Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay (1761-1804) and her cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray (1760-1825), attributed to John Zoffany
Wm Turner’s Slave Ship (1781) said to be a depiction of the Zong massacre
Dear friends and readers,
Imagine, gentle reader, if someone made a movie about WW2 where we were invited to enjoy the story of a Nazi family, who while their lives and laws were shaped by an abhorrent set of values they did nothing practical to repudiate, were as individuals good well-meaning people, with individual trials and tragedies of their own; the story of the movie tells how they, especially under the leadership of the father, saved this or that Jew and worked to say limit the number of extermination camps or their reach. During the movie we would be told of the slave labor camps, the extermination and gassing of people, but never see any of it — or only a grateful escaped Jew or two. The households, costumes would be lavish, intense interest would be garnered through in the subtle psychologies of this family as it might interact with more liberal or far worse families.
Surely there’d be an outcry. Surely no one would dare (outside Occupied Palestine where they’d shoot off guns if they had any).
One thought I had as we left the movie-house was how at the center of this genteel, beautifully clothed story more or less prompted by the famous picture once thought to be by Zoffany (very little other record is left of Elizabeth Lindsay called Dido, played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and an over-inflated reputation as central to the history of the abolition of slavery of William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield (Tom Wilkinson) was another un-dramatized story of horrific ruthless heartless cruelty. I reviewed a book a while back which discussed (almost as if it were justified) typical horrific incidents where the perpetrators essentially go unpunished in order to support an establishment elite.
Most of the time the jarring discords between what we see in costume drama — the elite groups living luxuriously or at least in considerable comfort — and the world outside its country house walls are not so striking if you allow yourself to be lulled into the image of security at the heart of costume drama, are not too wide awake — or not thinking and imagining on your own just a bit. Readers of Sense and Sensibility often appear to forget that its happy ending is dependent on Mr Brandon have coerced his ward, Eliza Brandon into marrying his eldest son who was cruel, amoral, indifferent to her; when she ran away, she lost everything including her life and the money she brought into the family shored up the estate, Delaford Abbey, which provides the happy safe place the Dashwoods take refuge in at the close of the novel. After all it’s but one woman, and the novel encourages us not to remember her so much as her daughter by an unknown man whose own weak conduct (so the novel encourages us to see her) leads to her seduction, pregnancy and abandonment by the novel’s alluring flawed hero, Willoughby.
In the allure and glamor of the literature and art found in the country house, we forget the cost to everyone but the central owning families:
Kenwood House where the painting originally hung
This movie — to give it the credit it deserves, makes the massacre (a word not used in it) central. I don’t know how historically accurate its time scheme is — I suspect as with Robert Bolt’s A Man for all Seasons, the film-makers have an important historical set of incidents and made it occur at a somewhat different time than it did in order to make them intersect with a love story. The case is not the more famous one connected to Lord Mansfield about James Somersett but a step-by-step tracing of the agonized step-forward of Lord Mansfield as he has to decide a case where slave-traders threw overboard in chains some supposedly diseased 150 African people in order to collect the insurance (on them as damaged cargo). The slave-traders saw a bigger easier profit than trying to sell individuals. Mansfield does it on narrow grounds: while he says he deplores slavery, he finds for the insurance company (who true to the breed don’t want to pay) that the slavers committed fraud because they did pass by water stations and so their “cargo” need not have become diseased. In the movie he is moved to do this because his adopted mulatto daughter, Belle (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) found the maps in his papers hidden away and forced him to confront them by giving them to a young idealistic vicar’s son, John Davinier (Sam Reid), who seems to be part of an ad-hoc unofficial group seeking to end slavery and whom his adopted daughter-niece Belle loves as he loves her.
The case was important because it discouraged copycat cases of horrible mass murder. At the same time we should note that the slavers got away with it: they went unpunished and the slaves as individuals were forgotten, remained nameless, as they are in this movie.
