William Wells Brown’s novel Clotel and its subsequent revisions tell the story of three enslaved women and the circumstances they encounter as they try to survive the south and achieve freedom. The novel argues the ineffectiveness of white abolitionists and white sentiment through the failures of white characters and subversion of white ideology. The novels place less importance on individual-based sentiment and instead, through revisions, serve as a call to action and show how systemic cycles of oppression and racism need to be dismantled by reparatory action rather than reliance on passive, sympathetic activism.
In his essay “’Heroic bravery in more than one battle’: The Creation of Heroes in William Wells Brown’s Muli-Edition Clotel” Christopher Stampone argues that the first edition of Clotel raises sympathetic white characters Henry Morton and Georgina Peck to hero status due to their abolitionist sentiments, “I read Athesa’s abolitionist husband Henry Morton and Georgina as heroes who…embody republican virtue and abolitionist sentiment in the first edition of Clotel” (75). However, while Stampone is correct about the overall sympathetic light they are painted in, the characters are not truly positioned as effective liberators for enslaved people to rely on. The story shows that both of these characters do not actually do much at all to help the problem of slavery from a systemic standpoint and, by their deaths, have failed all of our main characters.
Henry Morton is a character who is framed sympathetically while also shown to fail as an abolitionist. Stampone argues that “[Morton is] a universally democratic white man” (76) however, his sympathies only extend to the individual of Althesa, and not to the larger system of slavery. While he makes abolitionist speeches, the text never shows him free anyone and he is utterly unaware of how laws surrounding slavery work, showing that he is unconcerned with the systemic side. How could Morton fight slavery at large when he does not even bother to learn the laws surrounding it that would have let him free his children and wife?
The first edition, as Stampone points out, does hold Morton blameless for this, “Morton was unacquainted with the laws of the land; and although he had married Althesa, it was a marriage which the law did not recognize; and therefore she…was, in fact, nothing more than his slave” (Brown 205) but that does not mean he is absolved and instead shown as a hero. In fact, by juxtaposing his passive death with the tragedy of his daughters’ fate, the text seems to condemn his actions and ineffectiveness. He is blameless only in the sense that he did not mean to enslave people, however Brown is using his character and his failings, more of a symbol for the ineffective, ignorant abolitionist than for a heroic, liberator character, which is made evident in the tragic fates of his daughters.
Georgina Peck, on the other hand, is referred to directly in the text as a liberator, “there sat the liberator, pale, feeble, emaciated, with death stamped upon her countenance, surrounded by the sons and daughters of Africa” (Brown 80). But even in this scene, she has only liberated the enslaved people that are left after her father’s mistreatment of them. Currer, one of the main characters, dies before Georgina can liberate her, which calls to mind the countless others who also died waiting for freedom. Georgina’s title of liberator is limited in the sense that while she has liberated some enslaved people, she has been entirely complicit in the system of slavery and has not altered it in any way or challenged it an any tangible way.
Georgina’s father is known to be a cruel master and she is shown to be a person who can convince people to become abolitionists, something she does with her own husband, but she never tries to convert her father or even really hold him accountable for his cruel behavior. Georgina does lack social power due to her gender, which is shown more in the second edition, but she is positioned in a place to have some level of power over her father and considerable power over her husband, and yet she still takes a slow and passive abolitionist approach. While she is able to die and be framed by Brown as sympathetic, he is also showing how her type of liberation, a slow wait-for-it sort of freedom, does not end up helping any of our main characters and is ineffective at large.
The novel goes through great lengths to show how white characters’ involvement in abolition usually ends up hurting enslaved people through false hopes or empty promises due to inaction. In Katie Frye’s “The Case Against Whiteness in William Wells Brown’s Clotel” it is argued that the reason for this subversion is to show the “destructively, fragility, and instability of white ideology” (528). By having the sympathetic white characters fail, it shows how fragile and unsafe their ideas of freedom and race are. In fact, as argued by Frye, most every black character that comes into contact with white people who claim to oppose slavery are ultimately doomed.
Curruer, Clotel, and Althesa are all promised safety through their proximity to whiteness and, specifically for Clotel and Althesa, the love of a white man. However these fail because in Clotel whiteness inherently destroys. This might be best represented by Clotel, who while in disguise as a white man is hunted down and eventually left with no other choice but to take her own life to escape slavery. By becoming white, she has in a way condemned herself to die. This is seen contradictory to Mary, who’s “foray into cross-dressing leaves her on the same side of the color line, so that she morphs into a black, not white, man” (Frye 538) and she ultimately is the only character to survive all four revisions. From her, Brown argues that the safest route to freedom comes not from proximity to whiteness, but from the action that black enslaved people take on their own and through actions that affect the system of slavery, not the individual enslaved person.
