Gender Oppression And Racism In Property

Tracy Snow
22 April 2015
Gender Oppression and Racism in Property
Property, written by Valerie Martin, focuses on the life of a plantation owner’s wife; Manon Gaudet. Fixed on a Louisiana sugar plantation, Manon, is wife to a marauding slave owner and mistress to a house slave who has given birth to two children fathered by Manon’s husband. Martin uses the life of Manon to convey how gender oppression and racism influenced the life of Manon.
The character of Manon is that of a peculiar one. She herself has been raised to acknowledge what little feelings she has, whether emotional or physical, however she distances herself in her own life. Manon herself is removed from her own physical feelings, as it might seem that she has embraced misery
In the scene where Manon is drinking the milk from Sarah’s breast, she successfully completes an act of her own, gendered liberation by acting out on Sarah; she was able to break down gender boundaries placed on women of her society. Sarah becomes an individual to carry out the white woman’s own fantasies of power. Yet, one must be mindful that this scene had little to do with bonding and entirely focused on the domination of another. “How wonderful I felt, how entirely free” (Martin 76). In a way, Manon suckling on the Sarah’s breast, symbolized the blurring of lines between what is natural and abnormal and what is unnatural and proper between whites and blacks. Manon has constructed Sarah to be the wife she never could
She and countless others have been judged as a shellfish individual for taking matters in their own hands in order to achieve happiness. The expectations of her dull life slowly start to disappear, after her mother dies, taking her criticism with her. This in a way frees her from her lacking role as a wife. Moments later, Manon expresses that, for the first time in years she sleeps well. This behavior, further explains how Manon is finally taking action to fulfill her own needs, and her needs lie farther beyond her because she is stuck in world she is a part of. Manon’s character is one that is the oppressed and the oppressor, rational and naïve, owner and that of property. After learning the truth about her father’s failing, “He had refused to bring more children, black, white, or yellow, into this hell where they must suck in lies with their mother’s milk” (Martin 180), she beings to realize that he was aware of how society impacted his own life. Her father’s suicide was only seen as egotistical and rash, thinking that death was the only way to act on his recent