My daughter, Izzy and I went on Sunday and we were much more impressed than we thought we would be. I would not call it a movie which reflects Jane Austen’s novels, but a movie which is like the movies in the Jane Austen canon. As such, as what’s called quality film, I enjoyed it and thought it well-done. It seems to be meant as a semi-serious movie about a small step forward in the abolition of chattel slavery in the mid-18th century, has a black woman director, Amma Asante, and screenplay writer, Misay Sagan (who also scripted the movie from Our Eyes were Watching God). There were many African-American people in the audience, an unusual occurrence for this kind of movie.
Many people applauded when it ended, with congratulations to Mansfield all round, complete with his allowing his adopted daughter-niece (who has a dowry) to be courted by Davinier who hitherto has been treated as a person of inferior class and prospects, with a marriage in the offing by saying he will allow Davinier to come into his law office and become a lawyer.
In history Elizabeth Lindsay did marry one Davinier, had two sons by him, and the probabilities of the time would make it plausible that a young man in the fringe gentry, given a chance to rise in the world would be happy to accept even a “colored” or mulatto woman for his wife, especially when she brought him such a well-connected de facto father-in-law.
I was impressed by a relative lack of idealization in the characterization of the principals — relative, for Belle’s father (Matthew Goode) is all kind gentleness to this child as Belle’s biological father (he’s just played Wickham in Juliette Towhidi’s Death Comes to Pemberley) had by an unnamed slave. Despite overt supposed sternness, Lord Mansfield is all generosity towards his women.
Earnest morning discussion
Lord Mansfield’s women comprise many more than the four concentrated on here — rather movingly and with thematic appropriateness. I single out Penelope Wilton (yes yet again she is given a stirring role) as the tolerated Lady Mary Murray, the governess spinster who gave up a marriage with a young man she loved and who loved her because they lacked the money and equal status.
Wilton conveys poignancy and vulnerability, fragility as she sews away with her charges
If Belle does not find a husband, she will be trained to replace Lady Mary (she is told it’s not a bad fate and it wasn’t in context). Emily Watson is Lady Mansfield (she’s been a favorite with me since she played Elsie in Gosford Park), with Sarah Gadon given the thankless role of a kindly Lady Elizabeth who is far dumber than her sister-cousin Belle and in danger of marrying for money (gasp). In the film Mansfield is a gentle revolutionary kind of guy to all of them: Lady Mansfield remembers him this way when young. But Carolyn Steedman tells another tale in her chapter, “Lord Mansfield’s Women,” the story of several real women servants and how harshly and with indifference he treated these impoverished, sometimes pregnant women when they came before him as magistrate (see Labours Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England).
The film-makers really did attempt to show how a black girl brought up partly as an equal in a gentry rich family, but clearly also as an inferior might experience life. The incidents the script does justice are those which show how keen is the average person’s response to even fleeting forms of disrespect — and these for Belle are not so fleeting; they are in fact continual: she cannot eat with her family when other families come to dinner with them; it’s understood that she will not be sought in marriage by a certain level of male at all, and her legacy of 2000 pounds is of enormous importance in getting second and third and fourth sons, one of whom who asks her to marry him, Oliver Ashford (James Norton, also coming away from Death Comes to Pemberley where he played equally well a fine man, Alveston, in love with Georgiana Darcy) doesn’t bother to hide their real sense of her inferiority (as Darcy in the famous first proposal in P&P didn’t bother hide his sense from Elizabeth). Oliver’s blindness to his own snobbery and condescension to Belle when he asks her to marry him, provides some of few funny moments of the film. Norton is pitch perfect (reminding me of Johnny Lee Miller) as a hero in these costume dramas.
We see Ashford’s elder brother, James (Tom Felton) sexually abuse her by wrenching her arm, threatening her sexually and are to surmise that were she to marry James she’d be in danger of rape without recourse. One of the most moving, maybe the best moment in the film shows Belle pulling hard at her skin as she looks at a mirror: she is desperately trying to remove its color.
Costume dramas get away with discussing issues, revealing suppurating sorenesses that movies in contemporary dress don’t dare. It is exquisitely well-acted, filmed, with the older slow graceful use of juxtaposition, not much montage. It may be that the real simple reason the movie has gotten a lot of attention and is attracting audiences is that it has dared to have a black young woman as one of the “Austen heroines:”
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The film has garnered some good interesting reviews and essays.
