Favorite Characters: Dido Belle Lindsay (Belle)

I watched this movie again and was again bowled over by how much I adore this incredible character.  Dido is a young woman forged in a nearly impossible crucible, trying to determine who she is and what she’s worth in a world where she’s met with constant caveats on her value.

As a child, Dido’s life is set on a new course when she meets her father, a white aristocrat who sired her out of wedlock but who loves her and the resemblance he sees in her of her mother.  Although the great aunt and uncle who raise her in her father’s absence come to love her as one of the family, their love for her is never as uncomplicated as her father’s, who instantly acknowledges her, makes her his heir, and insists that she be given every opportunity afforded to the daughter of any aristocrat.  Her great aunt and uncle’s love, meanwhile, is filtered through an ever-increasing number of rules that govern Dido’s place in the world.  She’s still a child when they placidly decide that she’ll never marry, since anyone for whom her mother’s blood wouldn’t be a dealbreaker would be too lowly to be worthy of her father’s.

These are the types of catch-22’s that surround Dido.  Whenever there are dinner guests, she finds herself too objectionable to eat with the family but too elevated to eat with the servants, and so she slips through these cracks of in-between space where no one exists except her, caught between the two halves of her world – neither of which, it seems, can ever fully have her.  For many young ladies her age, having their portrait painted is a prospect of great delight and anticipation, but the mere thought of it devastates Dido, having spent her youth walking the halls adorned with family portraits in which Black bodies are painted only in the background, looking up at their white masters with servile admiration.  She can’t bear the idea, and yet she can’t begin to articulate to her great uncle why she’s so “ungraciously” opposed to his gift of having her sit for a portrait with her white cousin.

With all these often contradictory, always dehumanizing rules pulling at her, making her feel as though her mother’s blood is a shame she is forced to carry – “her [mother’s] apparent crime to be born negro, and [Dido’s] to be the evidence” – Dido retreats into pride.  This is what I think interests me the most about her character.  In the face of being made to feel less-than, she holds fiercely, haughtily to her father’s name and her rightful position.  When she first meets Mr. Davinier, she chastises him for not showing her the due deference that he, as a vicar’s son, ought to.  As she herself justifies it, she puts others in their place in order to state what hers is meant to be.  While she doesn’t initially make very heated protestations against following her great aunt and uncle’s rules, she’s not shy about making it known just why she feels they’re so absurd and unjust.

Dido is young, she’s confused, and her own unfair treatment means she doesn’t always give others the consideration they deserve.  But she’s also perceptive and bold, and she’s always learning.  I love seeing her awakening as she collects scraps of news on the controversy over the slave ship the Zong – her initial disbelief, her righteous anger that her great uncle has kept this knowledge from her, her growing political attentiveness, and the outpouring of compassion she feels for the drowned slaves that in turn gives her the bravery she needs to love every part of herself.