----- Original Message -----
From: "COUNTRY.GARDENS" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, March 29, 2003 1:27 PM
Subject: J3efferson In Paree
From my dear friend, Brenda LaClair, who sent this to me and has allowed me
permission to submit it to the List.
Deane Mills
York County
From: "David Thomas Konig"
Sent: Wednesday, March 26, 2003 1:59 PM
Subject: Re: Jefferson-Hemings popular resources
For teaching purposes (and none other!), I have found it useful for
students to watch the 1995 Merchant-Ivory film, "Jefferson in Paris."
David Konig
Washington University in St. Louis
Hi Deane,
In 1993 or 1994 my knowledge of TJ and position in CWF (Colonial
Williamsburg Foundation) brought an
interesting work assignment: being one of Nick Nolte's staff resource
persons when he, his agent, and assistant came to Colonial Williamsburg to
do research for his upcoming role in the Merchant Ivory film. I found Mr.
Nolte to be extremely intelligent and kind, yet a person with a lot of
nervous insecurity. When I saw the resulting film, I felt that he had been
trapped in a flawed vehicle, scripted by a person (Ruth Jabala? sp?) who
understood the ethos of Edwardian Britain but was ignorant of
/unskillfullyinterpreted the ethos of post-revolutionary Virginia. When a
friend asked about my response to this film, I wrote the following:
A NON-PC FEMINIST RESPONSE TO DISNEY'S MERCHANT IVORY FILM, JEFFERSON IN
PARIS
March 27 & 28, 1995
Dear Founding Spirits,
Please grant me the strength and courage of eloquence in this current time
and gender envelope (a predicament best described as a little white woman in
the waning years of the 20th Century) to inspire changes that will balance
and heal the world of the living.
Now about this Sally Hemings thing--WHY are we so preoccupied with the
notion that TJ would consort with a mulatto girl? Is it the racial angle?
That he would be captivated by a member of a race he assessed as inferior,
all the while trembling before the terrible prospect of a just God (Divine
Providence) reversing those relative positions [which suggests that he was
either a sadomasochist or a terrific rationalizer with the addendum that
Sally (the half-sister of his wife) was "almost a white woman."]
Is it the age difference--that she was a quarter century younger? In a
time when the tractability of women inferior in age could be considered
downright beneficial, as in the instance of George Wythe (TJ's mentor) who
when
approaching age 30 took as his second wife a sixteen-year old. [In the
19thcentury, President John Tyler would surprise his daughter by
appropriating one of her young lady friends as his second wife; in very
recent decades, a
thirty-something British prince bridled himself to a late teen. ]
** INSEPARABLE BUT NOT EQUAL **
Is it a most basic equation in irony that TJ would invoke the "P-variable:"
a powerful white gentleman makes advances to a tender vulnerable slave
woman/child
<RACE:GENDER:AGE:STATION:CLASS>?
A concomitant myth perpetrated by some white men and black women is that of
the emotionally frigid white lady. [Ergo, TJ and Sally become natural allies
in a conspiracy best described as "the Eldridge Cleaver corollary:" the REAL
losers in the sexual politics of slavery were white women and black men.]
In discussing this notion with Southern dowagers, a blithe retort often
repeated is that white wives were only too ready to be relieved of the life
threat of childbirth. ["Leave my bed and go down to the quarters" or "I'll
be your legal but not your sexual partner."]
PARTNER is the key word here. TJ's sole marriage partner was as charming
and cultivated a companion as 18th-century Virginia society was capable of
yielding.
An equal partner? no. As ideal a counterpart as social conditioning of the
time could render. And although she may have enjoyed connubial bliss, her
physical vessel proved tragically frail; indeed she gave her life in the
cause of producing an obligatory male heir. [Here the
old "biology as destiny" bugaboo rears its head; a startling point to
consider--until World War I, American women dying on birthbeds outnumbered
men dying on battlefields.]
So with his dear Patty's demise, TJ was released to go on in national
service as minister to France.
FRANCE, so full of pleasures of the mind and senses, especially when
compared to Virginia. Thomas Jefferson of Albemarle county in Paris: a
child let loose in a candy store. CANDY so immediate in delight, so certain
in indulgence and decay.
Enter Maria Cosway. At the very mention of her name, numerous male
historians smirk like naughty
schoolboys (fantasizing about "doing it to brainy broads in class"?).
Obscured by all this snickering is a possibility that TJ may have had his
first experience or true intellectual rapport with a woman! (No small feat
for one of our most intellectual of Presidents.) Whether physical
consummation occurred seems beside the point; a mental and emotional merge
seems to have been effected, yet a spiritual one is questionable given TJ's
deism and Maria's Catholicism.
Where does ALL this lead?
TJ to the possible warmth of a girls dusky arms
and to the very real perfidies of George Washington's Cabinet; Maria back to
an oppressive, perhaps abusive English marriage and ultimately a convent
iItaly.
So women of the world, what homilies are we to drive from this lesson in
history?
Patty's song: live by the womb, die by the womb?
Maria's aria: smart women wind up sexless in the end? Sally's plaint: the
meek shall NOT inherit the earth in a slave society? Perhaps the meanest
refrain in the TJ-Sally ode goes something like this: the genteel argument
that
miscegenation would be abhorrent to Mr. Jefferson negates the possibility
that beauty can be appreciated in the OTHER. Whatever "other"
is;losing/finding oneself in the aesthetic of exoticism is a perennial
theme.Persnickety racists beware: Sally could indeed be beautiful and
desired byMr. Jefferson. Whether these potential desires were acted upon is
yet another thorn.
How do we countenance the Hemings family chronicles that TJ was their daddy?
What about the Jefferson family stories of the Carr nephews or brother
Randolph siring Sally's offspring?
How does one vindicate Mr. Jefferson's honor without impugning Sally's
truthfulness as a mother?
Is there a difference between being a biological daddy and a putative
father? If this logic is followed, could Sally have regarded TJ as an
idealized protector or even fantasy lover? Stranger stories have emerged:
consider
in our own time tabloid accounts of the assorted offspring of rock stars,
celebrity athletes, and aliens from other worlds.
It is sad when women seek to elevate their self-esteem by coupling
themselves with notoriety OR that powerful ones would overwhelm a vulnerable
creature and then abdicate
responsibility to nurture the life they helped to foster.
TJ at least liberated there Hemings children fostered under his care.
WHAT are the USES of this saga? When we get beyond the lure of
sensationalism, the embarrassment of titillation, the desire for impossible
romance, a dilemma still remains: in the emerging 21st Century, how do we
draft a constitution to foster biologically emancipated, socially
responsible citizens? How do we promote conditions whereby people
regardless of their gender/racial/religious/national wrappers dedicate
their capacities of body/mind/emotion/spirit to full functioning? On what
basis do we constitute contracts allowing us to be INSEPARABLE AND EQUAL
PARTNERS???
Yours in love and light,
with apologies to all and deference to none,
Brenda LaClair
Williamsburg
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