Origins
Brown drew inspiration for Clotel from the alleged rumors that Thomas Jefferson fathered children by his female slaves. He was aware, however, that the reports concerning Jefferson's fathering and neglecting such children could and even might have been true, as similar reports certainly were true of countless other slaveholders, some of whom he had known personally, including his own father. Clotel; or the President's Daughter grew out of a desire on Brown's part, not to attack the character of Thomas Jefferson per se, but to win by means of an entrancing story attention to a comprehensive and persuasive argument against American slavery. Brown's primary purpose with Clotel was to exemplify slavery as the sum of all villainies and thereby to develop a public sentiment that would hasten the abolition of it. This text is just one example of how Brown criticized American statesmen, moralists, and churchmen for preaching the highest ideals of democracy, morality, and Christianity, and practicing the worst kinds of tyranny, immorality, and deviltry, whose sum total was chattel slavery.
Scholarship and Criticism on Clotel
Passing and the Gendered Dimensions of Resistance Strategies
One of the greatest things about literature is that it can be completely left up to interpretation. And with this groundbreaking first African American text has garnered some very intriguing scholarship and analysis. Scholar, Michael Berthold has critically evaluated this text in specific context to its of gender-bending, femininity and cross dressing. How Brown uses these themes is quite interesting and complex. As markers in the novel of cultural, social, and aesthetic dissonance, however, Clotel’s cross-dressings begin to indicate how "dissonance" - always underpinning Brown's practice of authorship - in fact is scaffold and tonality for the novel. The regulated transvestism of Brown's novel cultivates "forgetfulness of self" in the service of a recognizably nineteenth-century "true womanhood".
Berthold also makes a striking comparison between the novel and the real-life narrative of William and Ellen Craft, Running A Thousand Miles for Freedom. Although there are multiple similarities between these texts, Berthold delineates some significant differences. Though it should be noted that Brown was closely acquainted with both the Crafts. In Brown's reproduction, Clotel devises the same plot, even assuming Ellen's alias as "Mr. Johnson" and donning an identical pair of green spectacles. In both cases, the masquerade brilliantly parodies slavery's arrangements of race, gender, and property, allowing both Ellen and Clotel an intermittent empowerment. They assume the prerogatives of white male mastery while simultaneously staging that mastery as impotent. But both Craft and Brown seem to need, through their masculine recontextualizations of bold female stories of escape, to contain such implicit or emergent liberations. Brown's most significant alteration of the Crafts' escape is to make his heroine unmarried and a mother, the antithesis in this regard to Ellen Craft. As a fugitive, Clotel is at once more dangerously solitary and compulsively focused than her avatar. She flees slavery in order to return to the south and risk her liberty in the hopes of reclaiming her daughter Mary in Richmond.
The escape from bondage is articulated as a specific, inexorable maternal quest, and Clotel's freedom becomes the assumption of the full anguish of active motherhood. Clotel incarnates, according to Brown, that “overwillingness of woman to carry out the promptings of the finer feelings of her heart”. In a further deflection of Clotel's potentially transgressive cross-dressing, Brown in fact concentrates on William's role in the escape to mollify and contextualize Clotel's disguise and to celebrate William's own virtues - his intelligence, earnestness, honesty, and "deep feeling".
Clotel's cross-dressing lessens the plight of unrecognition. Her disguise allows her to negotiate the chasm of private and public and reworks the theater of slavery that Brown otherwise presents in the novel. As southern gentleman, Clotel experiences not only visibility in public, but, more specifically, the special freedom of being anonymous in public. The disguise also provides Clotel with new speech opportunities. Clotel is able to demonstrate her capacity for appropriating white male legalistic discourse and overturning slavery's catechismal rhythms. Speaking in public, she can risk a nascent sass.