There’s an excellent article on the historical matter aligning it to Austen’s Mansfield Park, clearly prompted by the movie: article “Ambiguous Cousinship: Mansfield Park and the Mansfield Family,” by Christine Kenyon Jones, published in Persuasions (31.1 2010): she brings out the realities of Mansfield’s decisions. The analogy of how women are treated as property in the film (Lady Mansfield of all people points out how women are in effect property) and the slaves is one that you can tease out of Austen in Mansfield Park: the position of governess is made directly analogous to that of a chattel slave in her Emma — only it’s not really as the governess cannot be thrown out a window in the hopes of payment, not beaten, raped, impregnated.
Paula Byrne (not the result of seeing the film as her book came out first) has a chapter in The Real Jane Austen on Lord Mansfield’s house, Kenwood, the women in it, including Dido or Belle and the probability (as she argues it) that a mulatto heroine in Austen’s fragment was prompted by seeing this young girl. I know Austen visited the Finch-Hattons (whom Elizabeth Murray married into) because she comments on how dull Elizabeth is; she visited the housekeeper at Highcleere Castle (aka Downton Abbey), liked to go touring to houses and ruins so that we have explicit evidence for Byrne’s fantasy is not a hindrance. Byrne describes the Mansfield household in detail.
Vanessa Thorpe’s review in the Guardian shows she has done her homework: she describes a biography of Mansfield by Poser, who revealed that this complex figure was not the crusading liberal portrayed in the film. “He was a brilliant mind, but was chiefly interested in protecting the status quo,” said author Norman Poser.
In Lord Mansfield, Justice in the Age of Reason, Poser, a New York academic, argues that the eminent politician and judge does not merit his reputation as a radical hero of the anti-slavery movement. Although he was fond of Dido Belle and always fair to her, there is no evidence that she influenced his views. In fact, the judge’s famous ruling in the case that later helped to dismantle slavery was the result of his slow acknowledgement that slaves had rights in law. “The film is right to suggest Mansfield is closely associated with the cause, but he did not want to bring down the slave owners in America, or even to end slavery,” Poser said. “He did, however, eventually rule that the practice was so suspect it would have to be set down in deliberate legislation if it was to continue, rather than simply being supported by common law and precedent.” Mansfield’s ruling on slavery in the “Somerset case” of 1772 reads: “It is so odious that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law.” Invoking habeas corpus, he reasoned that the captain of the ship on which the slave was being deported could fairly be considered to be holding a man against his will. Still, “he was very reluctant to annoy the slave owners and vested interests,” said Poser. “He rather hoped things would just go on as they were, saying ‘I would have all masters think they were free and all negroes think they were not’.”
Like many before him, Poser became intrigued by the story of Mansfield’s home life when he saw the Zoffany portrait at Scone Palace and has said: “I was also drawn to his remarkably clear legal decisions. He did not just give a ruling; he gave guidance on principles of law, many of which are still cited in cases on both sides of the Atlantic.” We see the portrait being painted in the movie.
I recommend going to see this film. I felt about it the way I did about Saul Dibbs’s The Duchess — where I later bought the DVD, had read Amanda Foreman’s book but found the DVD features had much more to tell me and Dibbs was someone who had made good films before. Like The Duchess, Belle exhibits just about all the flaws of costume drama — which ones grate on you, which ones you are aware of, will show as much about you as the film. On Women Writers across the Ages we discussed it, and Elaine Pigeon remembered:
About fifteen years ago I went to visit the Museum of the slave trade in Liverpool. While only a museum, the visit did give me a sense of what the slaves endured, if they survived, the transatlantic crossing. It is estimated that at least 50 million blacks died during the 300 years that the slave trade lasted. It’s an unacknowledged holocaust.
Ironically, Spielberg, known for his feel good films, was a lot more honest in his film Amistid. I think too that the more recent The Butler, yet another feel good film, at least acknowledges the issues more honestly. The impenetrable niceness of the Mansfields in the film Belle disturbed me. I think this guaranteed that the film remain on the surface, did not go beyond conventional costume drama.
