53 pages • 1 hour read
The Confessions of Frannie Langton
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Themes
Visibility and Personal Narratives
Who is visible, and for what reasons, is a major theme throughout the novel. As the story is told from Frannie’s perspective, much of the focus is on making her story known. She has been erased, maligned, and discriminated against. Her manuscript is a way for her to correct the record. The entire novel is a case presented by Frannie to preserve her experiences of reality and make them visible to others. This concern for how others perceive her is not limited to Frannie’s composition of her manuscript. In both Jamaica and England, she is concerned with presenting herself as someone respectable, with the hopes that this will make her respected. She trains herself to speak without using the vernacular used by the others enslaved on the plantation, is careful over her clothes and concerned about their appearance, and uses her words to show others how well read and cultured she is. She tries to mimic the behavior of upper-class Englishmen, as the things they have access to—respect, knowledge, and influence—are the things she desires for herself. Frannie knows the value others place on image, and crafts her own to try to achieve her goals.
Benham, too, is concerned with recognition and attention, but with a particular focus on avoiding scandal. He has a carefully cultivated image of the ideal English scientist to maintain, and any threat to that image leads him easily to violence and anger. He is willing to do whatever it takes to protect his image, leaving Meg to die of laudanum addiction alone, bringing Frannie back, despite the stigma associated with her work at the School-House, in order to hide Meg’s illegitimate child, and requesting that Frannie spy on Meg to ensure that she does nothing to destroy his reputation. This turns out to be a family trait. After Benham and Meg’s deaths, his brother tries to obscure Meg’s suicide by faking her murder in order to protect the family’s reputation.
The trial is the final exploration of English society as a panopticon. Spectators obsess over Frannie’s character, with competing narratives of her actions and life coming to a head on the floor of the courtroom. Though Frannie desires recognition and is frustrated by being invisible in the Benham’s home, the cruel scrutiny of the trial shows that visibility often only reinforces people’s initial preconceived opinions. Even the hanging and its lead-up is meant to be public, to be “instructive for the other gaol-birds to see us on our final night. The service for the condemned” (292).
The Nature of Truth
The truth is complex to Frannie, and this is one of the first things she establishes in her manuscript. As she writes when discussing Miss-bella’s influence on her story, “the truth is not a cloth every man can cut to fit himself” (29). Frannie has deliberately set out to combat the common narrative of suffering that she has seen in abolitionist papers, wanting to write a story that includes the other truths that are uncomfortable and unacknowledged. This leads her to admit to the mental effects of her enslavement, and how truthfully one of the worst things was the love she felt for her enslavers. This also leads her to admit her role in Phibbah’s death. She tells a “truth” to Langton when she says that Phibbah adds herbs to Miss-bella’s orangeade, but says that Paradise was no place for the truth. Langton was able to twist her truth into a lie, and now, standing by her commitment to honesty, she cannot avoid the way that truth is manipulated and used as a weapon.
Frannie’s idea of the truth is further complicated by her issues with memory and her struggles with laudanum. Frannie retreats from her experiences in order to manage her trauma. When she is introduced to laudanum by Meg, this retreat becomes involuntary, the drug warping her perceptions. She retreats into memory in hazes, acting out situations she is not in, like looking for a baby in the bushes of the garden while under the influence. This leads to her total loss of memory of the night of the deaths of the Benhams. She is left to worry over what truly happened. Her coping mechanism also cuts her off from the concept that she values most: knowing what the true story is to tell.
Different perceptions of what is true also obscure and complicate experiences. During the trial, Linux insists that she did not burn Frannie on purpose, whereas when Frannie told the story there was clear malicious intent. Meg insists that she did not actually expel Frannie from the house, that she did not intend for her to leave, whereas Frannie remembers vividly Meg’s screams for her to get out. These different versions of the truth reflect the person’s character, but even more, they reflect the person’s emotions. Linux did not want to be seen as cruel, Meg missed Frannie, Frannie felt abandoned. The truth of an event is lost the minute it ends, while any one person’s understanding of it is changed by many and varied factors.
The Dangers of Scientific Racism
The English scientific community and their practices are a constant presence throughout the novel. One of the first incidents described is of an English botanist stealing Phibbah’s knowledge of Jamaican plant life and their medicinal properties, which he publishes as his own. Langton uses Frannie’s uncompensated and unacknowledged writing and labor to conduct his experiments. These experiments, and Frannie’s forced participation in them, are brutal and are based around the idea that there is an inherent intellectual and physical difference between people of different races, a racist idea that Langton seeks to prove. His interest in this, mixed with the brutality of his experiments, is motivated by his desire to be recognized back in England. He fulfills his social desires by attempting to entrench his own image of himself in the scientific record.
Even though Benham paints himself as more benevolent and tries to be more solicitous in his personal manner, the distinction between him and Langton is not as clear as the two men seem to think. Frannie comments on this, asking herself how different the two really are, as they both enslave people. Benham was perfectly willing to engage in the humiliating wager between him and Langton over Frannie’s intelligence. The respect he commands and his favorable reputation make him all the more dangerous, his social capital allowing him the power to influence scientific publications. He and Langton are so dependent on the idea that they are superior that they ignore the scientific method in order to maintain it.
The experiments Langton conducts, even more important than their social and philosophical implications, have a real and immediate human cost. In the name of a pseudoscience meant to prove his own superiority, he tortured people and mutilated their corpses. His actions caused precise and directed suffering, and he was left unpunished. Langton’s desire to publish and be recognized is also a desire that these experiments and ideas be replicated, a desire to entrench his human rights abuses and racist ideas into the bedrock of Western scientific knowledge. This is one of the reasons Frannie’s narrative holds so much weight. Her exposure of his actions prevents any of it from being softened or obscured—she has the counter narrative. By dehumanizing the people who suffered from his desire to believe he is inherently superior, Langton left the door open for his image, in the eyes of those whose opinion he courted, to be destroyed.
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