story received mixed success in the British Isles. On the one hand, a strong antislavery sentiment remained in British society since the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and of slavery in the British Empire in 1838, and British people flocked to hear Roper’s testimony against slavery. He sold thousands of copies of his own slave narrative and travelled extensively around the country from Penzance to Aberdeen. The desire to hear a formerly enslaved individual speak no doubt co-existed with a fetishistic desire to view the black body as a site of pain and torture, but there were some who rejected Roper’s stories altogether. In certain locations, he was branded a liar for deliberately perverting the nature of the “peculiar institution” – his descriptions of repeated beatings, floggings and torture were apparently exaggerated, as they seemed so unbelievable. Like their twenty-first-century counterparts, newspaper correspondents tapped into white supremacist narratives to threaten Roper’s reputation, jeopardize his future success and ultimately discredit his testimony. As Marcus Wood states, “writings by ex-slaves and slave narratives from their first appearance were created and read against a perpetual backdrop of white suspicion, patronization and possessive fantasy” (2002, 11). The element of white suspicion is key to understanding the racial dynamics and politics of abolitionism, as well as white responses to African Americans in general. Roper’s speeches were often met with heavy suspicion and sometimes vitriolic loathing; extending across national lines, newspaper correspondents’ commentaries and rejection of Roper’s testimony revealed their investment in white supremacy and their desire to erode and deny black testimony. However, in spite of rising disbelief Page 3 of 26 and personal attacks, Roper risked his success and reputation on the British stage by boldly refusing to compromise on his descriptions of the brutality of slavery, since this denial threatened his identity and was an insult to everything he had endured. The first section of this chapter will explore the complexities surrounding the representation of slavery, and how white activists too often focused on black corporeal pain. By recounting the violent acts of white slaveowners one after the other, white abolitionists hoped to educate audiences and reinforce the belief that slavery was a sin. Unfortunately, this objectified black bodies and sometimes made them voiceless victims of slavery’s violence, rather than self-reflexive agents of survival. The next section will explore Roper’s interaction with Victorian print culture, and how his radicalism hindered his success on the Victorian stage. I will analyse three newspaper articles from England, Ireland and Wales to explain how Roper’s bold denunciation of slavery invited criticism along white supremacist lines: for these white correspondents, together with some of their audiences, slavery was a brutal institution, but to trust Roper’s word alone was folly. The violence Roper described was simply too brutal to be believed. Lastly, I will explore Roper’s performative reactions to such press criticism and slander. Despite relaying stories of torture and mutilation, he presented himself as the subject, rather than the object, of his own narrative and I will discuss three specific performative techniques Roper employed to challenge such ferocious criticism. The first centres on his Narrative, which he used not only as a way to make a living but also as an object to challenge white sceptics when he handed out copies to unsuspecting strangers. The second involved a bold refusal to edit his testimony on stage. While some visiting African Americans compromised or edited their speeches to gain popularity, Roper did not yield to Victorian sensibilities. The third centres upon the threat of violence: on Page 4 of 26 several occasions after Roper had relayed accounts of his torture, white men in Roper’s audience expressed loud disbelief that a man could survive such vicious whipping, only for Roper to quickly reply he would take the individual outside and show him in practice. The ephemeral nature of performance, together with the difficulty of understanding black performance through the white lens of Victorian print culture, means it is unclear whether Roper made these comments in jest. Regardless, Roper never compromised on his descriptions of slavery’s violence. His commitment to the truth revealed itself both publicly and privately.