Some names named
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
From our discussion, Elaine:
There is a fair review of the film in The Guardian from September 2013 which duly notes that it’s based on a true story, but that aspects of the film, such as Belle’s aiding the passionate reformer, the vicar’s son, down at the docks, ring false. I have to agree. These scenes made me highly uncomfortable as I expected some violence to befall the beautiful Belle. In making the film fit for mass consumption, not only have such unlikely scenes been added, but much had been glossed over. Although the actors are all superb, I found that the overwhelming niceness of Lord Mansfield and his family detracted from the importance of the story and his role as lord chief justice.
What you say at the end of your response, Ellen, is what really bothered me about the film: this “beautifully clothed story was a story of horrific ruthless heartless cruelty to a large group of people.” Sure other films also idealize and gloss over, but here it’s what is denied that is so critical. The world still suffers from the effects left by the slave trade, esp poor blacks in the US and Europe, not to mention the state of Africa. The film is revisionist, it’s rewriting an appalling history and creating instead a feel good movie, so we can put all that ugly stuff behind us now. Really, that’s the lie.
When I wrote my first posting, I put the first paragraph of this review last. Thanks to Elaine I’ve placed it first.
From Diana Birchall’s remarks:
Ellen says “I would not call Belle an Austen movie, but rather part of the costume drama film canon.”
Right, I wouldn’t call it a “Jane Austen movie” either, I should have made it clearer that I was actually quoting an interview with the director who said something to the effect that she wanted to make “a Jane Austen movie with slavery.” In that sense, she did. It doesn’t literally link with one of Austen’s texts, no. And Arnie, yes, I agree it’s very likely Jane Austen did see the portrait of Dido and her cousin at Kenwood!
Diana B: I thought you’d enjoy it – and would have a lot to say about it!
Me: Yes no matter how critical I am, I am absorbed by these costume dramas, take great pleasure in them. I like mini-series even better, especially when the characters are deeply enough seen.
Elaine: “Ellen, It occurred to me after your comments on the list about an imagined similar situation in Nazi Germany, just how good JA’s MP is since she provides an opening below the surface of manners by dropping hints of a subtext. While reading your fine blog, I wondered that there was no consideration of charging the owner of the Dong with murder. I guess that under the existing the law, the slaves/cargo were not recognized as persons. Is this appalling fact something Steedman covers?
Me: Thank you very much for the praise, Elaine. It was your response to my penultimate paragraph in a posting that led me to do the blog in the way I did.
In a way we could say Belle is much the better than MP because even if not dramatized, the script certainly brings out specifics of slavery as MP does not — but then 1814 is not 2014, and a single woman dependent on her family for all sorts of support, a family whose males could not risk their reputation upon which their positions depended, could not begin to write in the way these film-makers can.
I’ve not seen any mention in what I’ve read — not a lot — of any thought of charging these people with murder. The thing about chattel slavery is it does turn a human being into something subhuman, you lose all caste, and anything may be done to you including murder because no one will question the master or mistress enough — the person has the vulnerability of a dog or cat (the latter often just shot by someone’s enemy to get back at the person).
Steedman’s book chapter does not focus on Belle (or Dido if she was likely called that) — or the upper class women in Mansfield’s “charge.” They fill out the picture of his character and milieu; it’s about something that connects us back to Hannah Arendt: 7 cases of women servants where Mansfield was called on to preside over a decision, most of them (as I recall) where the servant is impoverished and pregnant and the parish does not want her to have right of “settlement” because then they have to give her charity. You got right of “settlement” if you had documents to show you have lived in a place for a certain period of time and worked there – -a servant’s contract. They all included disputes with employers at some level — no males are concerned, yet they would have impregnated the woman. It connects to Arendt because you see a refusal to treat these women as individuals with needs, rights, respect; everyone is following the letter of a law that they must figure out to obey. Mansfield comes out badly here — as he does apparently at times in Porson’s book. He is intent on his position with the people running the parish, the employers. We do hear the women’s voices in testimony sufficiently that we can see the human element in what happened but as in Cecily McMillan’s case (where she was declared guilty of assaulting a police officer when she was defending herself from an assault by several officers), it is translated into abstractions which work to erase what is really happening. In the movie we see one black servant who we are told is not a slave and who seems to be treated with respect — even giving advice about how to do hair.
