Valerie Martin's Property and the Failure of the Lesbian Counterplot.

by Amy K. King If you want to know how a mistress marriage works, ask a triangle. In Euclidean geometry the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees and parallel lines never meet. Everyone knows the score, and the women are held in tension, away from one another. The shape is beguiling and it could be understood as a new geometry of family life. Unfortunately, Euclidean theorems work only if space is flat. In curved space, the angles over-add themselves and parallel lines always meet. His wife, his mistress, met. (Winterson 16) THE SHAPE OF A TRIANGLE HAS LONG BEEN A POPULAR ABSTRACTION FOR human relationships of desire. As my epigraph from Jeanette Winterson's Gut Symmetries shows, when two women and a man are involved in a triangle of desire, the women's relationship is commonly one of tension and jealousy as they compete for the man's attentions. However, as in Winterson's novel, the wife and mistress involved in the triangle can begin their own passionate affair, which may extinguish the women's preoccupation with the man. Thus, when wife and mistress meet, their subsequent relationship may mirror an idealized lesbianstructure labeled a triangle of female desire by theorist Terry Castle in The Apparitional Lesbian. In this female-centered arrangement, the women initially held in tension away from one another can begin a relationship that not only awakens one or both of them sexually but also cultivates feminist hope through the women's achieving personal growth, developing or exuding feminist convictions, and/or building community between themselves and other women. The female desire triangle can possibly achieve a positive end for some women because it allows them to assert their independence from patriarchal social structures and take part in female community. However, the theory that triumphant female desire will overshadow the harms of male-dominated society does not reflect the realities of societies that privilege ownership of other people, as in the antebellum South. While "feminist hope" was possible in the Old South, the inherent privileges bestowed upon white slaveholding women made their embrace of true feminist thought of equality and empowerment for all women--white and black--highly unlikely: They were known to grumble in private about certain aspects of their lives and even, on occasion, to blame slavery for the most disagreeable ones.... But the complaints of slaveholding women never amounted to a concerted attack on the system, the various parts of which, as they knew, stood or fell together. Slavery, with all its abuses, constituted the fabric of their beloved country--the warp and woof of their social position, their personal relations, their very identities. (Fox-Genovese 334) Like Elizabeth Fox-Genovese in her work on white slaveholding women's lives in the Old South, Valerie Martin takes issue with the projection of current feminist optimism onto a complicated time and place. By Martin's own admission, her interest lies "in power struggles

everywhere," and in her novel Property (2003), she takes on the relationships of power that exist between a white slaveholding woman, her husband, and her mixed-race maid ("Interview" 13). Property tells a story of the antebellum South from the point of view of a slaveholding woman, Manon Gaudet, who lives on a southern Louisiana sugar plantation in 1828. Manon's daily life is fraught with struggles for power. Manon reveals throughout that the slaveholding men around her strive to obtain and keep power over their property--including their white wives and daughters. As Manon's husband (Gaudet) and her father compete for influence in her life, the three of them represent the basic male-male-female triangle of desire Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick identifies in nineteenth-century European novels. According to Sedgwick in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, the traditional triangle of desire represents the power relationships at play between a woman and her two male suitors (or a suitor and another man who has a claim on the woman, such as her father) as well as the power relationship between the two men participating in "the legal, economic, religious, and sexual exchange" of the woman in question (Castle 68). Property's illustration of the triad of male desire situates the novel within Sedgwick's feminist discourse; but the lesbian counterplot, as Terry Castle defines it, dominates the novel. In her work, Castle expands on Sedgwick's theories concerning the male-male-female triangle to include another kind of erotic triangulation in literature--female-female-male--which subverts canonical European plots:
To theorize about female-female desire, I would like to suggest, is precisely to envision the taking apart of this supposedly intractable patriarchal structure [of the exchange of women between men].... As the figure below suggests, the male-female-male erotic triangle remains stable only as long as its single female term is unrelated to any other female term. Once two female terms are conjoined in space, however, an alternative structure comes into being, a female-male-female triangle, in which one of the male terms from the original triangle now occupies the "in between" or subjugated position of the mediator. Within this new female homosocial structure, the possibility of the male bonding is radically suppressed: for the male term is now isolated, just as the female term was in the male homosocial structure.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] To Castle, the mere fact that archetypal lesbian fiction subverts the canonical male-male-female triad proves this female-female-male structure to be positive for women as they have the opportunity to forge new identities outside of patriarchal norms. The idealized effects of the female desire triangle continue to influence feminist scholarship, as Jordan H. Landry shows in a recent article in which she employs the lesbian counterplot ideal to analyze the portrayal of mixed-race women in Nella Larsen's Passing. Landry asserts that in Passing, "Larsen creates women-dominated triangles within which women's desires and bodies rise to the fore separate from male prerogatives" (26) and that "for her two main characters, Irene and Clare, loving blackness becomes inextricable from loving femaleness" (27). Even though Landry sees the ending of Passing as a possible, though not probable, departure from the optimism of the lesbian counterplot (44)--as Irene may have pushed Clare out of a window to her death-Landry asserts that "lesbian desire ... wins out in the end ... because of the kind of desire the ending evokes in the reader" to "focus on the physicality of the woman of mixed ethnicity's body and its ties to the African-American community" (46). Landry employs ideals of the lesbian counterplot to develop her thesis, yet, as Annamarie Jagose claims, the

