Property & Mimicry
Why "μιμέομαι (mimeomai)?" [1 Corinthians 11:1; Ephesians 5:1; 2 Thessalonians 3:7-9; Hebrews 6:12, 13:7; 3 John 1:11] Why would the writers of the New Testament use this word, a word associated with the tutoring practices of the Greek philosophers, with the human's own good and not directly with new life in Christ? Why not stick to words like "ἀκολουθέω (akoloutheo)," a word much wider used in the New Testament, of following after and being a disciple? The answer is obvious – because we are to be mimics of Jesus in every conceivable way, and we are to see the life he lived as human on Earth and parse it as a guide for ourselves – but it is worth asking because with it one asks why we would need or desire to live in the lifestyle of another person to begin with. Even if the answer to that is not so clear, Paul's thesis of imitators of Christ leading others to imitate Christ through imitating themselves makes it clear that we will imitate the people we like and love, and this is true towards the atheists we have in our lives as much as the pious. In Property, we are given a godless Antebellum deep American South, a sugar plantation, and a woman who seems to only live as those around her do, a woman who seems to be powerless to live in any way besides that of the people around her. This woman, Manon, finds herself stuck imitating only the sinful world she despises.
Most obviously, Manon, the main character of the novel, mimics her husband. Most obvious of this is Manon's treatment of slaves. The novel opens with Manon observing her husband putting the slaves on his plantation through "exercises:" he makes them all, and there are not too many altogether, strip and then has them swing from a rope into a lake together. When one of them inevitably gets a hard-on from extenuating circumstances, the husband beats that slave. "This is what proves they are brutes, he says, and have not the power of reason. A white man, knowing he would be beaten for it, would not be able to raise his member."[1] Manon, though disturbed by these practices, is not much of an "ideal slaveowner" to her own slave, Sarah. We see more clearly the similarities between the two when we are shown a proper scene of the circumlocution the pair engage in, with Sarah being used as a pawn:
"'I will never agree to your proposal [to spend time away],' he said.
"I expected this response, had indeed planned for it, holding my card high to my chest like a proper gambler. 'And if I were to leave Sarah here,' I said. 'What then?'
"He brought his hand to his chin and began pulling at his mustache, his eyes fixed on me with resolute puzzlement. He could see it. He would have Sarah to himself and I would be gone.'"[2]
Sarah is one of the few things in her life that truly belong to Manon. Manon's husband has been having sex with Sarah quite often. The two even have a deaf child, Walter, that tends to be ignored by everyone as much as possible. Manon is quick to flare her husband's own tumescence for her own desires, quick to dive into his own games in order to try and take advantage of what little she can in her situation. Manon is quick to act like her husband to accomplish the same goals as her husband, although she directs those goals to herself. The loathing Manon has for her husband is based on real wrongs, certainly, but even when genuinely oppressed, the victim can take after the perpetrator.
Manon also pulls a lot of her behavior from her parents. Manon visits her mother when she comes down with an illness during an epidemic and is there for her death. Manon's mother is cruel to Manon. She is also much more direct than Manon likes to be. When Manon visits her mother during the latter's sickness, her mother has nothing but scolding:
"'Whose baby is it?' she [Manon's mother] asked again.
"'Sarah's,' I said.
"'Yes,' she said impatiently. 'I know that. But who is the father?'
"'How should I know?' I said. She blinked at me, as if I'd struck her.
"'I thought you would manage better than you have, Manon.'"[3]
This is the kind of behavior Manon shows to everyone else, too, especially Sarah. See this conversation Manon has with her doctor about her own infertility, which shows her again chillingly:
"He shrugged. 'This is precisely my grievance,' I explained. 'That it [slave owners having children with their slaves] is common.'
"'Why not sell the girl?'
"'No. He would only find another. And this one suits me. She hates him as much as I do.'
