Clotel
Encyclopedia
Clotel; or, The President's Daughter is an 1853
novel
by U.S.
author and playwright William Wells Brown
, an escaped slave
from Kentucky
who was active on the anti-slavery
circuit. Brown published the book in London
, where he stayed to evade possible recapture due to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, but it is considered the first novel published by an African American
and is set in the United States, reflecting the southern institution of slavery. Three additional versions were published through 1867.
The novel explores slavery's destructive effects on African-American families, the difficult lives of American mulatto
es or mixed-race people, and the "degraded and immoral condition of the relation of master and slave in the United States of America." It is a tragic mulatto
story about a woman named Currer and her daughters Althesa and Clotel, fathered by Thomas Jefferson
. Their relatively comfortable lives end after Jefferson's death.
and fathered several children with her. Of mixed race and described as nearly white, she was believed to be the half sister of Jefferson's wife, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson
, the youngest of six children by her father John Wayles with his slave Betty Hemings. The large Hemings family were among more than 100 slaves inherited by Martha and Thomas Jefferson after her father's death. Martha died when Jefferson was 40 and he never remarried.
Although Jefferson never responded to the rumors, historians believe that his freeing of the four Hemings' children as they came of age is significant: he let Beverly (a male) and his sister Harriet Hemings
"escape" in 1822 from Monticello, and freed two by his will in 1826, although he was heavily in debt. His daughter gave Hemings "her time", so she was able to live freely in Charlottesville with her two youngest sons, Madison
and Eston Hemings
, for the rest of her life. Except for three other Hemings men whom Jefferson freed in his will, the rest of his 130 slaves were sold in 1827. A 1998 DNA study
confirmed a match between the Jefferson male line and Eston Hemings' direct male descendant. Based on this and the body of historic evidence, most Jeffersonian scholars have come to accept that Jefferson did father Hemings' children in a long relationship.
As an escaped slave, due to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, William Wells Brown
was at risk in the United States. He stayed in England for years, where he published Clotel, the first novel published by an African American , in London in 1853. In 1854 a British couple purchased his freedom, and Brown returned to the US.
," gives birth to two "near white" daughters: Clotel and Althesa. After the death of Jefferson, Currer, Clotel, and Althesa are sold.
Horace Green, a white man, purchases Clotel and takes her as a common-law wife, although they cannot legally marry. Her mother Currer and sister Althesa remain "in a slave gang." Currer is eventually purchased by Mr. Peck, a preacher. She is enslaved until she dies from yellow fever
, although his daughter was preparing to emancipate her.
Althesa marries her white owner, Henry Morton, a Northerner, with whom she has daughters Jane and Ellen. Their daughters are enslaved after Althesa and Morton both die. Ellen commits suicide to escape sexual enslavement and Jane dies from heartbreak.
Green and Clotel have a mixed-race daughter named Mary. Becoming ambitious and involved in local politics, Green abandons Clotel and Mary. He marries "a white woman who forces him to sell Clotel and enslave his child."
Dressing as a white man, Clotel escapes to Ohio (an account based on the 1849 escape of Ellen Craft
and William Craft). Her accomplice, William, continues to Canada. Clotel returns to Virginia in an attempt to free Mary. After being captured in Richmond, she is held in a slave pen in Washington, DC for sale but eventually escapes. Pursued by slave catchers, she is surrounded on the Long Bridge and commits suicide by jumping into the Potomac River
.
Mary works as a servant to her father Horace Green and his wife. Mary arranges to trade places with the slave George, her lover, in prison and he escapes to Canada. Sold to a slave trader, Mary is purchased by a French man who takes her to Europe. Ten years later, George and Mary reunite in Dunkirk. The novel ends with their marriage.
Semi-autonomous slave of Thomas Jefferson; mother of Clotel and Althesa.
Currer is "Sally Hemings fictional counterpart." Instead of being a source of direct labor for Jefferson, she works as a laundresses and exchanges her income for a "pseudo-freedom" for her and her daughters. She is purchased by Rev. Peck.
Clotel
Daughter of Currer and Jefferson; sister to Althesa. At 16 years old, she is purchased by Horatio Green, with whom she later has a daughter, Mary. Later in the narrative, she escapes from another owner in Vicksburg, MS, with William while disguised as a gentleman, Mr. Johnson.
Althesa
Daughter of Currer and Jefferson; sister to Clotel. Purchased at 14 years old by James Crawford and resold to Dr. Morton, who married her and with whom they had two daughters, Jane and Ellen.
Mary
Daughter of Clotel and Horatio Green; George Green’s lover and future wife. She switches places with George in prison, allowing him to escape dressed as a woman. She is eventually sold to a French man who takes her to Europe, where, after the death of the French man, she is reunited with George and they wed.