"category 'lesbian' is not essentially radical or subversive"; rather, "the category 'lesbian' is not essentially anything" (287). To Jagose, using "lesbian" as a category existing outside the reach of power structures "paralyzes as it seduces" because, "In a sense, the illusory exteriority promised by the category 'lesbian' is quite literally a utopic space, ou-topos, no place" (287). Thus, literary criticism which draws on the optimism inherent in the lesbian counterplot resembles Nina Baym's description of feminist literary theory as "a visionary attempt to describe women's writing as a reconstructed future, an attempt in which description often merge[s] with exhortation" (45). Lesbiancultures do not exist outside systems of power, though some readers overemphasize the idyllic nature of the "lesbian counterplot." The ideals associated with the lesbian counterplot can be especially misleading when the women involved in the triangle are unequal in social influence and privilege. The power systems depicted in Property show how the lesbian counterplot ideal fails to reflect the relationship between a master--Manon--and her slave--Sarah. Thus, while Propertyextensively parallels the lesbian counterplot, the novel ultimately destabilizes the optimistic outcomes Terry Castle sees in the triangle of female desire. Property's examination of a slaveholding woman's complex psychology reveals no inherent feminist hope for women involved in a triangle of female desire, especially when the two female protagonists are situated in a social system that focuses so thoroughly on the ownership of people. When one woman--a slave-owner--struggles to assert her own power in society, the other woman--a slave--becomes the female slave-owner's pawn. The relationships defined by power in Property begin with the canonical male desire triad, most obviously because Manon wants power in a society in which "Male prerogative and male responsibility ... [serve] as the organizing principle of ... households and ... society; white men [stand] at the apex of a domestic pyramid of power and obligation that [represent]... a microcosm of the southern social order" (Faust 32). Since the reader knows only what Manon reveals through her narrative in Property, Manon's thoughts concerning her husband and her father demonstrate the male-male-female triangle. Power struggles between Manon and her husband show that the Southern planter society Manon was born into pits her against her husband. Although Mr. Gaudet "prides himself on being different from his neighbors," Manon astutely observes that "his office looks exactly like every planter's office in the state" (8): his ways of living and doing business also reflect the corrupt norms of the slaveholding class in Louisiana, which include a penchant for violence against and forced sexual relations with slaves--at one point, Gaudet goes so far as to lash out against his own young, mixed-race child (28). Gaudet's very identity seems to be caught up in controlling his property, including his wife. During their courtship, Manon believed she "had in [herself] ... some value, something more desirable to [her] husband than money" (151). However, what "struck [her] as unusual" before she was married becomes terribly apparent during her marriage: her husband, to her horror, is interested in using her as a sexual object (151). To find power in her relationship with him, Manon first attempts to enjoy sex with him (no matter how brutal she perceives the act), for she thinks the "intensity" of Gaudet's "abandonment" in bed is "the direct result of some power [she] ha[s] over him, which somehow accrue[s] to [her] benefit" (152). But, soon after realizing her husband's sexual unfaithfulness, she abandons sexual contact with him altogether. Manon, thus discovering that she holds no intrinsic sexual power over her husband, since he has at least one slave concubine at his

disposal, tells him she "just want[s him] to leave [her] alone" (57). Manon exerts power in denying her husband sex, but the arrangement makes her deeply unhappy because it allows Sarah access to Manon's position of power as plantation mistress; Sarah now regularly shares Gaudet's bed and has given birth to one, maybe two, of his children, while Manon remains childless. Manon's mother realizes her daughter's precarious position of authority and determines that Marion's "neglect" of her "duties" has left her "no control in [her] own house" (69). While Manon does not want to have children with Gaudet because she "despise[s] him" (38), she cannot help asking herself "What sort of woman doesn't want children?" (37), a question asked of a woman in a society in which women "always defined themselves in relationship to men--first as daughters and sisters, then as wives and mothers" (Faust 139). Interestingly, early in the novel Manon believes she would have had children if she had married Joel Borden, a city-dweller whose urbane mannerisms make him desirable to many women (27), so the reader knows Marion's negative feelings toward Gaudet to be her sole reason for not wanting children of her own. The society of the Old South, echoed in the statement made by Manon's mother, shows Manon to be deficient if she does not hold the titles of "wife" and "mother," and while Manon does not want to give birth to Gaudet's children, she still thinks about having children in the abstract, with Joel, as if it were not possible for her not to want children at all. Consequently, Manon comes to believe that her own happiness depends on the death of her husband: "Though his ruin entails my own, I long for it.... If my husband dies, I think. If my husband died. But he won't. Not before it's too late for me" (17). Manon's thoughts run parallel to Fox-Genovese's generalization about the unhappiness of planter-class women: "Their men's abuse of prerogatives, notably sexual philandering but also excessive drinking and the squandering of family resources, caused them untold distress. But their resentment of these abuses rarely passed into rejection of the system that established their sense of personal identity within a solid community" (193). Likewise, in Property, Manon does not reject planter-class society: she is too entangled in the privileges of her position as plantation mistress to break away from slaveholding society. Instead of longing for a new social system, early in the novel Manon actually wishes to go back to the "simple comforts" of her parents' plantation, and she later wants to live independently in New Orleans, with the autonomy of a man (17, 180). Although Manon determines that all slaveholding people she knows "live ... on [lies] ... all the time," her anger settles on the people inside her small sphere, and her husband falls first under her scorn (48). Manon's father is the second man in the male-male-female triangle of desire. Early in the novel, Manon highly regards her father as she fondly recollects that he called her hair "his golden treasure" (12). Since planter-class daughters were essentially sold into marriage, Manon's father thought of her hair, her beauty, in terms of monetary gain, even though he dies long before Manon has grown to a marrying age. In addition, Manon's name plays on the word "mammon," which makes her a symbol of insatiability in a society that depends on the continuation of a slave system. (1) Regardless of her father's intentions for her in marriage, Manon believes her father's slaveholding practices are ideal for what a slaveholding "gentleman" should live by. Manon believes her father was "strict but fair," "remarkable," "strong, loving," and that he was "all that stood between [her] innocent happiness and chaos"--certainly a mixture of traits incongruous with a life based on the upkeep, discipline, and imprisonment of people (21, 23). However contradictory a figure Manon's father proves to be, her early recollections of him reflect what Fox-Genovese

