“I Got No Comfort in This Life”: The Increasing Importance of Patsey in 12 Years a Slave

She was terribly lacerated—I may say, without exaggeration, literally flayed.

Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave

There’s a subtlety that leads up to the crescendo of Patsy being whipped by Solomon. I had to do it because I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror as an artist and not do it that way.

Steve McQueen

What happens if we assume that the female subject serves as a general case for explicating social death, property relations, and the pained and putative construction of Blackness? … What possibilities of resignification would then be possible?

Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection

In interview after interview, British director Steve McQueen has confessed that he broke down only once during the filming of 12 Years a Slave. It was during the scene in which the enslaved woman, Patsey (played by Lupita Nyong’o), is being tended to by other slaves after both her friend, Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), and her master, Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender), have whipped her. McQueen recalls, “She lifts her head up and she sees Chiwetel … and she weeps and cries. And there’s acknowledgement, I suppose, that I asked you to kill me and now this.” He goes on, “And we cut to Chiwetel acknowledging her gaze, and then Chiwetel cries. This tear just drops from his face out of nowhere. I said, ‘Cut! I have to go for a walk.’[…] I had to go for a walk” (“Where It Hurts”).

McQueen’s comments are noteworthy for several reasons. First, he moves us past the horror of the beating itself—a scene that some critics have described as excessive and, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. suggests, a “potential too-much-ness” (“Steve McQueen”). Both its length, a 10-minute sequence taken in one shot, and its heightened sensory experiences, causes its cinematic excess. In contrast to the sensory deprivation that haunts most of the film, the whipping is a spectacle of gruesome beauty: the steadied handheld camera closes up on Solomon’s face and then slowly follows the whip’s arc from his grief-stricken eyes to Patsey’s tortured back; the welcoming hues of the Louisiana plantation and the brazen whiteness of the Big House collide with Patsey’s tattered clothes and bloodied back. Only laughing birds, the stinging lash, and a desperate human wail puncture a strange and overwhelming silence. When asked about her experience filming that scene, actress Nyong’o said, “that day was as real as it could have possibly been for me, because in preparing for it, all I could do was be present.”

Despite its gravity, the whipping scene itself is hardly unexpected. American audiences have long come to anticipate such a savage whipping in a film on slavery, especially when it is based on a true story. McQueen’s task then was to de-familarize his audience with the most oft-repeated scene of slavery to evoke empathy for his characters and repulsion at their predicament. He does this by shifting our gaze, and thus our identification, from that of Northup, to Patsey’s, to Epps’s, and back to hers. And it is in that visual exchange that the young actress Nyong’o not only overwhelms veterans Ejiofor and McQueen to the point of tears but also skillfully maintains Patsey’s subjectivity against America’s larger history of anesthetizing black pain. By turning to Patsey here, I build on previous generations of black feminist scholars, particularly Saidiya Hartman and Deborah McDowell’s eloquent reading of Frederick Douglass’s voyeuristic depiction of the whipping of his Aunt Hester by their slave master in the opening chapter of his 1845 Narrative.¹ Rather than considering Patsey to be the sole victim of Epps’s lash or even the object of Northup’s detached prose, her centrality in McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave asks us to reconsider the implications of seeing woman and slave as mutually constitutive terms.

Her growing significance in his film also extends and departs from earlier versions of Northup’s story: his own...