61 pages • 2 hours read
Venus
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Themes
The Exploitation and Commodification of Black Female Bodies
Content Warning: This section contains descriptions of racism, enslavement, sexual coercion and assault, as well as racist language and outdated terminology for race and gender.
The story of Saartjie Baartman is essentially a story about the exploitation and commodification of Black female bodies in 19th-century Europe. As a Black woman, the Venus Hottentot is alternately characterized as subhuman (“Wild Female Jungle Creature” (5)), an exoticized Other (the “African Dancing Princess” (15)), an animal (“Stepsister-Monkey”), and the physical embodiment of “Love.” None of the characters acknowledge her as a fellow human with an identity and desires. To them, she is merely an object from which they can gain sexual pleasure, money, or professional advancement. Their treatment speaks to the systemic and scientific racism that prevailed in 19th-century Europe.
As the Venus Hottentot is passed from the Brother to the Mother-Showman to the Docteur, she is manipulated and exploited in different ways. The Brother lures her to England with false promises of wealth, only to sell her to the Mother-Showman and disappear. The Mother-Showman, unlike the Brother, makes no attempt to disguise her motives. Under the Mother-Showman, the Venus is caged, exhibited to a paying audience, beaten, and sexually trafficked. However, the Venus experiences what is arguably the most pernicious form of abuse at the hands of the Baron Docteur, who frames his exploitation as love. He buys the Venus from the Mother-Showman but still feels the need to coerce the Venus into coming with him willingly. He brings her chocolates, and he assures her: “Don’t start I’ve doctors eyes and hands” (87), implying that his occupation as a doctor absolves him from the exploitative grabbing and gawking the Venus has experienced thus far. Meanwhile, the scientists at the Academy are no different from the spectators at the Mother-Showman’s exhibit, except they sexually assault the Venus in the name of science. When the Baron Docteur’s relationship with her threatens his reputation, he lets her be imprisoned and then uses her dead body to further his career.
These issues are complicated by the Venus’s assertions of agency, such as when she demands more money from the Mother-Showman, wants to have a child with the Baron Docteur, and frames her life as a prolonged attempt to gain fame and fortune. However, at the moment before her death, the Venus tells the Negro Resurrectionist: “Don’t look at me don’t look” (158), which implies that, underneath her “diva” persona, the Venus understands the ways in which she has been mistreated, abused, and objectified in Europe.
Colonialism and Racism as Motivations and Obsessions
Colonialism and racism are rife throughout the play, but they are best exemplified by the Baron Docteur, whose scientific work and fetishization of the Venus are inextricably linked to his colonialist, racist mindset. The Baron Docteur is torn between his established, well-to-do European life and his obsession with the Venus, ultimately choosing to preserve the former at the expense of the latter. Similarly, the Young Man of “For the Love of the Venus” fails to maintain his European life out of an obsessive desire to see and conquer foreign lands and peoples. Both men must navigate between their obsessive desire to possess colonized cultures and peoples and their motivation to exploit and abuse those same peoples for their own ends.
The Young Man’s arc sheds light on the Baron Docteur’s motivations and obsessions. The Young Man asserts: “A Man to be a Man must know Unknowns!” (48), demanding that the Uncle “procure for me an oddity, I wanna love something Wild” (48). The Young Man wants to conquer the Unknown before he gets married, which, in this case, represents his full engagement with European life and culture. Before he can consider himself a “Man” in European culture, he feels he needs to exploit colonized cultures and peoples to prove that he is worthy of joining the ranks of the imperialists, and the manner in which he chooses to display this supremacy is sexual, “loving” a “Wild,” or colonized, person. However, this obsession is cured the moment the Young Man asserts himself over the fake Venus, acquiring her promise of constancy and cementing their relationship in distinctly European terms. The obsession is cured by its satisfaction, after which the Young Man discards his “love” for the Venus, returning to his European life.
The Baron Docteur follows the same pattern as the Young Man, loving and cherishing the Venus with the understanding that her body offers a pathway to greater success in the European scientific community. This internal conflict is driven by the Grade-School Chum’s constant reminders that the Baron Docteur has a marriage and a reputation to maintain, which are actively damaged by his obsession with the Venus. The Baron Docteur is obsessed with the Venus, but she is also a way for him to further his own career. In the end, his self-interest wins out and, like the Young Man, the Baron Docteur loses interest in the Venus, returning to his European life.
The Construction and Manipulation of Historical Narratives
While Venus is not intended to be entirely historically accurate, instead bringing out the unrecorded elements of Baartman’s life, Parks includes “footnotes” to show how her own vision of the Venus is informed by real historical artifacts. The Negro Resurrectionist delivers these footnotes, acting as a guide to Baartman’s life and history. For example, it is through a footnote that the Negro Resurrectionist informs the audience of the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, three years prior to the Venus’s arrival in England. Such information contextualizes the action of the play and puts it in conversation with history, while also highlighting the ways in which history is itself a construct.
The “diva” persona of the Venus in the text is one of the ways in which Parks constructs the Venus’s narrative, but this decision is supported by the documentation of the court case against the Venus. It is true that Saartjie Baartman testified to her willing participation in her exhibition, allowing Parks to reimagine the court case through the Venus’s desire to earn money, with the Venus remarking: “After all I’ve gone through so far to go home penniless would be disgraceful” (76), layering the Venus’s pride and exploitation to explain how she could be both coerced and autonomous into exhibiting herself in England. The court’s conclusion that the perspectives of future people looking back on the Venus’s case are irrelevant, noting that “it is very much to the credit of our great country that even a female Hottentot can find a court to review her status” (79), again adds to the dimensions of manipulation and construction of history.
As Baartman is resurrected in Parks’s Venus, the question of the play becomes whether the documentation and history of colonialism can be trusted. The frequent inclusion of Georges Cuvier’s notes, from the perspective of the Baron Docteur, emphasizes the objectification of the Venus’s body after her death, with a specific emphasis on her genitals. However, the play puts its own interpretation on Cuvier’s notes. Even though the evidence for a romance between Cuvier and Baartman is scarce in historical documents, Parks makes it a central focus of the play, using Cuvier’s references to her “charming” hands and “grace” to illustrate the Baron Docteur’s affection for the Venus. The intention of this play is to question the ways in which history is constructed from such documentation. The work actively engages with questions of historical accuracy in its reimagining of a historical event, using a fictional narrative to fill gaps in historical understanding.
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