identifies as the "protection" slaveholding women experienced from the men in their lives, because "Even as male prerogative hedged [slaveholding women] in, it shielded [them] from direct contact with the disorderly folks who populated the world beyond [their] household[s]" (203). Obviously, Manon believes her father performed his social responsibility to her, but her husband has failed because he has introduced Manon to the cruelties--and, as the reader sees, the realities--of slaveholding. It seems Manon considers her father to be the proverbial knight, for she believes that if he were alive, "he would be at the door with his carriage to take [her] home" (17). While she thinks her father encapsulates male perfection, Manon pits father against husband as she "hear[s her] father's voice" and wonders what he would think about her husband, who brutally "strikes a child at a dinner party" (28-29). Manon's idealization of her father goes beyond his slaveholding practices, however, and leads her to imagine that he "would never have subjected another creature to such an assault" as her husband does to her in the bedroom before she shuts him out (151). During most of the novel, Manon believes her father to be truly different from the male norm of slaveholding society, and she implicitly longs for him as a replacement for her husband. Although Gaudet and Manon's father never meet, and therefore cannot have the formal male homosocial tie the masculine desire triad dictates, Marion creates a bond between them in her mind; she cannot think of one man without recalling the other. This pairing of the two men replaces the homosocial bond in the male-male-female triangle. The relationship between the two appears when Manon recalls her husband's words after he extinguishes a fire at their mill: "According to my husband, the conflagration at the mill only proves that he is a flawless manager, far more intelligent and efficient than my father, who might be alive today if he'd had the benefit of his son-in-law's advice" (50). Manon's narrative creates ambiguity here, for the reader does not know whether the thoughts following the word "manager" are Gaudet's or are Manon's extrapolation from his belief that he is "a flawless manager." Yet, Manon's husband's claim to outperform her father shows the two men in a struggle for power and influence in Manon's mind. Interestingly, though, neither man finds favor with Manon by the end of the novel. While Manon deifies her father throughout, she does have a revelation about his ultimate disregard for her and her mother:
His failing wasn't his refusal to perform his marital duties and engender more children for the general slaughter, though that was doubtless a symptom. It was something else, something Mother knew but never told, something he had always with him, and took with him, something behind his smile and his false cheer, and the charade of feelings he clearly didn't have. He pretended to be a loving father, a devoted husband, but he wasn't really with us, our love was not what he required, he did not long for us as we longed for him. He was an imposter. (181)

Although Manon does not explicitly state what she believes her father's failure to be, she makes it clear that she thinks he was so "obsessed" with slaves that he killed himself, thus failing both Manon and her mother (182). Manon calls her father "hypocrite" as she at last realizes he is like her husband in that they both ultimately neglect their white women. Indeed, Manon's eventual scorn for her father solidifies his intrinsic bond with Gaudet, for the painful revelation about her father causes her to think of her husband as if he were forcing her to wear an iron collar, normally used as punishment for female field slaves (18283). Manon resolves to "hold fast" to her "independence," because she deems it "all that [has] saved [her] from drowning in a sea of lies" perpetrated by the people around her to sustain slaveholding society (180). Independence, however, means freedom only from sexual responsibilities, for Manon does not wish to let go of her relatively comfortable

