"Civil" War wounds: William Wells Brown, violence, and the domestic narrative

African American Review, Spring-Summer, 2005 by Jennifer James

But the powerful association Brown makes between the war and slave revolution obscures a simple fact: the Civil War was not a slave revolt, and at Port Hudson, these men did not volunteer for the charges--a crucial fact that Brown alters within his novel when he writes that the black soldiers were asked, not commanded, to put themselves in harm's way. The fictionalized account in Clotelle therefore becomes puzzling. Within the space of the imaginary, Brown could have chosen to portray many less bloody and less tragic events of the war. He could have chosen events that showed an emerging fraternity among white officers and their black subordinates. In other words, he could have used his "non-fiction" to construct an uncompromised heroic black manhood, the decision Douglass made in depicting in The Heroic Slave a black man who wages a successful revolt, rather than a fictionalized version of, say, Nat Turner, whose body ended up dangling from a noose. Instead, Brown apparently felt so distressed by white wounding of black male subjectivity (on many terrains) that he himself reviolates the black male body: "His head entirely torn off by a shell," Jerome is simply and unceremoniously snuffed out (106). Images of slaying, Kenneth Burke observes in an analysis of Milton's heroes, are acts of transformation; "the killing of something is the changing of it" (179). Brown willfully presents a grotesque where once stood a "whole" black man.

Certainly, then, this seems an odd fate for a character the writer had carefully chiseled across the span of four versions of his novel. Indeed, Brown did not initially construct his hero as a man physically dark enough to be Andre Callioux's double. Named George in the first Clotel, he more phenotypically resembles the white aristocrats in the first text, Henry Morton and Antoine Devenant--who marry mixed race women--than he resembles most of the other prominent black males in the narrative. In part, George's phenotypic whiteness serves one of the same fundamental purposes as the mulatta's: it renders him a reasonable facsimile of the chivalric heroes of white sentimental literature generally, and within Clotel specifically, it allows him to supplant the white male figures who form ultimately unsuccessful relationships with Brown's mixed race heroines. Influenced perhaps by the appearance of what Delany called the "New negro" black male in his serialized novel Blake, or the Huts of America (1859-62)--a hero defined by the combination of his undeniably black skin, powerful intellect, great strength, and, most supremely, his commitment to instigating global black revolution-Brown apparently concluded that George was too white to signify black manhood, physically and ideologically. More than a bulked up, colorized version of George, Jerome consolidates the two distinct manifestations of black heroic masculinity in the novel: the ultra-light-skinned black romantic hero who marries the mulatta heroine and is allowed access to the domestic sentimentalized narrative, and the ultra-black slave-revolutionary, whose acts place him within a different narrative, one that distinctly disallows for domestic stability.