The exoticism and finery of the second disguise might bode a new transgressiveness on the part of Clotel, intimated by the effectually lesbian flirtation, borrowed from the Crafts, that occurs between Clotel and the older, unmarried daughter who wants Clotel to visit the family estate. When Clotel is unmasked by two city officers seize the key to her trunk, discover her female clothing, and imprison her. Through this symbolic rape, Clotel is rudely returned to herself and to slavery's world of imminent abuses and arrests. Her tenure of empowerment and license, a qualified liberation in transit, is painfully brief and utterly contingent on her disguise. In the odd crux of slavery's dehumanizations and Brown's narrativizations, she is most eloquent and powerful as a corpse. As corpse, however, she is allotted a final transvestism, a narrative transvestism wherein she assumes the public, ironic, politicized language of men to speak against patriarchal hypocrisy - against the father of the country himself. The carefully orchestrated cross-dressings of Clotel contribute finally to the larger vertiginous quality of the narrative.
Another scholar, M. Giulia Fabi contextualizes Clotel also by examing into the gendered dimensions in which slaves resist their own subjugation and how Clotel factors into this discussion, most particularly in the context of passing. Fabi theorizes that William Wells Brown divided and differently partitioned his attention between two competing plots. The first revolves around individual all-but-white female figures whose very existence constitutes a challenge to rigid racial definitions and whose ability to pass for white represents a genteel form of covert resistance expedient in eluding racial oppression. The second plot centers instead on the slave community and incorporates a wide variety of historical information, anecdotes, folklore, newspaper accounts, etc., in order to document the multiformed life of the slaves and the many diverse, more markedly confrontational forms of communal resistance to slavery.
The protagonists of this second plot are most often male and visibly black. Slave women who cannot pass are also subsumed within this community, though without adequate representation: The dichotomy between genteel and confrontational resistance in fact leads Brown to eschew the depiction of active female trickery, a concept extraneous to dominant contemporary ideologies of true womanhood, as well. Analogously, the significance of Clotel in the making of African American fiction changes over time: In its first version, it accomplishes the transition from autobiographical to fictional authorship; by its last, it emerges as an antecedent of the literary strategies and concerns of the post-reconstruction period.
The three book-form editions of Clotel reveal not only the oft-noted close connection between early African American literature and historical events,5 but also the author's effort to adjust his original text to its own accomplished novelization, in the attempt to tame its proliferation of characters and events, as well as to ac- commodate the open-ended real-life “melodrama endemic to American racism" within the generic boundaries of the romance”. In the second and third editions, the stronger emphasis on the adventures of the title heroine increases the visibility of the theme of passing, thus deflecting attention from the wealth of communal facts regarding slave life that Brown recounts.
In its first version, the sentimental female plot of Clotel is as deceiving as the fabulistic frame of African American folk animal stories. In both cases, irony and an unthreateningly fictitious context hide disruptive double meanings. On the one hand, the mulatto qualifies as a device of mediation both for her mixed genealogy and her gender: As a "white Negro," she appropriates the qualities of ideal white womanhood and complements them with loyalty, understanding, and support for individual black men. On the other hand, whereas Brown foregrounds the traditionally relational ideal of female courage as devotion and self-sacrifice, his male heroes loom in the background as powerful, cunning, and potentially violent freedom fighters.
In the first edition of Clotel, Brown articulated a scathing, comprehensive critique of slavery in the American South, race prejudice in the American North, and religious hypocrisy in the American nation as a whole. 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.
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 final powerlessness that makes Clotel choice to plunge into the Potomac rather than return to 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.
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. 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. 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. It is because of Brown's attention to the many different contexts and levels at which slave resistance occurs that he is able to portray it as (partly) successful and as an instrument of group survival. In Clotel, overt and covert rebellion are not exclusively interdependent, and the admitted failure of Turner's revolt and George's rebellion do not spell the utter defeat of black resistance. Brown thus emphasizes resilience and community survival at the same time that he stresses the unmanageability of slavery both on a moral and a practical level: If rebellions and covert resistance threaten the domination of the slaveholders, passing blurs the most basic racial criteria to distinguish the free from the enslaved.
Both of these ingenious scholars examine Clotel for the significance it places on the Black woman and her agency within a life controlled by systematic oppression and exploitation. To read further into these scholars' work, simply click on the hyperlinks attached to their names to fully access their articles.