lifestyle that relies on slave labor. Much like slaveholding women after the Civil War, the limit of Manon's "abilit[y] to construct" a "new sel[f]" is "shaped by a profound sense of how much [she] ha[s] to lose," and her need for comfort beats any desire to reinvent herself outside of slaveholding society (Faust 7). Although neither Gaudet nor Manon's father gains her affections, the men and Manon complete the male-male-female triangle because all three are joined through Manon's narrative. Unlike nineteenth-century fiction, however, Martin's novel goes beyond the male homosocial structure to do something quite modern. Property both subverts the male desire triad with the lesbian counterplot while it also undercuts positive ideals associated with the triangle of female desire. Terry Castle applies her description of the lesbian counterplot to the novel Summer Will Show (1936), by Sylvia Townsend Warner, describing it as "paradigmatically 'lesbian'" in that it "not simply ... depicts a sexual relationship between two women, but that it so clearly, indeed almost schematically, figures this relationship as a breakup of the supposedly 'canonical' male-female-male erotic triangle" (74). Castle calls Summer Will Showa revisionist work, and the female-female-male triangulation between Sophia (the wife), Minna (the husband's mistress), and Frederick (the husband) unsettles the canonical male desire structure (80). This foundational shake-up leads to "the triad of female homosocial desire" (83). Property also embodies characteristics of a revisionist novel, for its first-person narration from a long-silent female figure of notoriety--here, the plantation mistress--recalls Jean Rhys's revisionist project Wide Sargasso Sea. In addition, Tim A. Ryan indicates how Property calls into question the "sisterhood" found between a white woman and a black slave woman in Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose (2). Likewise, Property fits into the "revisionist" lesbian counterplot structure, as Manon, Sarah, and Gaudet make up the points of the female homosocial desire triangle. However, comparing Castle's analysis of Summer Will Show to Martin's novel problematizes the posited hopeful outcomes of the lesbian counterplot. Sarah certainly disrupts the canonical narrative of male desire in Property. She lives, stereotypically, as the concubine of the male master, Manon's husband. This relationship causes Manon "deep humiliation" when she discovers it and realizes that her "sense of having some particular value to [her husband] was a delusion" (152). Due to this awakening, Manon's former "willingness" to "encourage" Gaudet during sex becomes a point of unending bitterness to her (152). While the reader cannot discern what Sarah's relationship with Gaudet entails beyond the sexual--because all of Sarah and Gaudet's interactions (real or imagined) are filtered through Manon's perspective--Sarah's presence operates as a highly destabilizing force in Manon's life. As Joyce Carol Oates explains, "Manon is bitterly jealous of Sarah, and yet Manon admires Sarah; Manon also hates Sarah, thinking she would sell her if she could--but when Manon has the opportunity to sell Sarah for a very good price, after Gaudet's death, she refuses" (134). Because Manon vacillates between conflicting emotions regarding Sarah, the reader does not know how to interpret Sarah. Furthermore, Manon does not identify patriarchal, slaveholding society as the reason for her unhappiness; indeed, she wishes to embrace the powers sanctioned by masculine ownership of property. Rather, she believes she would be happy if it were not for the people who surround her and trouble her. Sarah's position as Gaudet's lover causes Manon great turmoil, not because of Gaudet's exploitation of both women, but because Manon senses that her position of power is in jeopardy. Early in the novel, though, Manon attempts to connect with Sarah over their shared hatred of Gaudet: "'He thinks you are poisoning him,' I said when [my husband] was gone,

watching her face. Something flickered at the corner of her mouth; was it amusement?" (56). Manon's perceived moments of connection with Sarah are infrequent but noteworthy, for she believes that earning "one of [Sarah's] rare straightforward looks.., mean[s Sarah] is pleased" (6). Manon even tries to emulate Sarah's mannerisms in order to upset her husband: "I looked at him for a few moments blankly, without comment, as if he was speaking a foreign language. This unnerves him. It's a trick I learned from Sarah" (8). These interactions pose, however briefly, a threat that Manon and Sarah will join forces to overpower Gaudet in some way--whether through poisoning or some other kind of "female insurrection"--for Gaudet realizes the danger of such a bond between his wife and slavemistress: "His good humor evaporated. He looked from Sarah to me and back again. 'All you women do is talk,' he said" (15). Castle concludes that Frederick, as the man in the female-female-male triad in Summer Will Show, "obviously, is now forced into the position of the subject term, the one 'in between,' the odd one out--the one, indeed, who can be patronized" (83). Manon's husband appears to run the risk of this denigration as the story progresses, especially because Manon denies him a name throughout the narrative, as she always calls him "my husband." In Summer Will Show, Sophia and Minna's psychological and sexual bond creates a "comedy of female-female desire" that reduces Frederick's character to "a figure of fun" and eventually makes him "drop out of sight altogether" (Castle 83). Conversely, Gaudet seems to have great staying power, no matter what the bond between Manon and Sarah may be. When Gaudet tells them, "You women should think about what would become of you if I wasn't here," he obviously sees himself as a constant in the world the women know (16). Gaudet cannot imagine his removal because, according to the patriarchal system under which they live, the stability of the two women's lives depends on his well-being. Manon wants her husband to die, although she believes it would bring about her ruin as well, and she also meditates on what Gaudet's demise would mean to Sarah: "Does Sarah think about what would become of her if he were gone? How could she not? What would become of me must be her next question, as she belongs to me. She can't doubt that I would sell her; I would sell them all" (16). Thus, Manon's own thoughts about Sarah early in the novel reveal her power over the enslaved woman. Even though they share hatred for Gaudet, no action will come out of this connection because there can be no sisterhood between Manon and Sarah if one woman has, and wishes to wield, the power to sell the other. Unlike Frederick's departure from Summer Will Show, then, an outside force eliminates Gaudet from the plot: a slave rebellion makes the total collapse of the canonical plot structure possible by physically removing the man from the story through his death. If the triad of female homosocial desire produces favorable outcomes when the male homosocial triad "reaches its point of maximum destabilization and collapses altogether" (Castle 83), then the positive effects of this destabilization should be evident in Property just as they are in Summer Will Show. Like the protagonist Sophia in Summer Will Show, Manon should have the compulsion to sever "all ties with the past--with her husband, her class, and with sexual convention itself" (Castle 79) in order to form an intimate bond with Sarah. However, Manon's perception of her place in society never changes. While Manon does strive to assert more masculine power throughout the novel, her actions and thoughts always reflect those of a slave-owner. That Manon centers her identity so firmly in Southern planter society reflects Fox-Genovese's findings about white slaveholding women: "That southern women complained about slavery and sometimes about men does not mean that they opposed slavery as a social system or even the prerogatives with which its class and race relations endowed men" (338). Instead of rejecting masculine slaveholding society,