Diane R: “Good comments on Belle. I haven’t seen it, as the last time my husband and I looked, the movie wasn’t within 250 miles of us. (Why pre-empt one of the many screens dedicated to Godzilla?) However, I found this morning, about how nothing has changed in the racial debate:
“”They have been taught to labor,” the Chicago Tribune editorialized in 1891. “They have been taught Christian civilization, and to speak the noble English language instead of some African gibberish. The account is square with the ex‑slaves.” And, remember, it’s not About Race, because nothing ever is About Race.”
Isn’t there exactly a play–or movie–about a dear little Nazi boy living on the borders of a concentration camp (which in reality would mean his father was in the SS) smuggling bits of food through the barbed wire to help the people he thought, with such adorable innocence, walked around in striped pajamas? (in reality, he wouldhave been indoctrinated to see them as a virus, though admittedly,that propaganda didn’t work so well.)”
Me: Diane’s comment reminds me of the unhappy way one can interpret Shakespeare’s Tempest. We are urged to remember that when Prospero taught Caliban to speak, his profit was to curse.
Today a new form of enslavement has spread — some huge percentage of black men are put in jail for minor misdemeanors, sometimes for years and years, in torturous solitary confinement too. When they get out in many states, they can never vote again. Debtor’s prison has returned, and I know from personal experience you can be put in jail for doing something which is not a crime as well as acts defined as crimes where no one has been hurt in any way. Privatized jails. Police kill with impunity. It all suits the aims of the oligarchy now running the US.
Diane Kendig: “Just came home from seeing it, with such mixed feelings. The first half was so good but it then it seemed to get less and less believable and the damned crescendo of sappy music at the point one is supposed to FEEL.”
I just saw this film, Ellen, and I appreciate your review. There’s so much I don’t understand about the movie. I, too, felt it jarring.
The Zoffany portrait, for one thing, does not imply (to me) the familial equality that was asserted (and contested and re-asserted) by the film. It isn’t, actually, the portrait that was being painted for most of the film, though it was the one displayed in the end. But, maybe that’s the point. Worth considering, anyhow.
I gather there’s some history here. What do we know and what are the film-makers making up? Also, why call the film “Belle” if she was really known as Dido in her life?
Mansfield’s decision, if accurately portrayed, probably was a step in the right direction, based on the rule of law.
And that’s worth knowing, I guess.
A very confusing “eighteenth century on film” film-going experience–despite the swelling music that told me how I ought to feel, though I was glad she married the guy she loved and who loved her. But, in the end, I still felt confused.
Elizabeth Kraft
To answer Elizabeth, the best writing I’ve come across is Carolyn Steedman’s chapter in Labours Lost, “Lord Mansfield’s Women” — about his decisions in the cases of 7 women servants. As far as I can tell, there is (as is common) hardly any documentary record of the life of Dido — the painting, a record of a marriage — I’m not sure about the two births. Perhaps there is a certificate of sale or manumission. Steedman has a good bibliography if anyone wanted to delve for real. The article in Persuasions is also good as far as it goes — marred perhaps (and thus worrying) by the idea that Austen had this African-English young woman in mind for Sanditon (is that really probable?). Austen knew Elizabeth Finch-Hatton all right, but she is caustic over her lack of conversation and that’s all. For the record, Austen did visit Highcleere Castle (aka today Downton Abbey): she knew the housekeeper. The details about these sorts of things are in Austen’s letters.
Of course my review is meant to be provocative.