"I saw a flicker of sympathy cross his expression, but I didn't think it was for me."[4]
She has no remorse for any of the people around her. She only considers herself and walls everyone else off, letting them become nothing more than waves crashing against her cliffside, a dull and eroding roar. We never see Manon's father, but he also has a great influence on her life, an influence Manon directly acknowledges. He is an enigma for most of the novel, and is really only brought up when Manon his fonding over him. Manon brings him up early on to praise his slaving practices:
"Whenever Father went to the hiring barn, the negroes pressed around him and begged him to take them on. . . I heard the first strains of the fiddles and began the dancing which lasted late into the night. . . Father was strict and fair. None of our people could marry off the farm. . . In order to have peace and harmony, he [Father] said, the negroes must recognize that the farm is their provider and protector. . .I didn't know, as a girl, how remarkable Father was."[5]
Manon herself also snidely remarks, "All night I prayed myself a widow, but to prove there is no Supreme Being who hears our prayers, in the morning Sarah came to my door with the message that my husband had gone to his brother's house and would not return until dinner."[6] She mimics her father's own irreligion with pride. Her father is the one person she has her heart on imitating. She knowingly and intentionally acts like the other people in her life, but Manon's father is the only person she looks up to, and as proven, he is not really a better role model than any other choice Manon could make. She only chooses her father on account of his distance through his death early in his life – that is, Manon's father isn't around to annoy, oppress, upset, or hurt her in any way, so she can parse his personality more freely. At the end of the novel, after finding his journal and hearing tidbits from those around her, she begins to unravel her good tidings towards her father: "He pretended to be a loving father, a devoted husband, but he really wasn't with us, our love was not what he required, he did not long for us as we longed for him. . . he was obsessed by the negroes, he wanted them to admire him, to adore him, and my mother was right as well; they had killed him."[7] Manon realizes that her uplifting of her father is based on the idea that he is better, different, from other people, from herself. Manon's father was not. Manon ironically stops looking up to her father because she can see that his life was just like hers in ways she cannot approach.
Manon also replicates a lot from the slave that she favors the most, the one she hates the most, the one thing in life that is truly hers, Sarah. As mentioned before, Manon’s treatment of her slave is not any different from how those around her treat their own slaves. If it has not yet become obvious, Manon is quite obsessed with Sarah. She wonders why her husband lets Sarah keep the baby he fathered her, but she realizes at her mother's house just after her mother dies that the baby and Sarah's breast milk sexually arouse him, so she herself is sexual with Sarah's breast milk and drinks it from her. "How wonderful I felt, how entirely free. My headache disappeared, my chest seemed to expand, there was a complimentary tingling in my own breasts. . . She's [Sarah's] afraid to look at me, I thought. And she's right to be. If she looked at me, I would slap her."[8] This scene of Manon trying to coalesce with Sarah is an early climax of the novel and a macrocosm of how Manon is the people she finds herself around. Manon is behaving similarly to her husband with Sarah, here literally trying to directly mimic his actions to see what it feels like, and she finds she quite loves acting as her husband does. This is also an obvious and direct parallel to the opening scene of the novel; Manon's husband puts himself and his slaves in weirdly sexual situations for his own gratification, and so Manon does the same. The the obsession and plainness and indifference of her father, and the cold cruelty of her mother is represented. She is merely doing what everyone else does; the depravity of the act does not change that. Sarah and Manon's relationship is self-sustaining in the sense that the two feed each other. Sarah is also cold and heartless because of her circumstance, but Sarah motivates herself towards escape and puts her plan into action. Even though Sarah's freedom is temporary, "'She has done more than that [pass as a free woman,]' I observed. 'She has tasted a freedom you and I will never know,'"[9] and Manon loathes that. Her relationship with Sarah is the most negative by the end of the novel, yet the most reciprocal. They yearn for freedom, even though it is only Sarah who wants it enough to go after it.
This novel shows the comprehensiveness of mankind's depravity. It’s focus on Manon shows how godless society propagates itself, though having nothing to truly support itself with. The animosity burning inside of Manon prevents her from feeling any kind of positive feeling whatsoever towards those she imitates, in spite of her imitation. There is only one man she feels anything towards, Joel, and it is a doomed match and she only seems to like him for his compliments to begin with. There are many other people in Manon's life, and even though her critical influences are clear, she does seem to pick up little things from the others – but then, who is picking up what from who, really? One must caution to not assume imitation is subconscious just because it is inevitable. It is not a decision we have a choice in making, but it is a decision nonetheless. A world that rejects Christ can only imitate itself, feed off itself, eat itself. Knowing this, one must be sure to imitate those who are near to Christ and who seek to draw nearer to Him. If the world seems inescapable, as Manon's surely does, then take hope that one can turn to Christ always. The Lord commands you to follow Him. [Leviticus 19:2-4, 20:7-8; Deuteronomy 10:12-22, 11:1-9; 1 Peter 1:10-16] Hang on to Christ, for in a rebellious world, there is nothing else to hold on to. Everything you love and look up to is nothing but shattered glass and drifting smoke; only Christ is eternal, only Christ is truly real. You must imitate Him, above and beyond and without all others, regardless of the epoch you live in, regardless of the difficulty of the task.