Manon chooses to embrace the very attributes she despises in her husband to gain her own foothold in Southern society. Even as Manon hints at a minor bond of understood glances with Sarah at the beginning of the novel, she continuously projects her own conceptions of events onto Sarah. To illustrate Manon's self-centeredness, Oates points to the scene in which Manon offers a spyglass to Sarah so she may look at Gaudet's exploits with the male field slaves. Sarah surprises Manon by refusing the glass and saying that she has never looked through the glass (17). Because "Manon doesn't quite realize that she is projecting her embittered, voyeuristic self upon Sarah," she may believe that all Sarah's steady gazes and small gestures add up to mean the two women are creating a bond (Oates 135). On the other hand, the text never shows how Sarah regards Manon, for her thoughts are absent from the entire narrative, and Sarah's actions and sparse words are all mediated through Manon's understanding of them. While the reader may believe some good could come out of the Manon/Sarah relationship, Manon's self-centeredness indicates a skewed relationship built on her ownership of Sarah, and her connection with Sarah becomes increasingly oppressive and perverse as the narrative continues. When absorbed inside Manon's narration, the reader may forget that the scale of power tips to her side when she deals with Sarah. Thus, some readers may draw the conclusion that "wordless scenes between mistress and servant, tenderly and sensuously described by Manon, are surrogates for romantic, erotic experiences" for both women (Oates 134), as when Sarah styles Manon's hair (12). Because Manon filters all scenes through her perspective and Sarah does not narrate her own experiences, such scenes cannot represent Sarah's feelings for Manon. Yet Manon does reveal her own conflicted feelings for Sarah: "It is one of the annoying things about her; on those occasions when she bothers to speak, she makes sense"; "There really is something inhuman about her"; "I had a desire to hear her speak"; "She was biting her lower lip with her upper teeth, looking down her nose at me, I thought, with about as much sympathy as a lizard" (6, 42, 55, 70). Manon's inconsistent narration of Sarah mixes contempt with admiration; through these contradictions, she makes Sarah's true feelings and character impossible to determine. While Manon obviously obsesses over Sarah throughout, her fixation grows from complex emotions. Although Manon reveals predictable jealousy regarding Sarah's relationship with her husband, she also exhibits jealousy of her husband's relationship with Sarah as Sarah styles Manon's hair: Sarah's "eyes were lowered, her hand steady, a single line of concentration on her brow all that gave evidence of any feeling about what she was doing. A very different look from the one I'd seen in the night as she rushed from my husband's bedroom. A flood of anger rose in me right up to my throat, so that I gasped for air" (50). Sarah's lack of emotion when she and Manon are alone--compared to Sarah's passionate appearance when she spends the night with Manon's husband--is highly irritating to Manon (48). According to Oates, Manon is "unwittingly in love with her servant Sarah, and most of her actions, even when she lashes out bitterly against Sarah, are guided by this thwarted passion" (139). While labeling Manon's emotions toward Sarah as a corrupted love story may seem to describe Manon's feelings in the scene just detailed, this characterization does not adequately explain the most horrifying scene of the novel--Manon nursing at Sarah's breast. Before the nursing scene, Manon witnesses her mother's death from cholera in her New Orleans townhouse. Following her mother's death, Manon laments that there is "no one to

help" her go against her husband, and she "look[s] around helplessly" as her eyes land on Sarah as she breastfeeds her baby in the parlor (74). Then, as thoughts about her husband and her mother's death agitate her, Manon sits in front of Sarah and begins nursing at her breast. The narration thus connects Manon's witnessing her mother's death, in which black fluid oozes from her orifices, (3) and her seeking a vital mother figure in Sarah as she drinks sweet milk from her breast. Yet substituting "Sarah" for "Manon's mother" oversimplifies the complexities of Manon's relationship to Sarah. This brief section of the narrative forms the turning point of the novel, and it encapsulates Property's undercutting of the lesbian counterplot. Here, Manon's self-centeredness becomes more sinister, as Manon focuses the entire scene--which proves to be deeply intimate for her in some ways--on her own sensations and thoughts. Whereas she often presumes what Sarah's gazes and gestures mean, here she guesses about Sarah's body: "The drop of milk still clung to the dark flesh of her nipple; it seemed a wonder to me that it should"; "I raised my hand, cupping her breast, which was lighter than I would have thought" (76). Manon misreads Sarah's body, only to have her misconceptions brought to her attention by the physicality of that body. Manon does not just ponder Sarah's "meaning"; she takes it upon herself to read--that is, touch-Sarah's physical body, so she does not misunderstand what Sarah's body means. This differs from Manon's constant guessing at what Sarah's looks and gestures mean elsewhere in the novel, and perhaps Manon may, finally, realize that her misconceptions about Sarah run deeper than the physical. However, as Manon shifts from a tentative explorer (reader) of Sarah's body to a brazen exploiter of that body, like her husband--"This is what he does, I thought"--Manon takes full advantage of her position as a slaveholder (76). The line between male and female slaveholder disintegrates. According to Fox-Genovese, "The power of the master constituted the lynch pin of slavery as a social system, and no one ever satisfactorily defined its limits" (326); Manon thus seems to act on the "rights" she perceives as being her own based on how her husband has defined himself as a master. Manon not only realizes that her actions resemble her husband's deeds, but she also becomes voyeur to her own actions as she imagines watching herself, observing her mother watch in horror, and looking at her husband as he "lift[s] his head from his books with an uncomfortable suspicion that something important [i]s not adding up" (76). Becoming voyeur to her own actions gives Manon stereotypically masculine qualities, for she now watches herself just as her husband watches the adolescent slaves during the perverse games he constructs for the sole purpose of inflicting sexual shame to assert his own authority (3-4). While Manon observes these games with disgust through her spyglass at the beginning of the novel--importantly, she initially acts as a hesitant voyeur who asks herself why she should feel guilty for spying on her husband's corruption (18)--she makes the masculine master's rights of sexual exploitation and voyeurism her own during the nursing scene. Exerting the power granted to a male master gives Manon pleasure, and her thoughts are those commonly attributed to intimate awakenings: "How wonderful I felt, how entirely free. My headache disappeared, my chest seemed to expand" (76). Consequently, sexually abusing a slave gives Manon the same sexual arousal her husband experiences while he beats the male slaves because their naked bodies become aroused during his thinly veiled "games" (4). Although Manon's actions link her and Sarah sexually in the female-femalemale desire triad, Manon undeniably receives pleasure solely from knowing she crosses her society's sexual boundaries as she invokes the "rights" of the male master. Manon feels pleasure not because she shares pleasure with another woman but rather because she takes it. Although she may have begun the scene by correcting her misconceptions about Sarah,