This is stated more obvious in the later editions with Miralda and Jerome taking more active, aggressive stances against slavery. The message against whiteness and the case against it becomes even clearer in the character of Jerome (formerly Geroge), who goes from “white as most white persons” (Clotel 222) to “of pure African origin…perfectly black” (Stampone 84). While Jerome in the first editions is still black, the change of race seems to be doing more than just distancing him from white people. He becomes an active agent of change in later editions, and his blackness gives him a level of safety that is not given to the characters who have to rely on the well-meaning white people around them. Jerome’s transformation makes him “a knightly hero figure” (Stampone 84) and also serves as a critic against the sympathetic activism shown by white characters.
Miralda’s actions also pose a direct challenge to the systems that oppress her, and she stands as a direct contrast to Georgina, who is complicit in the systems that oppress her. From a young age Miralda is vocal about the injustice of slavery, “her willingness to fight back causes [whites] to falter, suggesting that open opposition to slavery—even from a child—could rattle the foundations of the unjust institution” (Stampone 87). Here, Miralda is positioned as a revolutionary, versus Georgina in comparison seeming like a sort of idealized past notion of activism. Georgina’s whiteness prevents her form altering the systems that oppress enslaved people, because ultimately her whiteness makes her complicit in those systems and we see that destroy any hopes of abolition she might have harbored.
The criticisms Brown’s work argues over passive activism seem to also argue against “expectional individual[s] and private resolution[s]” (Soderberg 241). These two ideals are represented by the sort of change and activism Georgina and Morton represent. They help people based on exception. Georgina will help enslaved people but only if her father has already died and only if they happen to be around when she can. Morton decries slavery, but only seems concerned over Althesa’s status because he is attracted to her and feels bad. This sort of activism places emphasis on the individual rather than showing how “sympathies can be attached to the systemic” (245). Georgina and Morton are concerned not with the system at large, or how they could alter it, but how they can help the few enslaved people they feel sympathetic to.
Laura Soderberg in “One More Time With Feeling: Repetition, Reparation, and the Sentimental Subject in William Wells Brown’s Rewritings of Clotel” argues that Clotel’s changes and later editions take this a step further. Not only does Clotel argue against the individual sympathy sort of activism, but it promotes a generational, systemic view of activism that continues into today:
Clotel’s multiple iterations insist on a network of injuries extending beyond the scope of any one single instance. As characters from one edition blur into those from another, exchanging names and trading fates, Brown’s sequence of novels shifts from depicting private disasters of exemplary characters into a more structural history that moves between the individual figure’s particular suffering and the legal and social positions into which multiple figures can be slotted (243).
Essentially, by showing different characters move around the same sort of circumstances, the ideas of addressing repetitive hurts and generations of trauma are revealed to be the ultimate sort of activism to oppose the sympathetic kind used by white characters in the first edition.
Soderberg argues that the seriality of the novels “encourages the extrapolation of readerly outrage on behalf of an exceptional object of sympathy outward” (247). This sort of extrapolation means that readership concerns and investments can continue past just the set of circumstances the novel displays, giving the reader more of a stake in current problems and systems at large. We do not just have to wonder if Georgina and Morton are complicit, but we can extrapolate the anger or disappointment we feel towards them towards current issues regarding race and activism. Or, as Soderberg puts it, “readers must be able to make the shift from feeling mourning and outrage evoked by an event like Clotel’s death to feeling that grief and rage towards death to which they have no other connection,” (249). This is what characters in earlier versions of the story, and sympathetic activism, misses—sympathy that acts by association in a system rather than from personal investments in individuals.
The calls for activism in Brown’s Clotel are most notable when looking at the whole of the novel’s later editions and serialization. However, in even just the first novel, it is clear that Brown argues against the sort of idealized activism that privileges the few exceptions and largely ignore the systems those individuals are oppressed by. It challenges the white ideology and subverts racial understandings of the time to tell painfully tragic stories about the horrors of slavery, but also of the few revolutionists who by their action against the system of slavery are ablet to achieve freedom and can, to this day, be extrapolated to larger systems of inequality and inaction.
Works Cited
Brown, William Wells, and M. Giulia Fabi. Clotel ; or, the President’s Daughter. Penguin Books, 2004.
Frye, Katie. “The Case Against Whiteness In William Wells Brown’s ‘Clotel.’” The Mississippi Quarterly, Vol. 62, No. 4, MISSISSIPPI STATE UNIVERSITY, 2009, Pp. 52740.
Soderberg, Laura. “One More Time With Feeling: Repetition, Reparation, And The Sentimental Subject In William Wells Brown’s Rewritings Of Clotel.” American Literature, Vol. 88, No. 2, Duke University Press, 2016, Pp. 241–67, Https://Doi.Org/10.1215/00029831-3533290.
Stampone, Christopher. “‘[H]Eroic Bravery In More Than One Battle’: The Creation Of Heroes In William Wells Brown’s Multi-Edition ‘Clotel.’” African American Review, Vol. 49, No. 2, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016, Pp. 75–91, Https://Doi.Org/10.1353/Afa.2016.0019.
Rachel Loring 