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

Intertwined, but not smoothly integrated, with Brown's multifaceted, accretive communal portrayal of slave life is the tale that follows, in chronological but rather non-sequential fashion--the individual trials and peregrinations of Thomas Jefferson's mulatto offspring, characters who are sensationalistically emblematic, but hardly representative, of the community of slaves that populate his novel. Cognizant of the appeal that "white slaves!" elicited on a white abolitionist audience and concerned with his heroines' gentility and higher moral standards, Brown casts their story in the sentimental patterns of female virtue, distress, death, and/or marriage.(8) In connection with the passers, trickery as a form of resistance is disciplined and never glorified for its own sake, even when the author makes clear that deceitfulness would be justified by the structural immorality of slavery. In contrast with the imaginative trickery of his fictional male characters, Brown's heroines are monotonously engaged in the same strategy of escape from slavery--passing--which relies on physical appearance more than on cunning, on silence more than on verbal skills. As such, passing proves consistent with feminine ideals of passivity and gentility, and the amount of deceit it involves is rationalized by Brown as a minor evil that foils more serious threats to the heroines' fundamental female attributes: chastity and/or motherhood.

The close connection Brown establishes between passing and traditional notions of true womanhood emerges clearly from an examination of the different fates that befall the novel's central passers: Clotel and her daughter Mary. The story of Clotel's flight draws on, but also radically modifies, Harriet Beecher Stowe's best-selling description of Eliza's escape to Canada in Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). In both cases, passing secures freedom, but whereas Eliza passes defensively and only in order to emigrate abroad (a decision ultimately harmonious with Stowe's procolonization policy), Clotel, once free, continues to disguise and returns south in search of her daughter. However, Clotel's short-lived, courageous, independent attempt to save Mary eventually fails, and her ensuing public suicide elevates her individual defeat into an exemplum of the evils of slavery. In other words, the final powerlessness that makes Clotel choose to plunge into the Potomac rather than re slavery becomes a more effective abolitionist statement than her living trickery. Her tragic heroism emerges as quintessentially feminine, both because it is motivated by self-sacrifice and because it is ineffectual.

The reader familiar with nineteenth-century literary prescriptions of female purity also sees in her death the traditional fate of the seduced woman: However well-meaning and noble-minded, Clotel has agreed to live with Horatio out of wedlock (84). The poetic justice of seduction novels and Brown's interest in condemning the sexual exploitation of slave women coalesce in requiring the death of the heroine who has become a victim of an immoral system larger than herself, but who has also been tarnished by it. In spite of his condemnation of white Southern male immorality, Brown does not challenge contemporary prescriptions regarding the sexual behavior of women nearly so radically as Harriet Jacobs, for example.(9) On the contrary, the effectiveness of his antislavery propaganda relies on conventional moral standards.