Manon once again projects her own feelings onto Sarah while she drinks Sarah's milk: "I closed my eyes, swallowing greedily. I was aware of a sound, a sigh, but I was not sure if it came from me or from Sarah" (76). When Manon hears a disembodied sigh and thinks the two women share "complementary tingling" in their breasts, she reveals her denial of the actual situation and thus completes her projection onto Sarah (76). To her, stealing pleasure from another woman forced to concede the pleasure does not mean that the subjugated woman, Sarah, cannot also have pleasure as well. Manon commits rape made all the more horrifying because she inflicts on another woman the physical and psychological trauma that Manon has had to endure from a man. That Manon would forsake her possible sisterhood with Sarah to take advantage of her body deeply disturbs the reader; however, the nursing scene actually completes the bonds of desire (psychological and physical) between Manon, Sarah, and Gaudet. The end of the scene, when Manon once again guesses at Sarah's emotions--"She's afraid to look at me, I thought. And she's right to be. If she looked at me, I would slap her"--absolutely destroys potential misconceptions about Manon's ability to form a meaningful relationship with Sarah (77). Even though Sarah's body posture and facial expression could mean Manon's actions have outraged her, Manon reads Sarah's posture and expression as fear and subjugation. As Manon basks in the power she can exercise over another woman, the lesbian counterplot fails in spirit due to the power Manon has to exploit Sarah even more thoroughly than her husband can. Although not taking advantage of another woman's body may seem like a basic tenet of sisterhood, Manon does not regard this point because she already has the power--by law--to do anything she wishes to her property, Sarah. Another important facet of the nursing scene lies in its implications for Sarah's children, who are the products of Gaudet's exploitation of Sarah's body. Because Manon makes clear that she will not cut ties with masculine slaveholding society to embrace an alternate, matriarchal system, Sarah cannot hope for a positive change in her children's lives. In contrast to feminist action, as Susan V. Donaldson indicates, Manon "coldly, methodically" takes Sarah's milk in a "violation" that is much like the one enacted on Sethe in Toni Morrison's novel Beloved by two white boys, for milk is understood to be "the only thing" a slave woman "has to give to her children" (274). In stealing Sarah's milk, Manon firmly indicates her attitude toward Sarah and her children--none of them deserve her acknowledgment as human beings. Throughout the novel, Manon disregards Sarah's deaf, lively son Walter as being a "horrid creature" (34) that is "like a dog" (5) and is a "curse" (154) that she "never touch[es]" if she "can avoid it" (169). Sarah's baby, Nell, gets less--but equally telling--descriptions from Manon, for she believes the baby is "a dark, ugly thing" (6). Instead of reaching out to Sarah and her children as people also harmed by the masculine slave system, Manon chooses to subjugate them further by attempting to take away their humanity, since they are merely property that she can assert her control over to gain security. Even though Manon never gives the nursing scene a second thought, the rest of the novel deals with the emotional fallout from this breach of sexual boundaries. Manon, of course, continues to attempt to know Sarah's thoughts through her expressions and gestures: The baby "would find little to be happy about in being weaned, I thought, and Sarah's long face told me she thought so too"; "She was feeling sullen, I concluded.... She gave me a sudden penetrating look, then turned away.... In Sarah's look I had read the same question I had in my own mind: How much do you know?" (97, 99). After the nursing scene, the gap between Manon and Sarah grows wider, and Manon cannot guess the actual feelings these "looks"