Ellen
I enjoyed Norman S. Poser’s Lord Mansfield: Justice in the Age of Reason (McGill, 2013). Poser is professor emeritus at Brooklyn Law School, so his book (~ 500 pp.) is primarily interested in Mansfield’s legal career. The book has chapter titles such as “Commerce and Industry,” “Betting and Lending,” and “Women and Marriage.” In the chapter “Slavery and the Somerset Case,” as an introduction to the two pages on Dido Elizabeth Belle, Poser writes: “A distinction should be made between Mansfield’s decisions as a judge who consistently furthered the interests of merchants and property owners even at the expense of fundamental human rights, and his humane conduct of his personal life.” You want to read more now, don’t you?
Best,
Alfred
I saw Belle last night. I found the idealism and emotional intensity of Dido and Davanier compelling. I also thought it a brilliant movie for more important reasons
I have been following with interest the discussion on this list about individual actions to ameliorate the plight of a handful of the oppressed versus the need for systemic change and, of course, agree that the movie does depict an individual act of compassion in a way that shows whites off well. At times I felt I was through the looking glass into a world that isn’t our world, a world that is too good, the kind of world JA disliked, which made her feel evil.
But yet. The movie simply wasn’t a whitewash about a wealthy, titled, kind and compassionate white British family taking in a poor black girl as one of them, thus exonerating whites on the issue of slavery, for central to the story is the horrific reality of the Zork and the deliberate chaining together and drowning of the slaves to collect insurance money. Systemic horror in pursuit of profit, supported as legal by the lower courts, the predecessor of the judicial system we have today (I was taught in school how lucky we are in this country to have a legal system based on the English, and in some ways that is true, but we have certainly inherited a flawed system, open to abuse, as we have seen in the McMillan case, if not countless others) is central to the movie. The uncertainty about whether or not justice will triumph over a legal system weighted to protect property rights and the powerful is the core conflict of the film. As soon as the legal case enters the film, it becomes difficult to retreat from the horror of systemic injustice into the rarified world of the English upper class, for the horror is at the center of that world.
Systemic racial injustice highlighted for we are never led to believe this mass murder is a rogue incident, as we were, say, with the Abu Ghraib torture: It is always clear that the drowning incident is symptomatic of a system of injustice. Further, this incident ties racism explicitly to the profit motive. We are never left in any doubt that pursuit of money is the root motivation for the unspeakable cruelty that occurs. And going even further, the movie is explicit that not only is this pursuit of profit a goal of the ship owners, as well as the insurance company, which could care less about the “cargo” as long as they don’t have to pay for it, but the nation as a whole. This is not a case about a greedy shipowner versus a greedy insurance company, but it is about the wealth of Britain as a whole. What the movie makes explicit is that it was almost OK to ruthlessly drown hundreds of innocent people–for Britannia’s comfort and prosperity. This is a movie that ties racist ideology to a pursuit of profit that knows no humane bounds. We have racism, the movie says, because it is profitable.
The domestic drama mirrors the national drama. On the domestic scene, as on the mercantile, specifically, on the marriage market, which is explicitly likened to the slave trade, money is what counts.
Belle has a large inheritance: despite being black, she gets a marriage offer from a landed, aristocratic family, albeit from the second son, almost immediately upon coming out. In contrast, the white, and not just white, but fair skinned, blond, blue eyed daughter is rejected by the older son of the same family when it becomes clear she has no dowry. As soon as money comes into the picture, comically, but not–the movie is making a point–the mother of the landed family immediately becomes not racist. However, race speaks too: the oldest son treats Belle cruelly on the basis of race, and it is evident that the family Belle proposes to marry into will treat her as second class due to her race. There is no doubt that like the slave traders, the landed family are out to strip Belle/Dido of her wealth. Money, whether through the marriage market or the slave trade, draws darker and lighter skinned people together, and yet, as long as exploitation is the white person’s motivator, blacks will get the worst of it. The domestic drama works tightly to underscore the national story. Only as Belle meets someone, who like her, wants something other (to invoke Zizek) than money can a better domestic future be imagined for Belle. Systemically, only as Lord Mansfield, albeit for ostensibly non idealistic and narrow reasons, sides with the insurers (though the movie strongly implies he is influenced by moral concerns) do we get cracks in a system of legal injustice.
