...Sara-Maria Sorentino Recent texts in the historiography of slavery have focused on slave-owning women in an attempt to overturn the paradigm of the benevolent mistress. While “benevolence” has silenced and exceptionalized mistresses’ violence, newer interpretations draw from slave testimony...

... prestige and protection after the Civil War. Particularly concerned with the degree to which the right to marry among African Americans affected—in truly affective ways—the institution of marriage among whites, especially for the plantation mistress whose own (un)holy wedlock occurred within the context...

.... Mistress and Maid . Frick Collection, New York. Wheelock, Arthur K., Jr. Vermeer and the Art of Painting . New Haven: Yale up, 1995 . Wynter, Sylvia. “Rethinking `Aesthetics': Notes towards a Deciphering Practice.” Ex- Iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema . Ed. Mbye Cham. Trenton: Africa World, 1992...

... in Furs, Sacher-Masoch’s tale of youthful torture at the hands of a Slavic aristocrat (a cold, cruel mistress), becomes emblematic not only of ethnic resistance but also of the ideology behind masochism: “In the language of Sacher...

... and that of her mistress, Mme Aubain, by alternating between descriptions of the two women, each of whom is designated only by the pronoun “she.” The first paragraph presents Mme Aubain as subject, but in the second paragraph, the subject...

..., whispering sweet nothings in her ear in her husband’s voice, and cruelly forcing Linda to relate the details of Dr. Flint’s sexual harassment amount to sexual abuse—what Sánchez-Eppler labels “erotic domination”—and make the mistress a “sexual culprit” along with the master. See Abdur-Rahman 43–45. See also...

... of a mistress on whom "my restless passions had alighted" who yet ''was the only one and 1was faithful to her" (72). He describes a marriage arranged for him later by his parents, which led to his mistress's being "torn from my side and this was a blow which crushed my heart to bleeding (131). He recounts how...

..., establishes black slaves as God's children created in a state of innocence. Equally important is a need to depict benevolent slaveholders, usually mistresses, in order to demonstrate that they are not inherently cruel; rather, it is the system of slavery that corrupts them. The existence of a kind mistress...

... and whence masochism occurs as a linguistic event, a fabrication of speech. In the context of masochism’s foundational text, Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs (1870) , the covenant to be expounded is sealed between the novel’s protagonist, Severin, and Wanda Dunajew, his chosen mistress. Though of utmost...

... 107). The same sense of entitlement did not apply automatically to married women. When Marie Sivadon appeared in court after having shot her husband's mistress, the presiding magistrate asked directly if she believed that a wife has the right to kill in such circumstances. She replied, somewhat...

... each mistress's head when dawn has come to take her from his couch. (Beauvoir 163) It is in writing, from woman and toward woman, and in accepting the challenge of the discourse controlled by the phallus, that woman will affirm woman somewhere other than in silence, the place reservedfor her...

... Street mansion as his housekeeper and mistress. Sally Bickham left Girard on cordial terms in 1796 to marry, and Girard quickly replaced her with Polly Kenton, a laundress. After many years as his mistress and housekeeper...

... the father is, but does know for sure that she will be fired as soon as her mistress finds out she is pregnant—and she has nowhere to go. From these premises, the sequence unfolds as a veritable via crucis : the maid wakes up in her makeshift bedroom tucked in a corner of the corridor next to the sewing...

..., concubines, mistresses, courtesans, and wives. 1 He does not refer explicitly to exchanges of sex for money, but that only makes his obsession with the subject more intriguing, suggesting prostitution as a metaphor that pertains to economic exchange as such. Whether one writes of bakers or prostitutes...

... suppose—by a quest for unbounded sensuality. Severin, the novel’s protagonist, seeks to debase himself before a cold and exacting mistress whose whip would deliver him from the sensual world he has come to abhor. He likens himself to the martyrs of old and takes as a motto for his doctrine the words...

...; and if you happen to see Mistress Alice, his daughter, give Matthew Maule’s humble regards to her. She has brought a fair face from Italy,—fair, and gentle, and proud,—has that same Alice Pyncheon...

... their own life, not as wife, not as mother, not as mistress, not as girlfriend, but as individual human being. This will be a struggle permeated with bitter conflicts, torment, and suffering (mental and physical). Consider only...

... was the only person able to ride a certain Tom, is in the end killed by him. But this turn on his mistress is represented as an act of saving grace on the part of the horse, rescuing her from a melancholy future as wife and mother...

..., of "dubious and questionable" reputation (161). Once the King's mistress, Adler has promised to disrupt his upcoming marriage; she has a compromising photograph of herself and the King that she means to send his royal fiancee. The King's attempts to recover the photograph through waylaying and searching Adler...

... betrays Carmen's transgressive character is her appetite for what women are supposed, by the narrator, to hate. She wants a pleasure that a woman is not expected to wish - to want to be the master-mistress of her own pleasure. The first time in literature a woman accepts a cigarette, the gesture serves...