might entail. Even though sexual interaction commonly solidifies the bond between women in the female triangle of desire, feminist possibility totally unravels in Property after Manon sexually exploits Sarah. Manon realizes Sarah does not love her: "The truth was that at that moment I wanted nothing more than to pour out the tale of my unhappiness to someone who loved me, but there was no such person" (104). Despite her endless self-absorption and selfpity, Manon at least knows she does not have any meaningful connections with people, including Sarah. Manon, however, cannot guess that the reasons for this division stem not only from Sarah's feelings for her personally but more importantly from Manon's position of power in the slaveholding class, a position which Manon fully and deliberately embodies. Later, the extent of Manon and Sarah's detachment is apparent during a conflict with runaway slaves on Gaudet's plantation. As a consequence of the power divide between the two women, Manon must give Sarah the direction to stand close to her when a runaway slave enters her bedroom (107). Understandably, Sarah does not automatically seek safety or solidarity by standing near the woman who took advantage of her body. Manon's thoughts during the slave insurrection reveal the true nature of Manon's relationship with Sarah. Under the strain of probable death, Manon exposes her disregard for the well-being of any person other than herself--including Sarah--for she wonders, "above all, how could I escape?" (108). Manon's selfishness finally separates her entirely from Sarah, and she repeatedly chronicles Sarah's actions as a detached observer: "I looked at Sarah, who stood with her back to the sideboard as if she expected to be called upon to serve coffee"; "I glanced at Sarah, who had laid her hand across her mouth and closed her eyes"; "I looked back at Sarah, who was edging away from the table" (109, 110, 112). This disconnection ends once the two women vie for Gaudet's abandoned horse after he is beheaded by one of the rebels; here, Manon experiences another physical lesson via Sarah. Whereas Manon begins the nursing scene learning about Sarah's body, while Manon and Sarah compete for the horse, she receives a painful lesson as a consequence of her actions as a slaveholder: Sarah "turned on me in a fury, tearing at my face with her free hand, her sharp nails digging into my already wounded cheek" (114-15). Although Manon pleads with Sarah to let her go first because the slaves will kill her, Sarah tears at Manon's skin and refuses to allow her to flee on the horse so Sarah and her infant can escape the plantation. Yet the reasons for Sarah's violence are lost on Manon, who at first wonders whether Sarah is "going for help" (115). Manon's self-absorption quickly leads her to change her view of Sarah's actions. While Sarah possibly does hope the slaves will kill Manon, as Manon suspects, Manon is unable to imagine any other reason why Sarah would have sprinted toward the horse (117). She is mystified when Sarah runs away after Gaudet has been beheaded by the rebels: "My husband is dead, I thought. Why would she run now, when she was safe from him? It didn't make sense" (127). Obviously, Manon cannot view Sarah's flight with her baby as an escape from slavery, for Manon still projects her own thoughts and desires onto Sarah. Because Manon does not truly wish to escape Southern society and all its conveniences--as a member of the South's elite class, a slaveholding woman's "fundamental sense of identity depend[s] on having others to perform life's menial tasks" (Faust 77)--she is incapable of imagining why Sarah would want to flee. After all, Manon believes the insurrection ordeal was worth her physical pain and disfigurement solely because it removed her husband from her life (134). Manon, of course, fails to realize that Sarah's desire for freedom extends past Gaudet; Sarah wishes for her and her daughter to escape the South and all that culture entails. After the insurrection, Manon compulsively wants to find her property, Sarah, no matter the

cost. At first, she believes she pursues Sarah because they should both have to live with the fact of Walter, whose physical features bear resemblance to Gaudet, his father (140, 5). Walter serves as a bodily reminder of the slave system under which they all live, yet Manon does not think about him with such depth. Walter embarrasses Manon and therefore Sarah should have to live with that embarrassment as well. Also, Marion thinks of selling Sarah: "I had thought to sell [Rose] when Sarah returned, but it might be more practical to sell Sarah"; "I allowed the notion of making such a profit and getting rid of Walter in the bargain tempt me for a moment" (164, 169). The principles guiding her search for Sarah are not economic, for she spends more than Sarah's monetary value to find the escaped slave. In her most telling statement, Manon replies to Mr. Roger, the man who wishes to buy Sarah and free her so she can be his wife, "You seem to think I care for nothing but money. I am going to considerable expense to recover what is mine, by right and by law, and recover her I will" (171). In this moment, Manon clearly reveals Sarah's position as her possession; because these "rights" are deeply ingrained in Manon's worldview as master, she cannot imagine letting Sarah go free. The power over other people entitled to Manon as a slaveholder has utterly corrupted her. Though Manon longs to "live quietly, without illusions" (183), her social position will not allow this, for the perpetuation of the lies of slavery constitutes her entire world. When slave catchers bring Sarah back to Manon after her flight to the North, Manon continues to misread Sarah's appearance--"My uncle was wrong; Sarah was not much changed"--even though Manon has already admitted that Sarah has "tasted a freedom" Manon "will never know" because Sarah "has traveled about the country as a free white man" (190, 189). When she asks Sarah about her missing baby, Sarah does not surprise Manon as she delivers the answer, "She dead," with her "usual forthcomingness" (190). Manon does not consider Sarah's attitude a ruse to disguise the location of the baby in the North. Indeed, Sarah appears to be the same piece of property she was when Manon "lost" her during the slave insurrection. During the final scene, Manon scolds Sarah for fleeing, and Manon can approach the subject only through her selfish slaveholder lens: "I'm sure they all made you feel very important, very much the poor helpless victim, and no one asked you how you got away or whom you left behind" (192). Although Manon's statement could reflect deeper feelings for Sarah as a person who "left her behind," Manon's self-centered view of the world drives her to speak-Manon still believes that Sarah had no reason to flee after Gaudet's death. When Sarah fondly recalls being treated to tea with cream and sugar at a house in the North, Manon regards Sarah's words with disbelief and judges that "her uncle was right" because Sarah "had changed; she [had] gone mad" (192). This concluding scene--although it seems abrupt in its resolution--shows Manon's detachment, not only from Sarah, but from reality. She cannot imagine a society which deems a black slave worthy to sit at a table with white folk and drink tea. She cannot imagine a society in which women of all races share a basic right to be treated as human. Even though her obsession with Sarah makes the lesbian counterplot of the novel possible, the conclusion of Property shows no intimate bond between Sarah and Manon, because of the power relationship that Manon cannot, even for a moment, think beyond. Indeed, the final scene of the novel points to Manon's full embodiment of masculine slaveholding ideals, for Manon's "property" should never be treated as anything else. Property's denouement shows Terry Castle's "euphoric resolution" (88) of the lesbian counterplot to be impossible within the social conditions established by the

