The "unguarded expressions of the feelings of the negroes": gender, slave resistance, and William Wells Brown's Revisions of 'Clotel.'

African American Review, Winter, 1993 by M. Giulia Fabi

By 1864, the author's circumstances and those of his country had changed radically: Brown had returned to the United States to work as an antislavery agent; the Civil War was raging; and Clotelle was to be reissued in the Redpath's series of "Books for the Camp Fires." The new domestic context and the novel's professed goals of relieving "the monotony of camp life to the soldiers of the Union" and of kindling "their zeal in the cause of universal emancipation" result in extensive revisions of the original text. What used to be "A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States" would become "A Tale of the Southern States." In keeping with the more expressedly fictional and more geographically circumscribed subtitle, Brown preserved most of his original denunciation of the immorality of Southern slaveholders that characterized the sentimental plot of Clotel, but voiced his criticism of Northern prejudice more mildly.(17) Also, for the comfort of Union soldiers and of a country at war, he edited out the most documentary evidence of Southern brutality against blacks and whites, emphasizing instead the domestic crises engendered by slavery within Southern white homes, as well as the familial disruption and de facto homelessness characteristic of slave life. More specifically, Brown eliminated Sam's song of discontent, together with two naturalistic episodes only remotely connected with the heroine's story and dominated by male figures as well as by death.(18)

As a result of these cuts, Brown's portrayal of the separate life of the black folk and his naturalistic depiction of the inhuman violence sanctioned by unchecked white domination become increasingly subordinated to the sentimental tale that follows the individual trials and peregrinations of his all-but-white characters. Even in their case, however, Brown would quell the sensationalism of his British edition by substituting the miscegeneous Jefferson with a senator. The ostensibly more conciliatory and more covertly critical thrust of his revisions was coterminous with the increasing novelization of Clotelle, which resulted from heightening the importance of the sentimental plot (and therefore of the female characters) as well as from emphasizing the plight of emblematic individuals, rather than the recreation of the slave community through several subplots. That the theme of passing would come to dominate the novel signals also Brown's own circumspection in revealing the methods of quotidian slave resistance to his slaveholding countrymen, a diffidence that recalls the slave narrator's unwilling to publicize the details of his escape.(19)

At the same time that Brown curtailed the episodes of resistance involving members of the slave community (and thereby dramatically reduced the depth of his folk figures), he substituted a focus on individual heroic manhood for them.(20) George, now renamed Jerome, is no longer imprisoned for participating in a slave revolt, but for striking the master who intended to flog him, a la Frederick Douglass. However, though the scope (but not the bravery) of Jerome's resistance is reduced, he becomes more representative of the slave community: First, his escape comes to incorporate episodes of cunning and bravery that had been attributed to nameless slaves in the British edition(21); secondly, whereas in 1853 George had been described as looking "as white as most white persons" (224), in 1864 Brown proclaims Jerome to be "of pure African origin" and "Perfectly black" (57).