Brown drew inspiration for Clotel from the alleged rumors that Thomas Jefferson fathered children by his female slaves. He was aware, however, that the reports concerning Jefferson's fathering and neglecting such children could and even might have been true, as similar reports certainly were true of countless other slaveholders, some of whom he had known personally, including his own father. Clotel; or the President's Daughter grew out of a desire on Brown's part, not to attack the character of Thomas Jefferson per se, but to win by means of an entrancing story attention to a comprehensive and persuasive argument against American slavery. Brown's primary purpose with Clotel was to exemplify slavery as the sum of all villainies and thereby to develop a public sentiment that would hasten the abolition of it. This text is just one example of how Brown criticized American statesmen, moralists, and churchmen for preaching the highest ideals of democracy, morality, and Christianity, and practicing the worst kinds of tyranny, immorality, and deviltry, whose sum total was chattel slavery.
Scholarship and Criticism on Clotel
Passing and the Gendered Dimensions of Resistance Strategies
One of the greatest things about literature is that it can be completely left up to interpretation. And with this groundbreaking first African American text has garnered some very intriguing scholarship and analysis. Scholar, Michael Berthold has critically evaluated this text in specific context to its of gender-bending, femininity and cross dressing. How Brown uses these themes is quite interesting and complex. As markers in the novel of cultural, social, and aesthetic dissonance, however, Clotel’s cross-dressings begin to indicate how "dissonance" - always underpinning Brown's practice of authorship - in fact is scaffold and tonality for the novel. The regulated transvestism of Brown's novel cultivates "forgetfulness of self" in the service of a recognizably nineteenth-century "true womanhood".
Berthold also makes a striking comparison between the novel and the real-life narrative of William and Ellen Craft, Running A Thousand Miles for Freedom. Although there are multiple similarities between these texts, Berthold delineates some significant differences. Though it should be noted that Brown was closely acquainted with both the Crafts. In Brown's reproduction, Clotel devises the same plot, even assuming Ellen's alias as "Mr. Johnson" and donning an identical pair of green spectacles. In both cases, the masquerade brilliantly parodies slavery's arrangements of race, gender, and property, allowing both Ellen and Clotel an intermittent empowerment. They assume the prerogatives of white male mastery while simultaneously staging that mastery as impotent. But both Craft and Brown seem to need, through their masculine recontextualizations of bold female stories of escape, to contain such implicit or emergent liberations. Brown's most significant alteration of the Crafts' escape is to make his heroine unmarried and a mother, the antithesis in this regard to Ellen Craft. As a fugitive, Clotel is at once more dangerously solitary and compulsively focused than her avatar. She flees slavery in order to return to the south and risk her liberty in the hopes of reclaiming her daughter Mary in Richmond.
The escape from bondage is articulated as a specific, inexorable maternal quest, and Clotel's freedom becomes the assumption of the full anguish of active motherhood. Clotel incarnates, according to Brown, that “overwillingness of woman to carry out the promptings of the finer feelings of her heart”. In a further deflection of Clotel's potentially transgressive cross-dressing, Brown in fact concentrates on William's role in the escape to mollify and contextualize Clotel's disguise and to celebrate William's own virtues - his intelligence, earnestness, honesty, and "deep feeling".
Clotel's cross-dressing lessens the plight of unrecognition. Her disguise allows her to negotiate the chasm of private and public and reworks the theater of slavery that Brown otherwise presents in the novel. As southern gentleman, Clotel experiences not only visibility in public, but, more specifically, the special freedom of being anonymous in public. The disguise also provides Clotel with new speech opportunities. Clotel is able to demonstrate her capacity for appropriating white male legalistic discourse and overturning slavery's catechismal rhythms. Speaking in public, she can risk a nascent sass.