novel. Even though the triangle of female desire wins out in practice--indeed, Property leaves only Sarah and Manon alive from the two desire triads at work in the narrative--the novel gives no hope for a bond between Manon and Sarah ever to be more than that of master and slave. As Manon's thoughts concerning the people in her small sphere reveal, her desire for personal freedom relies heavily on her ability to wield power over her possessions; as property, Sarah symbolizes Manon's masculine power. Thus, Property undermines the "fantastical, allegorical, or utopian" (88) traits Castle identifies in thelesbian counterplot. While Property's narrative threatens positive conceptions of lesbian literatures, the novel significantly sheds light on the overwhelmingly negative possibilities of power that can exist, and have existed, between women. Works Cited Baym, Nina. "The Madwoman and Her Languages: Why I Don't Do Feminist Theory." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 3.1/2 (1984): 45-59. Castle, Terry. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. Donaldson, Susan V. "Telling Forgotten Stories of Slavery in the Postmodern South." Southern Literary Journal 40.2 (2008): 267-83. Faust, Drew Gilpin. Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1996. Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary: A Story of Provincial Life. 1857. Trans. Alan Russell. New York: Penguin, 1950. Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1988. Jagose, Annamarie. "Way Out: The Category 'Lesbian' and the Fantasy of the Utopic Space." Journal of the History of Sexuality 4.2 (1993): 264-87. Landry, Jordan H. "Seeing Black Women Anew through Lesbian Desire in Nella Larsen's Passing." Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 60.1 (2006): 25-52. Martin, Valerie. "An Interview with Valerie Martin." Rob Smith. Contemporary Literature 34.1 (1993): 1-17. --. Property. 2003. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 2004. Meilhac, Henri, and Phillippe Gille. "Manon." The Authentic Librettos of the French and German Operas. New York: Crown, 1939. 147-94. Oates, Joyce Carol. Uncensored: Views and (Re)views. New York: Harper, 2005. Prevost, Abbe Antoine Francois. The Story of Chevalier Des Grieux and Manon Lescaut. 1753. Trans. Angela Scholar. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004.

Ryan, Tim A. Calls and Responses." The American Novel of Slavery Since Gone with the Wind. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2008. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men." English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1985. Winterson, Jeanette. Gut Symmetries. New York: Vintage International, 1997. AMY K. KING University of Mississippi (1) The character Manon Gaudet also resembles her namesake Manon Lescaut, from Abbe (Antoine Francois) Prevost's 1731 novel The Story of the Chevalier Des Grieux and Manon Lescaut and Henri Meilhac and Phillippe Gille's libretto for Jules Massenet's opera Manon. While Manon Gaudet does not seem to be as "passionately fond of pleasure" as Lescaut (Prevost 36), she is nonetheless also unsatisfied with her life at every turn. Both women are entrenched in societies that give them few options--Lescaut must prostitute herself to gain wealth and finery in both the novel and libretto, and Manon Gaudet is, arguably, traded to her husband as property, regardless of her privilege as a white slaveholding woman. Manon Lescaut in the libretto exclaims, "Ah! but it must indeed be delightful to abandon sorrow, and know only pleasure!" (Meilhac and Gille 160), while Manon Gaudet likewise wishes to leave behind the sorrow of her husband's house. Furthermore, both women's stories in Property and The Story of the Chevalier Des Grieux and Manon Lescaut end despairingly in New Orleans. (2) According to Ryan, Property "encourages the reader to consider what kind of person [Kate] Chopin's famous proto-feminist heroine, Edna Pontellier, might have been had she been born a generation or two earlier--as a slaveholder" (173). Ryan's work shows how Martin's novel covertly parallels The A wakening while it "excavates the suppressed racial subtext" of Chopin's novel (177). (3) The violence wrought on Manon's mother's body during her death recalls Emma Bovary's death from arsenic poisoning in Madame Bovary When Manon's mother dies, a black fluid streams out of her mouth, nose, eyes, ears, and fingernails while her eyes bulge and her skin turns blue as "the veins in her neck and hands st[and] out against the flesh like spreading black tentacles" (69-70); Emma Bovary likewise has a "blue-veined face," vomits blood, and her eyelids are "unnaturally wide apart" (327, 330, 335).
Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com Publication Information: Article Title: Valerie Martin's Property and the Failure of the Lesbian Counterplot. Contributors: Amy K. King - author. Journal Title: The Mississippi Quarterly. Volume: 63. Issue: 1-2. Publication Year: 2010. Page Number: 211+. COPYRIGHT 2010 Mississippi State University; COPYRIGHT 2011 Gale, Cengage Learning