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

Brown's attack on the myth of racial purity embodied in the sexual purity of the Southern lady reaches a climax when Clotel returns to the South in search of her daughter. There, the full disruptiveness of passing emerges by connection with same-sex carnality. During a stagecoach ride to Richmond, Clotel travels with an elderly gentleman and his marriageable daughters:

Clotel and they had not only given

their opinions as regarded the merits

of the discussion, but that sly glance

of the eye, which is ever given when

the young of both sexes meet, had

been freely at work. The American

ladies are rather partial to foreigners,

and Clotel had the appearance of a

fine Italian. (204) In a bold reversal Brown strikes a blow against slavery by portraying the utter moral chaos it engenders and the far from clearly defined racial and sexual categories on which it is based. The passer's ethnicity is not easier to read than her gender, and in both cases socially sanctioned signifiers such as skin color and attire are instrumental in hiding the liminal subjectivity they are supposed to contain.

Liminality, like passing, remains a female prerogative in Clotel, where male characters are defined by their oppositional stance. George, who is Mary's lover and looks as white as she, escapes from prison wearing her clothes, but he has to walk "but a short distance before he felt that a change of his apparel would facilitate his progress" (228). Confirming his evaluation of passing as unheroic, Brown can then structure George's escape to Canada following the more rugged and heroic pattern of other famous slave fugitives; like Brown himself (Narrative 217), George finds his way to Canada "hiding in the woods during the day, and travelling by the guidance of the North Star at night" (Clotel 228).(13) As a participant in a bloody slave revolt and as the "heroic young slave" (225) who risks his life to save "some valuable deeds" (224) belonging to the same city that has sentenced him to death, George provides a fair example of the kinds of confrontational male resistance extolled in the novel. In marked opposition to the innocent sensibility and the genteel individualism of his female passers, Brown's male heroes, many of whom are extolled for being full-blooded, engage in violence, act in concert with the slave community or at least clearly within it, and provide a variety of rebellious behaviors that defy and/or ridicule the power of the slaveholders.

The examples of male resistance Brown compiles in Clotel are so numerous as to justify impressions of the novel's sketchiness. Brown praises and celebrates Nat Turner as "distinguished for his eloquence, respected by the whites, and loved and venerated by the Negroes" (213) only twenty-two years after his insurrection. Turner's example of violent resistance against the outrages of slavery is followed by descriptions of the acts of other characters, Picquilo and George (213-14), whose deeds are notably not accompanied by condemnations of the unchristianity of retributive justice. Concomitantly, Brown reveals and celebrates more covert strategies of resistance that originate in the slaves' own knowledge of the peculiar institution. By feigning to be on business for his master, a (male) slave succeeds in leaving the South with one of his owner's pigs; two others attempt to gain their freedom by acting as a captured runaway and a slave catcher (169). Regardless of the actual percentage of slaves who engaged successfully in such ingenious escapes, Brown's portrayal of these incidents elevates them to the status of exempla, of emblematic instances of slave discontent, intelligence, and love for freedom.