Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus by Clifton Crais & Pamela Scully, Book Review Example

The book written by Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully can hardly be evaluated as a historical work; neither can it be called a social or political account of the events that took place at the verge of the 18^th and 19^th centuries; one cannot call it an account of an individual life of an outstanding personality who Sara Baartman surely was. It is hard to estimate the book as belonging to any of those themes because they all find their optimal and harmonious revelation in the work that was produced by the authors in 2008. This story is really glorious in the way the authors united all elements that many historical accounts lack – they managed to show the separate life of an important person who became the center of their studies, and at the same time they managed to give a proper account of the political, social, cultural and scientific events that accompanied Baartman’s life and ‘career’ in Europe. The authors also managed to blend them in such a way so that the reader obtained a clear explanation of why perception of the British society and views on sexuality, femininity and blackness evolved with the performances of Baartman, how the whole cultural thinking evolved together with her life and influence on the minds of people who knew her, who came to watch her and who studied her as an exhibit from a scientific point of view. The book gives a wonderful insight into the life of Sara Baartman before her enslavement and involuntary career in Britain, as well as the way the change of her image and the way people treated her changed both her life and the way of thinking in much more large-scale proportions. There is no wonder why the authors themselves describe their biography of Sara Baartman the following way:

“Her story – or perhaps their stories – also is a cautionary tale about silence and the limits of history, and about what happens when someone, or something, comes to stand for too much, when the past can bear no more” (Crais and Scully 6).

There is no doubt that such a woman who was distinguished by the excessive size of her buttocks and large sexual organs became an embodiment of many cultural, political, social and scientific purposes that the writers followed and that shaped the initial decision of making Sara Baartman a “Hottentot Venus” performer – another woman who lived another life in the scene and whose name and icon was then used for many evil purposes, as a support for racist ideas etc. Sara Baartman was depicted in an entirely different way from all other characters, which surely was the same in the time when she lived in London and Paris – the way she looked and the way people saw her was so completely different from their accustomed views, that the society simply could not agree to include her in the very sort of human beings, preferring to speak about her as ‘other’. This fact does not cause any surprise because together with the racial prejudices that the society of that period of time had (it is enough to recollect that the events took place during the last years of slavery enacted, and Sara was initially enslaved and brought to Europe as a slave), and surely with the idols of beauty and sexuality that existed in the society guided by widely accepted conventions. Being brought to the civilized Europe that was going through a very rapid, turbulent progress and that was shivering from the shocks of industrialization, wars and conflicts, Hottentot Venus also shook the very idea of femininity in a black woman and the overall views on sexuality, thus touching upon many spheres of human life that will be discussed further on.

First of all, the appearance of Hottentot Venus as a stage performer with remarkable appearance that could not leave anyone indifferent – the woman who played the role of Hottentot was insignificant regarding the emotions she had, the personality she possessed. She horrified the public, but at the same time the shameful truth was that she really attracted men with her hyper-sexuality. It was the dirty truth that was not accepted for a long time but still existed no matter what. Even under the conditions that Hottentot Venus was further on examined as a scientific discovery by Georges Cuvier trying to find the anatomic, rational explanation for her ‘freakiness’, as it was treated, this woman was still considered by many people as a mysterious, attractive and beautiful woman.

Initially it is important to speak about the cultural purposes of such character creation – the way the public perceived Hottentot Venus and the way they differentiated themselves from the strange phenomenon, the strange creature she represented for them:

“Europeans created the Hottentot Venus as the living missing link separating beast from man, the drives from intellect, the anxious space between our animal and human selves. Sara entered Europe’s psyche, modernity’s psyche, not as a woman, a living breathing person with emotions and memories and longings, but as a metaphor, a figment, a person reduced to simulacrum” (Crais and Scully 6).

Indeed, the cultural purposes of such diminishment of Sara’s human identity was a shameful experience that cannot be justified; a ridiculous observation that can be made in this respect is that her tribal identity was Khoekhoe, which in their native dialect meant ‘men of men’ (Crais and Scully 8). Bearing such a name of her tribe, Sara still was deprived of the opportunity to be and feel being a human being. This is the power of human imagination mentioned by the authors – it made her a mysterious creature while she was a simple woman, and it did not let her go nearly a century after her death.

The political motives of creation of such a character in a book are clearly felt throughout the work of Crais and Scully; more than that, they are clearly stated in the introduction of the book. The authors were trying to look at the life of Hottentot Venus not through the prism of her life in Europe and her performance as an idol of unconscious, unexplainable sexuality and beauty, but as a simple woman whose life was simply ruined by colonization. The authors saw a victim in her, and could not favor the state of affairs in her life that brought her to the minds of millions of Europeans – they wanted to find additional proofs for the fact that colonization and slavery were great evils that ruined people’s lives irreversibly and made them lose their personalities, their inner selves in the new lives – they referred to Sara Baartman as “a woman who grew up in South Africa and who was killed in Europe by a figment of other people’s imagination” (Crais and Scully 4).

This way the authors show how slavery and cruelty of colonizers – they spoke about the native land of Sara Baartman where they managed to find at least some information leading them to the earliest history of her life as a “desolate and impoverished community” surely showing how colonization and brutal reign that the British empire imposed on African Americans for several centuries ruined not only a single life but the life of a much larger number of people (Crais and Scully 4). Showing a single destiny of Sara Baartman they become the investigators of the microcosm of a destiny that symbolizes in this or that way the destiny of the whole African nation who became prosecuted even after abolition of slavery in all places where they had been brought, and who could not get back home because nothing but poverty and despair waited for them there. Both in the lines describing the way black Britons were racially discriminated in London in terms of employment (Crais and Scully 67-68), and the way Dunlop, the owner of Venus, made her an ‘enfreakment of culture’ due to the creation of an ‘ethnopornographic freak show’ (Crais and Scully 73), as well as many other passages, show the awful discrimination not only of Sara Baartman, but of the whole African nation that was distorted in the eyes of the European society just because of a single whim of a single person.

The scientific purpose of depicting Sara Baartman as a beast, as a non-human was also clear in the lives of Crais and Scully – the authors emphasized the racist line that the society of those days was trying to draw first of all between them and Sara as a black woman, and surely as a woman with irregularities in her appearance. People tried to find the explanation to that fact in her scientific belonging to another class of creatures, which nearly became true due to the effort of Cuvier. However, further consequences of such scientific division found even worse, distorted and perverted usages of Sara’s image in the world history. No matter how painful and strange it is to accept this, but Sara became the living support for racism and the coming theory of inferiority of races, which resulted in the uncountable evils of Hitler’s and Mussolini’s reign, genocide against many nations in multiple parts of the world etc. Those who planted the seeds of racism referred to the icon of Sara who had no right to be called a human being, in their opinion, and, to the overall disgust, there were many who found the idea interesting and, more than that, reasonable.

Drawing a conclusion, it is necessary to say that the story of Sara Baartman, as well as the one of Hottentot Venus, both reveal many chilling, even horrifying and painful facts about the life of races that were considered inferior in the past. Learning from the experience of those people it is necessary to understand how one person brought about the tremendous effect both on the cognition and on the perception of races, people, body, femininity and sexuality in the European thought, and how awful and perverted the inferences sometimes were. The power that imagination and perception possess have no boundaries, and sometimes it is easy to make a clear and obvious thought distorted only with the effort of one’s mind – this way the story of one woman whose life was broken, torn to pieces and destroyed for the pleasure of the public opens up the new boundaries of human cruelty and ignorance.

Works Cited

Crais, C. Clifton, and Pamela Scully. Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: a ghost story and a biography. Princeton University Press, 2009.