Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Wench
3. Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Wench.
Four enslaved women are brought by their masters to an Ohio summer resort, three summers running. I'm tempted to say that the story focuses on the relationships between the women, but enslavement warps and constrains everything, including the ability of these women to build relationships with each other. Instead, perhaps, I should say that it focuses on these women's ongoing struggle against their enslavement, and how that affects their relationships with each other.
Some of the early reviews I read suggested that this was a story about love between masters and slaves, in this sheltered little place in the North where it possible for that love to feel expression... I desperately hope I'm misremembering something, because even typing that make me want to throw up a little. All of these women are favored in their owner's eyes as concubines, but only one of the women perceives the relationship between her and her owner as love. (And to my eye, that "love" is the same relationship as what gets called love in domestic abuse situations: a last grasp at personal agency.) The other three women are in various states of resignation and rebellion, and not one of them would use the word "love", nor anything like it, for their relationships with their owners.
The novel is in four parts, and centers on Eliza, the sole woman in the story who frames her relationship with her owner as love. We first get to see all four women in their first summer together at the resort (I found that first summer somewhat perplexing, with so much left unsaid in the narration that I was often lost as to why someone was doing something, or even, at times, as to what had just happened). Then we are given Eliza's extended backstory -- the entire arc of her relationship with her owner, which does much to explain her choices the first summer. The final two parts are the last two summers at the resort, focusing on the individual choices each of the women make with respect to how and when they resist their owners, as well as how they try to influence each other to either resist or capitulate, depending on what is at stake for whom. I'm going to be chewing over the relationships in this novel for a long time coming -- there is nothing simple about what these women are dealing with, nor with how they choose to face it.
I would think this should not need saying, given the topic, however: trigger warning for incest, rape, sexual and non-sexual abuse of children, emotional torture, and physical violence. And probably other things I've forgotten to enumerate. Not so very graphic, but the emotional torture is unremitting -- it is, after all, the primary method of control that these owners used against their slaves while in the North.
(additional tags: slavery, united states, historical fiction, 1850s)
Four enslaved women are brought by their masters to an Ohio summer resort, three summers running. I'm tempted to say that the story focuses on the relationships between the women, but enslavement warps and constrains everything, including the ability of these women to build relationships with each other. Instead, perhaps, I should say that it focuses on these women's ongoing struggle against their enslavement, and how that affects their relationships with each other.
Some of the early reviews I read suggested that this was a story about love between masters and slaves, in this sheltered little place in the North where it possible for that love to feel expression... I desperately hope I'm misremembering something, because even typing that make me want to throw up a little. All of these women are favored in their owner's eyes as concubines, but only one of the women perceives the relationship between her and her owner as love. (And to my eye, that "love" is the same relationship as what gets called love in domestic abuse situations: a last grasp at personal agency.) The other three women are in various states of resignation and rebellion, and not one of them would use the word "love", nor anything like it, for their relationships with their owners.
The novel is in four parts, and centers on Eliza, the sole woman in the story who frames her relationship with her owner as love. We first get to see all four women in their first summer together at the resort (I found that first summer somewhat perplexing, with so much left unsaid in the narration that I was often lost as to why someone was doing something, or even, at times, as to what had just happened). Then we are given Eliza's extended backstory -- the entire arc of her relationship with her owner, which does much to explain her choices the first summer. The final two parts are the last two summers at the resort, focusing on the individual choices each of the women make with respect to how and when they resist their owners, as well as how they try to influence each other to either resist or capitulate, depending on what is at stake for whom. I'm going to be chewing over the relationships in this novel for a long time coming -- there is nothing simple about what these women are dealing with, nor with how they choose to face it.
I would think this should not need saying, given the topic, however: trigger warning for incest, rape, sexual and non-sexual abuse of children, emotional torture, and physical violence. And probably other things I've forgotten to enumerate. Not so very graphic, but the emotional torture is unremitting -- it is, after all, the primary method of control that these owners used against their slaves while in the North.
(additional tags: slavery, united states, historical fiction, 1850s)