George Green
Slave in the service of Horatio Green; Mary’s lover and future husband.
After escaping prison, he flees to the free states, evades recapture in Ohio with the help of a Quaker, and then goes to Britain via Canada. Ten years after arriving in England, he travels to Dunkirk, France, where he reencounters Mary.
Horatio Green
First man to purchase Clotel after Jefferson’s death; Clotel’s lover; Mary’s biological father.
Georgiana Peck
Daughter of Reverend Peck.
Reverend Peck
Father of Georgiana Peck. He purchases Currer and then tasks her with kitchen and household affairs.
William
A mechanic enslaved alongside Clotel in Vicksburg. After having paid his master from his earnings as a mechanic, he was able to secret away $150, which he and Clotel then leverage in an escape.
Recent scholars have analyzed Clotel for its representations of gender and race. Sherrard-Johnson notes that Brown portrayed both the "tragic central characters " and the "heroic figures" as mulattoes with Anglo features, similar to his own appearance. She thinks he uses the cases of "nearly white" slaves to gain sympathy for his characters. She notes that he borrowed elements from the abolitionist Lydia Maria Child's plot in her short story, "The Quadroons" (1842). He also incorporated notable elements of recent events, such as the escape of the Crafts, and the freedom suit court case of Salome
, a slave in Louisiana who claimed to be a native-born German immigrant.
Martha Cutter notes that Brown portrayed his women characters generally as passive victims of slavery and as representations of True Women and the cult of domesticity, which were emphasized at the time for women. They are not portrayed as wanting or seeking freedom, but as existing through love and suffering. Cutter asks, if Mary could free George, why did she not free herself? Although Brown published three other versions of Clotel, he did not seriously change this characterization of the African-American women. There were women who were known to have escaped slavery, including Ellen Craft, but Brown did not portray such women fully achieving freedom. Other women legally challenged slavery in the courts by freedom suits
.
Through Clotel, Brown introduces into African American literature the "tragic mulatto" character that was later developed by "Webb, Wilson, Chesnutt, Johnson, and other novelists."
It is also considered a propagandistic narrative, in that Brown leveraged "sentimentality, melodrama, contrived plots, [and] newspaper articles" as devices "to damage the ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery."
Chapters predominantly open "with an epigraph underscoring the romance’s urgent message: 'chattel slavery in America undermines the entire social condition of man.'"
Clotel is told through the use of a "third-person limited omniscient narrator." The narrator is "morally didactic and consistently ironic." The narrative is fragmented, in that it "combines fact, fiction, and external literary sources." It presents the reader with a structure that is episodic and is informed by "legends, myths, music, and concrete eye-witness accounts of the fugitive slaves themselves" and it also "draws on antislavery lectures and techniques" such as "abolitionist verse and fiction, newspaper stories and ads, legislative reports, public addresses, private letters, and personal anecdotes."
1853 in literature
The year 1853 in literature involved some significant new books.-Events:*Charles Dickens writes Bleak House, the first English novel to feature a detective.*William Wells Brown becomes the first African American novelist to be published.-New books:...
novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
by U.S.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
author and playwright William Wells Brown
William Wells Brown
William Wells Brown was a prominent African-American abolitionist lecturer, novelist, playwright, and historian. Born into slavery in the Southern United States, Brown escaped to the North in 1834, where he worked for abolitionist causes and was a prolific writer...
, an escaped slave
Slavery
Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation...
from Kentucky
Kentucky
The Commonwealth of Kentucky is a state located in the East Central United States of America. As classified by the United States Census Bureau, Kentucky is a Southern state, more specifically in the East South Central region. Kentucky is one of four U.S. states constituted as a commonwealth...
who was active on the anti-slavery
Abolitionism
Abolitionism is a movement to end slavery.In western Europe and the Americas abolitionism was a movement to end the slave trade and set slaves free. At the behest of Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas who was shocked at the treatment of natives in the New World, Spain enacted the first...
circuit. Brown published the book in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
, where he stayed to evade possible recapture due to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, but it is considered the first novel published by an African American
African American
African Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have at least partial ancestry from any of the native populations of Sub-Saharan Africa and are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans within the boundaries of the present United States...
and is set in the United States, reflecting the southern institution of slavery. Three additional versions were published through 1867.
