Abstract
William Wells Brown’s Clotel: or, The President’s Daughter has long been examined as a text that accomplishes much cultural work as the first African American novel. First published in 1853, Clotel tells the story of former President Thomas Jefferson’s slave mistress and children, effectively printing what had before then been merely rumor. This paper examines Clotel as a novel that does cultural work by representing whites fictionally, specifically in response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin by critiquing Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel and illuminating the hypocrisy of Christian slaveowners. Using Jane Davis’ “types,” the argument is that Clotel is made more powerful when read as fiction because Brown seizes the same power that Stowe seized for abolitionists and other whites: to see and experience the “other,” internalize and interpret it, and present that image to society. Brown’s slave characters perform the power of critiquing the white “other,” redefining the paradigm of the fictional slave narrative.
Jane Davis outlines four white “types” of whom African American authors have written: the white supremacist, the hypocrite, the good-hearted weakling, and liberals (4). The “‘good white’ exists to such a small degree that it does not merit discussion” according to Davis (4).
Reverend Peck is the consummate hypocrite as described by Jane Davis. He owns seventy slaves, and desires that “the sons of Ham should have the gospel” (76). Brown, like other African American writers writing before the Civil War, is especially concerned with the hypocrisy of the devotion to Christianity of some slaveowners. As Reverend Peck’s character is developed, one can see the trajectory which Brown has employed. In the chapter “The Parson Poet,” the reader finds Peck calmly describing how slaves are used for medical experiments. He also offers Carlton a poem, entitled “My Little Nig,” in which he compares a slave to a pig (110). Brown characterizes Peck as an evil man who believes he is a true Christian.
Mr. Carlton, Reverend Peck’s colleague from the North, fits well with Jane Davis’ definition of “the good-hearted weakling.” Mr. Carlton is willing to debate with Reverend Peck, but doesn’t take any action. Brown writes Carlton not as malicious, but certainly as impotent.
Writing the character of Georgiana is the biggest departure for Brown from himself. Georgiana has often been read against Little Eva of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Georgiana, upon her father’s death, decides to emancipate her slaves incrementally. On her deathbed, Georgiana gives instructions to her slaves on how to live their free lives: “If you are temperate, industrious, peaceable and pious, you will show to the world that slaves can be emancipated without danger” (167). Brown has Georgiana make many mistakes here: she implies that slaves’ behavior has something to do with their treatment, makes her slaves a metonym for four million others, and gives away white fear about the “danger” of emancipating the slaves.
Brown gives the “evaluative power” to “overlooked person[s]” by writing scenes in which the slave characters critique whites. After Snyder, the missionary, gives a sermon in which the sole directive is “servants obey yer masters” the slaves talk about the underhanded nature of the message. Brown often uses song or rhyme to show the slaves critiquing whites. Each instance of the slave characters critiquing the white characters is a powerful narrative device that also does cultural work: Brown gives his slave characters the ability to internalize and interpret the white “other,” and in so doing, demonstrates to white readers that they are being interpreted as well.
Brown’s text is important not only as a fictive one, but as one that self-authenticates — while published by abolitionist whites in England, no introductory passage prefaces his novel. Brown uses this voice to take the same license that Stowe does: to write fictionally about historical facts and, perhaps more importantly, to write fictionally about the “other.” Through Reverend Peck, Brown critiques those hypocrites who claim that the Bible sanctions slavery; with Mr. Carlton, Brown critiques good-hearted weaklings who know what is right but do not act on it. Through some of his slave characters, such as Uncle Sam, Jack, and Dick, Brown shows white readers that they are internalized and interpreted by the African American mind just as they “type” African Americans. Brown not only acts as an ethnographer, but in writing whites takes the agency that Stowe claimed in writing about slave life and makes it his own.
Works Cited
- Andrews, William L. “The Novelization of Voice in Early African American Narrative.” PMLA 105.1 (Jan., 1990): 23-34.
- Brown, William Wells. Clotel; or, the President’s Daughter. In Three Classic African-American Novels. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Random House: New York, 1990. (ix-xi, 1-223).
- Davis, Jane. The White Image in the Black Mind: A Study of African American Literature. Greenwood Press: Connecticut, 2000.
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- Levine, Robert S. “‘Whiskey, Blacking, and All’: Temperance and Race in William Wells Brown’s Clotel.” In David S. Reynolds and Debra J. Rosenthal, eds., The Serpent in the Cup: Temperance in American Literature. University of Massachusetts Press: Amherst, 1997, 93-114.
- Knadler, Stephen P. The Fugitive Race: Minority Writers Resisting Whiteness. University Press of Mississippi: Jackson, 2002.
- Schweninger, Lee. “Clotel and the Historicity of the Anecdote.” MELUS 24.1 (Spring 1999): 21-36.
- Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Barnes & Noble Books: New York, 2003.