Colligan, Colette. “Anti-Abolition Writes Obscenity: The English Vice, Transatlantic Slavery, and England’s Obscene Print Culture” International Exposure: perspectives on modern European pornography, 1800-2000, edited by Lisa Z. Sigel. Rutgers, 2005. Link

While I’ve known for a while that Atlantic slavery was the inspiration for the Master-slave motif of BDSM, exactly how this happened is a bit of a mystery, and I’ve been forced to do a bit of hand-waving when I give presentations. We know that books like Robinson Crusoe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin were inspirations for sexual fantasies, as documented by Krafft-Ebing and Freud. But what happened after that?

Colette Colligan has the answer. The Rosetta stone of BDSM history is two texts: First, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861 in the USA, available in the UK in 1862) written by Harriet Jacobs under the pen name “Linda Brent”, and its sexualized parody The Secret Life of Linda Brent, a Curious History of Slave Life (1882) written by George Lazenby and published in The Cremorne.

Incidents is a classic “slave narrative“, originally published in serial form but stopped before completion because of its subject matter. Jacobs wrote with remarkable frankness about the constant threat of sexual abuse she lived under, and even hinted at white male sexual abuse of black males and white female/black female and white female/black female interactions.

Lazenby’s The Secret Life of Linda Brent is a fragmentary parody of Jacobs’s slave narrative that covers only the first years of her life but manages to rewrite the sexual violence described in Jacobs’s narrative as sadistic obscenity. It distorts slave women’s sexual victimization as grossly carnal and rejects Jacobs’s anxious professions of virtue by overtly sexualizing her: she watches a slave and a white overseer copulating, masturbates, and engages in sexual “games” with another mulatto woman. The Secret Life dwells particularly on the sexual violence that accompanies white men’s sexual access to black women in slave society. The parody lifts the flogging scene from “Kate’s Narrative”, repeats it four times, and in so doing reveals sadistic fascination with the sexual torture of female slaves. In its descriptions of flogging the parody overwrites the English flagellation fantasy with a racialized flogging fantasy. … In the parody Martha [Jacobs’ grandmother in the original text] describes how her master, Jackley, detains her for a wealthy and lecherous Colonel who is a guest at his hotel. As she is confined in one of the rooms, the Colonel spanks and birches her while her master watches with “quiet but intense enjoyment.” The beating is frankly sexualized: in the manner of English flagellation obscenity, its instrument is the birch, and its focus is the nude buttocks rather than the back, where the slave was usually whipped. Yet the fantasy also relies on the frisson of difference for its erotic effect. The Colonel eroticizes and racializes the woman, revealing the erotics of color, by describing her “beautifully-polished skin — the slight olive tint of which looked far more voluptuous than the white skin of an Englishwoman’s.” With this slippage the parody reminds us of its English audience and reveals how its erotics depends on racial difference and transatlantic displacement for its effects. Pg. 78-79

Other scenes in the parody directly reference the original text. Also, the illustrations in this and other porngraphic texts set in the antebellum South whitewash the women.

The big open secret of antebellum slavery was white male sexual access to slave females. Actually, the bigger secret was white male sexual access to slave males, but that didn’t leave visible evidence walking around. After several generations of this, the colour line was anything but black and white. One book on slavery records more than seventy different fine gradations between “black” and “white” used in Virginia police records: quadroon, octoroon, yellow, high yellow, etc. The legal status of the child was that of the mother, but you could be born a slave and look pretty white, just black enough to be “exotic” and an acceptable object for sexual acts beyond the pale for white Southern women. Thus, “white slave girls” wasn’t an impossibility, even without the “white slave trade” scare.

Add to this the fact that many illustrations for books on slavery could not show fine gradations of skin tone, so slave women would be depicted with “white” skin.

The color of slave women was further blurred in Charles Carrington’s The Memoirs of Dolly Morton (1899). In the 1890s, Carrington published a number of pornographic works interested in American sexuality, and set in the antebellum American south or the West Indies. Dolly Morton is a white American woman who moves to Virginia to run an underground railroad. The Southerners discover her activities and viciously whip her. One plantation owner offers to save her if she becomes her mistress, and she accepts his offer. Morton is unmistakeably white, but she is in the position of black women, and compared to them, often described as more fragile and susceptible to pain. Harkening back to the theory of sensibility of the previous century, she, the white woman, feels her mistreatment more intensely than the black women. As Colligan says, “In effect the novel is a white woman’s slave narrative, one that draws on the history of slavery to document a white woman’s sexual victimization.”

Lazenby’s The Secret Life was published about twenty years after Jacobs’ book was in the UK, and after slavery had been abolished in the USA after the American Civil War. Slavery could be considered “over there” and “back then”, particularly to the British reader. Pornographic novels and photos with slavery themes were published in 1910 and later.

And that is how “slave” came to mean white women. Before there was The Story of O, there was Dolly Morton and before that, there was The Secret Life and before that, there was Incidents.

Colligan says that this particular theme in British pornography didn’t appear until the 1880s, as a parody of a pre-existing and familiar genre, the slave narrative. (I’m using “parody” in the academic sense, not the comedic sense.) However, we know that Munby and Cullwick were playing their Master-slave games in the 1850s, and there are hints in Munby’s diaries that blackface minstrel performers in London would perform “secrets of plantation life”. So, I think the idea of eroticized Master-slave roles existed in the English imagination well before Lazenby wrote The Secret Life.

As an aside, there seems to be a real dearth of domestically produced American pornography in the 19th century, though British and European texts were published (often illegitimately) across the Atlantic. American Comstockery and puritanism, perhaps? At any rate, it looks like these fantasies of the American past were transmitted back to American readers from European texts.

International Exposure is a great read. There’s a fascinating essay on how incest porn didn’t appear until the 1880s, and may have been linked to Freud’s early theories of incest. Other essays show the politicized nature of pornography in former Communist countries like Hungary and the Ukraine. I think the last chapter of my book should include at least a section on the spread of erotic imagery and culture in countries where it was repressed for decades under Communism.