The exoticism and finery of the second disguise might bode a new transgressiveness on the part of Clotel, intimated by the effectually lesbian flirtation, borrowed from the Crafts, that occurs between Clotel and the older, unmarried daughter who wants Clotel to visit the family estate. When Clotel is unmasked by two city officers seize the key to her trunk, discover her female clothing, and imprison her. Through this symbolic rape, Clotel is rudely returned to herself and to slavery's world of imminent abuses and arrests. Her tenure of empowerment and license, a qualified liberation in transit, is painfully brief and utterly contingent on her disguise. In the odd crux of slavery's dehumanizations and Brown's narrativizations, she is most eloquent and powerful as a corpse. As corpse, however, she is allotted a final transvestism, a narrative transvestism wherein she assumes the public, ironic, politicized language of men to speak against patriarchal hypocrisy - against the father of the country himself. The carefully orchestrated cross-dressings of Clotel contribute finally to the larger vertiginous quality of the narrative.
Another scholar, M. Giulia Fabi contextualizes Clotel also by examing into the gendered dimensions in which slaves resist their own subjugation and how Clotel factors into this discussion, most particularly in the context of passing. Fabi theorizes that William Wells Brown divided and differently partitioned his attention between two competing plots. The first revolves around individual all-but-white female figures whose very existence constitutes a challenge to rigid racial definitions and whose ability to pass for white represents a genteel form of covert resistance expedient in eluding racial oppression. The second plot centers instead on the slave community and incorporates a wide variety of historical information, anecdotes, folklore, newspaper accounts, etc., in order to document the multiformed life of the slaves and the many diverse, more markedly confrontational forms of communal resistance to slavery.
The protagonists of this second plot are most often male and visibly black. Slave women who cannot pass are also subsumed within this community, though without adequate representation: The dichotomy between genteel and confrontational resistance in fact leads Brown to eschew the depiction of active female trickery, a concept extraneous to dominant contemporary ideologies of true womanhood, as well. Analogously, the significance of Clotel in the making of African American fiction changes over time: In its first version, it accomplishes the transition from autobiographical to fictional authorship; by its last, it emerges as an antecedent of the literary strategies and concerns of the post-reconstruction period.
The three book-form editions of Clotel reveal not only the oft-noted close connection between early African American literature and historical events,5 but also the author's effort to adjust his original text to its own accomplished novelization, in the attempt to tame its proliferation of characters and events, as well as to ac- commodate the open-ended real-life “melodrama endemic to American racism" within the generic boundaries of the romance”. In the second and third editions, the stronger emphasis on the adventures of the title heroine increases the visibility of the theme of passing, thus deflecting attention from the wealth of communal facts regarding slave life that Brown recounts.
In its first version, the sentimental female plot of Clotel is as deceiving as the fabulistic frame of African American folk animal stories. In both cases, irony and an unthreateningly fictitious context hide disruptive double meanings. On the one hand, the mulatto qualifies as a device of mediation both for her mixed genealogy and her gender: As a "white Negro," she appropriates the qualities of ideal white womanhood and complements them with loyalty, understanding, and support for individual black men. On the other hand, whereas Brown foregrounds the traditionally relational ideal of female courage as devotion and self-sacrifice, his male heroes loom in the background as powerful, cunning, and potentially violent freedom fighters.
In the first edition of Clotel, Brown articulated a scathing, comprehensive critique of slavery in the American South, race prejudice in the American North, and religious hypocrisy in the American nation as a whole. 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.
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 final powerlessness that makes Clotel choice to plunge into the Potomac rather than return to 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.
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. 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. 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. It is because of Brown's attention to the many different contexts and levels at which slave resistance occurs that he is able to portray it as (partly) successful and as an instrument of group survival. In Clotel, overt and covert rebellion are not exclusively interdependent, and the admitted failure of Turner's revolt and George's rebellion do not spell the utter defeat of black resistance. Brown thus emphasizes resilience and community survival at the same time that he stresses the unmanageability of slavery both on a moral and a practical level: If rebellions and covert resistance threaten the domination of the slaveholders, passing blurs the most basic racial criteria to distinguish the free from the enslaved.
Both of these ingenious scholars examine Clotel for the significance it places on the Black woman and her agency within a life controlled by systematic oppression and exploitation. To read further into these scholars' work, simply click on the hyperlinks attached to their names to fully access their articles.
This video is a presentation done by Bridgewater State University student, Sandra Andrade on the aspects of francophone culture in Brown's Clotel. This student examines the particularly unique cultural diversity in this text. Enjoy!