One of the things Black Sails did so well was showing how different people react to oppressive systems. The ways they choose to resist it, or live around it, or give in to it.
I think that Eleanor Guthrie’s story in the final season was one of the most interesting, heartbreaking examples of this. Ultimately, to me, her story was about the horror, futility, and violence of assimilation.
She tried to get power and escape oppression by joining the system that oppressed her. And to do that she gave up everything that truly mattered. One by one she cut away everything that made her her to fit this shape that was proscribed for her.
She gave up her name
(when Guthrie meant so much to her)
and her clothes
(The scene where Mrs. Hudson packs away Eleanor’s clothes is so incredibly sad. Those weren’t the clothes that Eleanor was arrested in. Eleanor must have sought them out after coming back to Nassau. And she kept them in her room. But she was never able to wear them again. She was never able to dress to please herself ever again.)
and her voice
(Rogers cuts her off. He listens when he wants, but he doesn’t listen when it matters. Before she could make things happen on her own, but inside this system she needs him to believe her, to hear her. And he doesn’t.)
and in the end it killed her.
And that destruction of Who Eleanor Truly Was continues even past her death. In the scene where Rogers hallucinates dead Eleanor, he imagines her sitting quietly and knitting.
He only sees the mutilated version of her, the fantasy of “Mrs. Rogers” that she performed to assimilate into a system that would not allow her a place as long as she was true to herself. He does not see Eleanor Guthrie who hated knitting and forced every pirate to account for her in their plans.
Her fate is just as Flint said: “All this will be for nothing…Defined by their histories. Distorted to fit into their narrative.”
In the end it was Max, who refused society’s demands to give up what truly mattered to her (even in appearance), that ended up with everything.
And I think that’s an incredible story.
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