if Blanche had been "pure?" It seemed as if the reason she fell apart--the alcoholism, whipping Ellen, threatening to have Mede killed--was because Hammond rejected her for lying about her virginity. And while he never had any intention of being faithful to her he would have shown enough attention to father an heir by her if nothing else. And since jewelry was all that was needed to get her to perk up that might have been enough.
shareIt was of course some kind of double standard. Hammond like other men expected brides to be virgins while the same standard did not apply to men.
I think Hammond was basically a decent man but also a little naïve. The "system" required him to marry a white woman to breed but also permitted him to meddle with the black wenches. I don't think Blanche really minded Hammond using the slave girls for sex. What really offended her was that Hammond actually preferred Ellen to her. You can see Hammond actually loved and cared for Ellen, gave her expensive jewelry, and even agreed to free her "sucker". That was what caused Blanche to take revenge.
Things would have been different if Blanche had not been stupid enough to "summon" Mede to her room for sex, and it was still more stupid for Mede to come despite the other servants trying to stop him. What was he thinking? Regardless of Blanche's threats, did Mede really believe that what he did could have been without serious consequences?
Hmmm ... I accepted his having gone as his having to obey the mistress of the house.
But Blanche could also have accused him of having raped her out of spite ... that really would have gotten Hammond going. I really can imagine after all of Hammond's evident kindness to slaves Mede thinking Hammond would believe him. His indictment of Hammond at the end was so simply eloquent, it was much more profound than a lot of final summaries I have heard lately.
I agree, Hammond was basicallly decent but then why did he have to start killing? His wife, then Mede ... it ended in losing his father. I wondered about the double standard but I think the really troubling double standard was treating other humans as meat. That just must have corrupted men's souls, which I think might have ultimately been what was going on with Hammond. I had seen the movie in a theater originally but aside from the master and mistress's affairs with people of the opposite race, so to speak, I did not remember how the movie ended. It's quite a shocker. I really expected Hammond to say, well, I've got my black lover, you go ahead and have yours and we'll live under one roof with no one the wiser. I guess that wouldn't have helped keep the white control going so probably Hammond was wise in the contect not to go in that direction. But I at least expected him to understand his wife. I know she was an evil drama queen but couldn't he have just divorced her?
Thanks for asking that question. That's what I was wondering, too: where did everything go wrong?
Maybe Blanche could have told Hammond from the start that she wasn't a virgin. I guess that would have ended with her being a spinster, but it might have been better than her fate.
Then when she was found out, perhaps she could have been a lot more humble and accepted her fate. It seems Hammond would have tried to sire a child by her. If she had been really demure, who knows, maybe she could have gotten him to come around.
But ultimately to me it seems where everything went wrong really was with the institution of slavery that resulted in such anguish and death. So many people are calling it a holocaust, and it really did use Nazi-istic tactics.