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

Whereas in her strong abolitionist plea Child capitalizes on utter female defenselessness to enhance her condemnation of those corrupt individuals who have absolute power over the "docile and injured race" (63), Brown expands Child's focus on and appeal to individual (im)morality into a direct denunciation of the institutionalized sexual abuse of slave women. In the very first lines of the novel Brown describes miscegenation as a widespread phenomenon in the South (Clotel 59), and he sustains the broad scope of his critique by attributing the paternity of his title heroine to Thomas Jefferson (64). At the same time, he rewrites Child's tragic mulattos as passers, thereby empowering the offspring of the sexual violation of black women to become an active menace to the perpetrators of such violence. As the potentially undetectable link between the enslaving and the enslaved, the passer constitutes a threat both to white property and to the "whiteness" that legitimizes the ownership of human chattel.

Consistently, Brown takes his all-but-white title heroine out of her "beautiful cottage ... almost hidden among the trees!" (83) and into the public realm, where even her eventual suicide--which significantly occurs in view of the Capitol--takes on a clearly political, rather than exclusively sentimental and moral, significance. Unlike Child's, Brown's abolitionist strategy combines emotional appeal with a vision (however limited and genteel) of female resistance and an emphasis (however wishful) on the importance of survival: While Mary's escape remains singularly successful, even the utter tragedy of her cousin Jane (a secondary character most directly patterned on Xarifa) is described with a concern for her fictional integrity in that she dies before being sexually violated (210). Admittedly, the fate of Brown's characters is as contrived and unrepresentative as Child's, but it reveals his reluctance to advance the abolitionist cause at the expense of the human dignity of his female characters.

In Clotel, the disruptive potential of passing exceeds its function as a means of escape in still another way: Though presented as a female activity, passing necessitates that the title heroine disguise herself not only as white but also as a man, a fact that highlights the connection between race, racism, and (white) female mobility. Clotel is aided in her escape by William, "a tall, full-blooded Negro, whose very countenance beamed with intelligence" (171). He pretends to be her servant, does all the talking for her, and ends up gaining his freedom when they reach the North. To avoid recognition and, arguably, also because her escape mate is a dark man, Clotel passes for white and dresses like a man, a double disguise that is replete with irony.(11) On the one hand, in fact, the idea of disguising as a man originates in her mistress's invidious scheme to turn Clotel into a "recognizable" slave by cutting off "her long hair" and making it "as short as [that of] any of the full-blooded Negroes in the dwelling" (150). On the other hand, the need for male attire points to the limited mobility of white women and contains an implicit, but keenly sarcastic, commentary on the South's paranoid preoccupation with the "purity" of white womanhood which complements and sharpens Brown's explicit condemnation of the sexual exploitation of black women that motivated Clotel's decision to escape in the first place.(12)