The Queen is the (Is)land - Female Power in Black Sails
Black Sails is a series about pirates. As I mentioned in another blog, there were very few women pirates in historical reality (many more, of course, in fiction).
While Black Sails does include the notorious Anne Bonny, one of the best known women to sail under the black, it mostly addresses femininepower in other ways.
In fact, Anne is presented as having masculine power…she’s a good fighter, a good sailor, and a decent commander, and all of this is coded as male in this world.
So I’m not going to talk much about her, although she’s well presented and ably played by Clara Paget.
Instead, I’m going to talk about three other women in the show – Eleanor Guthrie, Max, and Madi. (pronounced more like the French word for Tuesday, by the way).
Eleanor Guthrie – the Pirate Queen
Eleanor Guthrie is an interesting figure. Played by Hannah New, she represents colonialism, but also compromise. After her father becomes completely useless…and after his death…Guthrie becomes the uncrowned queen of Nassau Town.
Is she a pirate? Technically, yes…but what she actually is at that time is a fence. By controlling commerce and helping the pirates trade their ill-gotten gains, she keeps a rough, loose peace in Nassau. The power she exercises is entirely financial. Piss her off, and you can’t sell in Nassau and will have to go somewhere else.
And she uses that power, if not always deftly. Outsiders see her as the Pirate Queen and eventually she’s arrested and shipped to London to face trial…
…where she promptly gets the ear of…and eventually in bed with…Governor Rogers. With the might of England behind her, she sets out to bring peace to Nassau permanently.
It doesn’t work. Maybe it can’t work. But ultimately, Eleanor fails because she is still, at heart, a colonialist and a representative of externalpower.
At the same time, she has become so integrally tied to Nassau Town that the fall of Nassau parallels her death by violence. I did not expect this character to die.
But after spending time thinking about it…symbolically, Eleanor has to die. It’s not just that she’s colonial, she is English.
And the ancient northern European superstition of the ruler being integrally bound to the land and being sacrificed for it is echoed here, not necessarily by the conscious intent of the writers.
When Eleanor dies, we know Nassau Town has fallen. Actually fallen, not just been sacked by people who then flee.
It resonates.
Eleanor’s power of the purse is distinctly feminine in this environment. It’s echoed by the power her grandmother holds…and echoes across, to, to the second powerful woman I’m going to talk about…
Max - the Hooker Without a Heart of Gold
Max is the only name we ever get for her. It’s a peculiarly gender neutral or even masculine name attached to an ineffably feminine character. Jessica Parker Kennedy may be the best actor in the show, and does a very good Caribbean accent for somebody from…Calgary. (She was also Nora Allen in the Flash, but the two characters look so different that it only adds to my belief that she’s talented).
Max is a subversion of the “hooker with a heart of gold” character…because Max does not have a heart of gold. What she does have is a sense of honor…but of the kind that means that if you cross her, she will take you down.
Max’s power is adjacent to the power of the purse; certainly she uses money. But her power is the power of the pillow.
As first a sex worker and then the madam of Nassau’s premier brothel, she is Eleanor’s lover for a time, but has relationships with both men and women (as does Eleanor and Anne…not all the women in this show are bi, but…)
And those relationships are something she shamelessly uses. Her girls are a spy network. Her power is that she knows everything that goes on in Nassau.
Including how to save it, although in the end, she turns away from power and towards love, in what I think was a Very Bad Decision. (Did I mention this show is all about bad decisions).
Max uses her sexuality, but isn’t always entirely in control of it, which makes her more human and flawed.
She’s my favorite character in the show and contrasts highly favorably with, dare I say it, Inara Serra from Firefly, who often devolved into the Hooker with a Heart of Gold trope. That might be unfair, though, given that show’s premature cancellation.
I love Max. I don’t know that I’d want to hang out with Max, but she’s dangerous, beautiful, and ultimately shows the weakness of using sex for power.
Use sex for power long enough and you run the risk of actually falling in love with somebody you’re trying to honeypot.
Madi - Mistress of the Freed
We see a lot less of Madi than the other two. She’s a maroon princess, daughter of the maroon queen and Mr. Scott, and lover of Long John Silver.
Played by the talented Black South African actor Zethu Dlomo-Mphahlele, Madi is more enigmatic. She’s distant. She doesn’t engage in the power of the purse and there’s no indication her relationship with Silver is anything other than two people appreciating each other.
So, what is her power?
The power of the voice. She is the daughter of a fugitive slave, with no place in the white colonial world as anything other than property.
The same white colonial world that would see all the pirates swing. Her alliance with Silver is both intimate and diplomatic.
She makes herself indispensable not based on particular skill (although she’s a competent fighter) but based on being somebody every side in this fragile alliance will listen to.
Unfortunately, her voice (and her beauty) may be what ends up shattering the alliance as she inadvertently sets Flint and Silver at odds.
The lesson of Madi is that you can’t make anyone indispensable…which is, perhaps, a lesson of the show in general. She ends up coming over as a decidedly tragic figure. None of it is her fault, but Silver is, in the end, right.
They can’t run this war without her.
All three of these women exercise power in a gendered way…and in the gendered way of the time. And one of the things Black Sails achieves, despite it’s general focus on the male gaze, is to present us with women who have gendered power, but aren’t going to elicit the Sansa Stark reaction…nobody could call any of the three “weak,” even in contrast to the masculine power of Flint, Silver, and, yes, Bonny.
This was a brilliant way for the show to have strong female characters without breaking historicity. One could also add Anne as the “not like other girls” character, but the remarkable thing about Eleanor, Max, and Madi is that they are like other girls.
They just know their power and how to use it.