Monticello: A Revelation of Jefferson’s Hypocrisy
Sophia de la Cruz
Not many realize that the author of the Declaration of Independence, the securer of religious freedom for the United States, and prominent Enlightenment figure was also a known advocate for slavery having owned over 600 people in his lifetime (Thomas Jefferson, American Leader). Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson is a notoriously contradictory figure in American history for this very reason. Many have analyzed this theme through the lens of his political writings and actions, yet, is also evident in the structure of his home in Virginia entitled Monticello. Having designed the house himself, Jefferson’s values are evident in the structure (Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello…). Most interesting is the way he orchestrates the interactions between the people who roamed Monticello. This includes not only Jefferson’s own family, but also a myriad of prominent political figures and the hundreds of slaves that worked there. Taking a closer look at the estate we can pinpoint multiple design choices that facilitated Jefferson’s ability to play the part of both the slave owner and the enlightenment thinker. As a renowned architecture historian and theorist, Beatriz Colomina makes many well-researched claims about the connection between designed spaces and the people that inhabit them. Her thoughts published in Privacy and Publicity will be used to orient this examination of Jefferson’s Monticello. In her work, Colomina responds to architect Adolf Loos’s convolution of the classic divide between the private and public; the object and subject (Colomina, 244). She studies the tension brought forth between these two opposing ideas and the influence they have over the individual in each role. In Colomina’s work lies a metaphor brought forward from Loos writings: “The house is the stage for the theatre of the family, a place where people are born, live and die” (Colomina, 252). Because of the way Monticello is situated in history, in the time of slavery, this metaphor can be extended. If the family acts dually as the players and the spectators, within the same metaphor, slaves would inhabit the role of the stage hands. They act as the invisible force, hidden in the shadows, that place the props and ready the setting of the show that is domestic life.
The slaves ability to be invisible is unlike the roles that Colomina outlined when speaking on Loos interiors. The subject in Loos houses were intruders. In the given scenario, the intruder has only penetrated the house once its gaze lands on the most intimate place (Colomina, 250). While slaves were privy to the most intimate things within the home, from the nursery to chamber pots, they were not seen as intruders. Being rendered subhuman, their gaze did not hold enough power or importance to threaten the inhabitants. This illustrates the power and importance of historical context when analyzing the interiors and the interactions they support.
Despite the already inconspicuous nature of the slaves:
Jefferson put multiple systems in place to ensure limited interaction between the black and white folk.
The first of which is the wine dumbwaiter. Connected to the underground wine cellar was built a dumbwaiter that would allow slaves to send bottles to the tea room from below. The bottle would arrive in a concealed cabinet along the fireplace. Similarly a series of rotating shelves in the dining room made 14 course meals possible without servers. The food would be prepared and brought through underground passageway from the kitchen to the opposite side of the walls enclosing the dining room. There the food would be loaded onto shelves that turned on a rotating hinge so that once the door was turned the food would appear in the dining room as if by magic. A guest at Monticello recalls, “by each individual was placed a dumbwaiter, containing everything necessary for the progress of dinner from beginning to end.”(A Greater Eye to Convenience). These devices further enhance the metaphor of the slaves as the stage crew within the show of domestic life by creating a physical divide between the front stage and backstage. Additionally, the cleverness of the dumbwaiters is not dissimilar to the pulley mechanisms used in theatre to raise and lower scenery and props.
When described by the Monticello historical society, the house was designed with “a greater eye to convenience”. While it is clear that this feeling is physically held solely by the people in the dining room, slaves also benefit from the ability to escape interaction. The slaves’ task of carrying the many platters up steep and narrow staircases within the walls of the house is not a pleasant one, but in many ways their physical separation is desirable. The walls and hidden passageways took on the responsibility of rendering the slaves invisible. In physical interaction, there is a required effort between both parties to reject their natural states. The role of the Jefferson family is to disregard an entire group of human beings that inhabit their household on a day-to-day basis, to constantly separate them from their human dignity in order to allow them to play their part. This should be hard for many but especially an Enlightenment thinker like Jefferson who conceived the famous lines:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
(US 1776).
The slaves must also go against their nature to carry out day to day tasks without any reward, in constant fear of punishment. In this way, the spaces designed to separate the master from slave are successful in easing tensions. Albeit, not all of Monticello is successful in this way.
Colomina states that there is always a space of maximum tension in Loos buildings that dislocates the subject within a threshold or border between two spaces (pg 276). In his fictional house for Josephine Baker, we find it in the windows that look into the pool that the subject and object get convoluted (pg 276). In Monticello, I found it to be the particularly narrow spiral staircase situated between the first floor and the second. Not only is it the threshold between the public main areas of the house and the private bedrooms, but its narrow design requires a physical negotiation between slaves and members of the family alike when attempting to move between floors. The staircase is only wide enough for one person, especially in consideration of the large skirts that would have been worn by females of the house (Orr). Additionally, the spiral shape of the staircase conceals anyone who may also be attempting to utilize the space. The clash between a lady of the house and a slave on this staircase would dislocate their roles temporarily in an awkward moment of inescapable confrontation. We do not know if this feeling of discomfort was preconceived by Jefferson when he designed the staircase, but looking at his numerous other efforts to avoid this conflict it is hard to deem it intentional. Nonetheless, this space’s ability to capture a historical tension has been deemed an important design feature in the analysis of Jefferson’s home.
Considered one of the best American architects of the late-18th and early-19th century, Jefferson did not fail in creating a piece of American history that people still visit and study today (Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)). While the public often recognizes the genius of his innovative designs and clever gadgets, what they often fail to see is the intentions of the composition. Loos often described the modern man as a man of simple decoration and fashion. He finds that an intellectual does not individualize himself through physical ornamentation but by more complex demonstrations (Bloomer 93). Jefferson’s failure to live up to his own values is inherent in the way he has built Monticello. There is a strong sense of secrecy in its hidden corridors and quirky mechanisms. His efforts to hide his inconsistencies only manifests more clearly his faults. And while it is, arguably, easier to make this criticism from a mindset that is developed by hundreds of years since Monticello’s creation, we find places like the staircase would have surfaced the same tensions that have been discussed.
In recent years, Jefferson’s association with slavery has surfaced in order to bring about a more balanced view of the founding father. Often these discourses take place separate from the things we have previously known of him positively. It’s as if two different versions of one person are being created. To create a truly balanced view we must combine these conversations through lenses such as Monticello, a place that shapes and is shaped by Jefferson day to day. His designs offer a tangible realization of his values and ideologies.
Rather than limiting ourselves to the analysis of his political actions and writings, it is good practice to take into consideration the designed environment that he spent most of his life in.
By this we can achieve a more accurate understanding of this historical figure.
