스티브 매퀸의『노예 12년』: 공감에 기초한 새 노예 서술

Abstract

This article attempts to examine Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave in terms of its greater recognition of the black female voice and the growth of the timid black male protagonist into an outspoken abolitionist. First, by paying attention to black female voices and sexuality, 12 Years helps us to understand more clearly slavery’s pathological dynamics, in which the vicious cycle of white tyranny and black suffering is endlessly repeated. In particular, black women were structurally exposed to white violence and sexual assaults so that, in the film, the miseries of female slaves are graphically portrayed, thereby presenting black women as representatives of all suffering black slaves. This is typically revealed through the unbearable sufferings that Patsey undergoes in her pathological relationship with her master and mistress. Whereas the film thus emphasizes the importance of black female corporeality and voices, however, it silences the protagonist Solomon Northup. What he does throughout the movie is to mechanically work, as directed by white masters or overseers, to witness fellow slaves’ distresses, and to turn away from them silently. The movie particularly emphasizes Northup’s “powerlessness” and “passivity” before the suffering of the female slaves: a woman in the Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave: A Neo-slave Narrative of Empathy 31 bunkhouse, Eliza, and Patsey. However, after witnessing Patsey’s insufferable physical and psychological anguish caused by the master’s lust and the mistress’s jealousy, the protagonist, initially passive and timorous, becomes keenly aware of the moral wrongs that he has done by ignoring his fellow slaves. His power of empathy thus begins to grow, eventually transforming this previously passive onlooker into an active abolitionist. Even though he has physically deserted Patsey and fellow blacks by becoming a free black resident in New York again, Northup remembers their suffering and therefore participates in the mass political movement of abolitionism in order to atone for the forsaking. Thus, the protagonist’s memory of Patsey’s suffering is kept alive, decisively influencing his subsequent actions in the latter part of the movie. Emphasizing the importance of black female experiences and voices and showing how the power of empathy grows inside the initially passive observer, Northup, this movie manifests itself as a neo-slave narrative, which reminds the contemporary audience of the enduring need to remember the history of slavery in this post-racial era. Because the historical trauma of slavery still haunts the age of Obama in various forms of racial issues, the movie urges us, first, to remember Patsey’s suffering; second, to understand precisely why such terrifying ordeals were inevitably generated under the labor system of slavery; and, finally, to empathize and act with fellow blacks as Northup himself did.