The movie has been likened to Austen, and we can see the parallels, especially to MP, of a young girl adopted into a wealthy family as a not quite equal, in the sister relationship that reminds us of Lizzy and Jane, and we can see too the concern for money, especially on the marriage market, as reminiscent of Austen. The movie, it has also been noted, lacks Austen’s wit, and It does have a much more earnest, passionate ethos. (It does have wit too,) However, it suggests Austen to me in all the ways minute domestic injustice can be read (or not!) as stand ins for larger social injustices. This movie can be read as feel good costume drama. It can be read as a comforting, familiar narrative to whites, in which whites, good and compassionate and moral, overturn the evils of racism on both systemic and personal levels. Or it can be read as troubling drama in which the profit motive is indicted, both in the marriage market and the larger markets in which capital flows globally, as the root of human misery, a profit motive that still reigns supreme in the world today and which leads to ideologies that distort human relationships and community in truly grotesque ways. As with Austen, it can be understood as much more subversive than its surface suggests. Unlike Austen, it does explicitly have a horror story at its heart.
As I watched the movie, I was reminded of the Gothic, for what could be more of a horror story than mass drowning the blacks, and I wondered to what extent eighteenth century Gothic expressed unspoken unease about the black Other.
I was reminded too of Wilberforce (my husband said, no, Belle was much better, with which I agree, yet I was reminded, because both are costume dramas around an anti-slavery theme) and of Spielberg’s Lincoln, one of the few Spielberg films I liked. Lincoln and Belle seemed similar in depicting a dramatic moment in black emancipation within the context of a domestic drama, including the influence of blacks in the domestic environment. (If, as both movies posit, it takes a direct relationship with a person from an oppressed class for dominant class people to be influenced to do right thing (a premise I don’t necessarily agree with) then let’s bring on desegregation.). However, I think Belle the better and more subtle movie.
My husband loved the settings and costumes- more than the cleavage surely– and I found the gowns and settings lovely as well, but also found them a bit distracting. I noticed them a bit too much, and they seemed a bit too much of an idealized 21st century vision of what gracious 18th upperclass life should be rather than what it really was; however, I think we are meant to understand the horror that enabled that graciousness
I agree — and the movie is unusual in making central to it a complicated case and making clear what’s at stake at each level of decision. Let’s hope we see more movies by this scriptwriter.
I may have been too hard on the jarring effect but I did feel the emphasis in the movie skewed what was most important about it. It was just too complacent and idealizing about the characters we see intimately and I felt that as I walked out the absence of any presences of real slaves.
E.M.
Diana Birchall heard a talk by Anne Mellor on MP as a slave novel and had this comment: “I can’t believe that no one else has pointed out that Belle is actually East Indian, that Lindsay was stationed in India, but the moviemakers have made her an “American type” black to relate it to U.S. slave history!”
Me: A good point. Maybe Belle was part Southeast Asian – so would have had dark skin and what is (absurdly) called Caucasian or European features. The central painting announcing the existence of this specially treated semi-slave, gentlewoman-nice as Dido Belle — and she was called Dido– is taken to show a girl with negroid features. But looking at the painting I see a thin heightened nose so it’s not clear — her skin looks mahogany in the reproduction.
British people called someone with dark skin (Henry Crawford) or eyes and hair (Heathcliff). so there would have been inexactitude. They might lump together anyone not white.
Diana: “She looks absolutely Indian to me, Indian-as-in-India. That nose is narrow, not the broad Negroid nose. I wish I could recall all Ann Mellor said, but she did say that the silks and scarf were Indian silks and scarf. And that her father, Lindsay, was stationed in India for several years. Mellor was very persuasive and said the movie was just chock full of historical inaccuracies (which we knew). Interesting!”
Me: “So did Mellor say she was Indian — genetically we should say Southeast Asian.”
Diana: “Yes: she specifically said Indian, because Lindsay had been in India and the textiles are Indian. It’s not my idea – I never thought of it but as soon as she said it I thought, Yes!”
