Written more than two decades apart, Barbara Chase-Riboud's first novel Sally Hemings (1979) and most recent book Hottentot Venus (2003) appear to be parallel "bookends" to each other. Both Sally Hemings and Hottentot Venus are black feminist revisions of the most controversial and the most popular images of black women in the early nineteenth-century. In Sally Hemings, through a series of flashbacks, multiple narrators, and weaving in and out of the consciousness of her title character, Chase-Riboud reconstructs the historical relationship between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson primarily from the point of view of Hemings. Invoking a similar narrative strategy, Chase-Riboud's Hottentot Venus recreates the story of Sarah Baartman, the Khoisan woman who left South Africa in 1810 for England and France, publicly exhibited her body for European scientists and carnival spectators, and reluctantly bore the pejorative moniker Venus Hottentot. Much like Sally Hemings, the novel Hottentot Venus retells Baartman's story by challenging the dominant nineteenth-century visual and written accounts of her life and by giving the fictional Baartman authorial control. Due to prevailing racial and gender stereotypes about black female sexuality, both Hemings and Baartman endured and continue to experience what Chase-Riboud once described in an interview with Monique Wells as "the eternal negation of their humanity" (65), in the Western imagination. In an attempt to rescue Hemings and Baartman from the dehumanizing images that defined them for the vast majority of the [End Page 934] nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Chase-Riboud's Sally Hemings and Hottentot Venus grant these women an interiority and subjectivity denied to them in their real lives.
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