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

In the 1853 edition, this studied debut into fictional authorship does not, however, completely eliminate a "lingering preoccupation with documenting the facts" (Andrews, "The 1850s" 43) that is more pronounced and qualitatively different from conventional nineteenth-century declarations that novels were true to life. In Clotel, in fact, Brown once again emerges both as editor and creator of fiction. He selects and compiles stories of American slavery that in keeping with his fictional, rather than autobiographical, intent he declares to have derived not only from his own experiences, but also from such secondary sources as American abolitionist journals, tales from "the lips" of runaways, and other authors' fictional texts. The result of this second "editorial" effort is not only the substantiation of the author's claim that "the various incidents and scenes ... [are] founded in truth" (Clotel 245), but also the fictional recreation of a multiplicity of slave voices and experiences often unrelated to the title heroine.

Initially, Brown does not impose any developmental narrative frame on this material, a fact which, as critic J. Noel Heermance notes with dismay, continually misleads the reader, who is never given "any idea [of] what characters will or won't be developed" (181). I approach the oft-noted sketchiness that results from this narrative mode not exclusively as an instance of artistic ineptitude (Heermance 181; Andrews, "The 1850s" 45-46), but as a deliberate strategy that succeeds (if we are to judge by the reactions of critics) in making the reader experience the powerlessness, the uncertainty, the absurdities that characterize slave life and are epitomized, as well as thematized, both in the "To-Day a Mistress, To-Morrow a Slave" pattern that governs Brown's sentimental plot and in the rebelliousness of his male slaves (Clotel 149).(7)

The deliberateness with which Brown deploys a strategy of accretion in order to advance a realistic, confrontational portrayal of the black community can be gauged by examining how the ancillary Narrative of the Life and Escape functions to safeguard the assumed unthreatening sentimentality of his subsequent tale. As Stepto has noticed, the "personal voice and hardboiled prose" of Brown's 1847 Narrative turns into "flat" writing in the 1853 version. This change occurs for purposes of "validation" and "authentication" (28), but also, I would argue, to disguise Brown's own consummate trickery and to ensure for himself the possibility of double talk. All the duplicity, trickery, and cunning that characterized Brown's self-presentation in 1847 disappear in the 1853 Narrative, only to reemerge in the male subplot of his novel, sugar-coated by the romantic, more conventionally moral adventures of his mulatto heroines. In other words, the Narrative of the Life and Escape neutralizes the disruptiveness of Brown's authorial persona in order to mediate the shift from the 1847 defiant autobiographical description of proudly performed acts of slave resistance to the covert insertion of male defiance within the ostensibly unthreatening, feminine confines of the sentimental novel.