It’s still a story with slavery and African slavery at its center because of Lord Mansfield’s involvement with the insurance court case about the murder of so many Africans for the insurance payments.
But the girl at the center is not herself part African. She would probably have had an easier time marrying into British whites because of this. British people then (and we see it in the novels of Austen too) had a way of calling anyone not fair (blue-eyed, blonde, light skin) “black” withouit distinguishing real gene pools.
Ellen
I don’t know if there is a historic record of her ancestry. There might not even be a bill of sale. She was an illegitimate half-slave. I think it would have mattered what her origins were — marginally when it comes to marriage – but it mattered. That they put a fancy Oriental style turban on her head means something. lady Mary Wortley Monague wore one.
DNB refers to Dido being christened in England in 1766 at age 5. It doesn’t seem clear whether she was born there or abroad though. Her father isn’t named in the baptismal record, but her mother’s name is given as Maria Belle. DNB says Lindsay was posted between the home and the West Indies stations at this period, though he was later in the East Indies.
Thomas Hutchinson, an American, and a man described as a ‘Jamaican planter’ both refer to Dido as ‘a Black’. Hutchinson referred to her hair as ‘ her wool’.
I think the fact Mansfield confirmed Dido’s freedom in his will suggests her mother was a chattel slave. As a lawyer he would be careful to prevent any argument that because Dido was illegitimate she inherited her social status not from her father but her enslaved mother. Also, the name Dido itself reflects an African origin?
It doesn’t follow even if Dido’s mother was an enslaved woman from the West Indies though that she was purely African. Maria Belle might have been mixed-race herself.
Interesting that in ‘Sanditon’ Lady Denham has designs on marrying the wealthy bi-racial heiress to her nephew, Sir Edward.
Rita
Thank you, Rita, I didn’t think to look in the obvious place. Yes worries over her being snatched back into slavery suggests she was half-African and by origin (through the mother) a chattel slave. “Black” doesn’t prove anything in this era: Henry Crawford is described with the word “black.” And the use of European features for Dido in the painting is not atypical for drawings of African people when they are idealized. E.M.
Anyone who has seen ‘Dido’ may like to check out the website of Miranda Kaufmann, who seems to have done her Oxford thesis on Africans in Britain in the Renaissance, but also has some great links to later periods
http://www.mirandakaufmann.com.
Kaufmann found 360 Africans present in the historical record for the years between 1500-1640. Considering how patchy that surviving record is (damn that civil war) it seems fair to speculate that’s something of an iceberg number. It surprised me.
Rita
I am late to the discussion as it only came out in the UK last week. A very interesting review and I have enjoyed all the comments. I wrote a very positive review of Belle and did touch a little on the subject of being a mixed raced Janeiete. I could quite easily have written an essay, but alas I stuck to the fact I was doing a short movie review.
To quote Elaine: ”Sure other films also idealize and gloss over, but here it’s what is denied that is so critical. The world still suffers from the effects left by the slave trade, esp poor blacks in the US and Europe, not to mention the state of Africa. The film is revisionist, it’s rewriting an appalling history and creating instead a feel good movie, so we can put all that ugly stuff behind us now. Really, that’s the lie.”
It is actually amusing, as this is why I liked the movie, sure it was a lie but I needed a glossed over movie for once. I love Austen and while I am reading it, It can be hard at times to block out the knowledge of what was happening in the world at that time, however sometimes you need a reprieve.
The simple fact the ‘one drop’ rule still applies today is evidenced in the fact that anyone who is not white is black. I personally do not mind being classed by society as black but I do not class myself as black simply for the reason that I am proud of my father and would be denying his identity and heritage if I was to see my self as anything other than mixed race.
I wanted a movie that was glossed over: it can be tiring and hurtful to always watch movies which leave you feeling awkward, If I had wanted to see 12 years a slave again that is what I would have done. I liked the fact I left the cinema feeling okay for once. Although the world may see me as black, I am mixed race and a well balanced one at that (another discussion) watching any type of movie with connections to slavery is difficult for me to watch as I feel the pain of one side and the ownness of the other.