The novel explores slavery's destructive effects on African-American families, the difficult lives of American mulatto
Mulatto
Mulatto denotes a person with one white parent and one black parent, or more broadly, a person of mixed black and white ancestry. Contemporary usage of the term varies greatly, and the broader sense of the term makes its application rather subjective, as not all people of mixed white and black...
es or mixed-race people, and the "degraded and immoral condition of the relation of master and slave in the United States of America." It is a tragic mulatto
Tragic mulatto
The Tragic mulatto is a stereotypical fictional character that appeared in American literature during the 19th and 20th centuries. The "tragic mulatto" is an archetypical mixed race person , who is assumed to be sad or even suicidal because they fail to completely fit in the "white world" or the...
story about a woman named Currer and her daughters Althesa and Clotel, fathered by Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson was the principal author of the United States Declaration of Independence and the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom , the third President of the United States and founder of the University of Virginia...
. Their relatively comfortable lives end after Jefferson's death.
Background
The novel played with known 19th-century reports that Thomas Jefferson had an intimate relationship with his slave Sally HemingsSally Hemings
Sarah "Sally" Hemings was a mixed-race slave owned by President Thomas Jefferson through inheritance from his wife. She was the half-sister of Jefferson's wife, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson by their father John Wayles...
and fathered several children with her. Of mixed race and described as nearly white, she was believed to be the half sister of Jefferson's wife, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson
Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson
Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson, born Martha Wayles was the wife of Thomas Jefferson, who was the third President of the United States. It was her second marriage, as her first husband had died young...
, the youngest of six children by her father John Wayles with his slave Betty Hemings. The large Hemings family were among more than 100 slaves inherited by Martha and Thomas Jefferson after her father's death. Martha died when Jefferson was 40 and he never remarried.
Although Jefferson never responded to the rumors, historians believe that his freeing of the four Hemings' children as they came of age is significant: he let Beverly (a male) and his sister Harriet Hemings
Harriet Hemings
Harriet Hemings was born into slavery at Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, third President of the United States, in the first year of his Presidency. Most historians believe her father is Jefferson, who is believed by many historians to have had a relationship with his mixed-race slave...
"escape" in 1822 from Monticello, and freed two by his will in 1826, although he was heavily in debt. His daughter gave Hemings "her time", so she was able to live freely in Charlottesville with her two youngest sons, Madison
Madison Hemings
Madison Hemings, born James Madison Hemings , was born into slavery as the son of the mixed-race slave Sally Hemings; he was freed after the death of his master Thomas Jefferson. Based on historical evidence, most historians believe that Jefferson, United States president, was his father...
and Eston Hemings
Eston Hemings
Eston Hemings Jefferson was born a slave at Monticello, the youngest son of Sally Hemings, a mixed-race slave. Most historians believe that his father was Thomas Jefferson, the United States president. Evidence from a 1998 DNA test showed that Eston's descendants matched those of the male...
, for the rest of her life. Except for three other Hemings men whom Jefferson freed in his will, the rest of his 130 slaves were sold in 1827. A 1998 DNA study
Jefferson DNA Data
The Jefferson-Hemings controversy concerns the question of whether there was an intimate relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his mixed-race slave, Sally Hemings. The controversy started as early as the 1790s...
confirmed a match between the Jefferson male line and Eston Hemings' direct male descendant. Based on this and the body of historic evidence, most Jeffersonian scholars have come to accept that Jefferson did father Hemings' children in a long relationship.
As an escaped slave, due to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, William Wells Brown
William Wells Brown
William Wells Brown was a prominent African-American abolitionist lecturer, novelist, playwright, and historian. Born into slavery in the Southern United States, Brown escaped to the North in 1834, where he worked for abolitionist causes and was a prolific writer...
was at risk in the United States. He stayed in England for years, where he published Clotel, the first novel published by an African American , in London in 1853. In 1854 a British couple purchased his freedom, and Brown returned to the US.
Plot Summary
The narrative of Clotel plays with history by relating the "perilous antebellum adventures" of a young slave Currer and her mixed-race, light-skinned daughters fathered by Thomas Jefferson. Their girls are born into slavery. The book includes "several sub-plots" related to other slaves, religion and anti-slavery. Currer, described as "a bright mulattoMulatto
Mulatto denotes a person with one white parent and one black parent, or more broadly, a person of mixed black and white ancestry. Contemporary usage of the term varies greatly, and the broader sense of the term makes its application rather subjective, as not all people of mixed white and black...
," gives birth to two "near white" daughters: Clotel and Althesa. After the death of Jefferson, Currer, Clotel, and Althesa are sold.
Horace Green, a white man, purchases Clotel and takes her as a common-law wife, although they cannot legally marry. Her mother Currer and sister Althesa remain "in a slave gang." Currer is eventually purchased by Mr. Peck, a preacher. She is enslaved until she dies from yellow fever
Yellow fever
Yellow fever is an acute viral hemorrhagic disease. The virus is a 40 to 50 nm enveloped RNA virus with positive sense of the Flaviviridae family....
, although his daughter was preparing to emancipate her.
Althesa marries her white owner, Henry Morton, a Northerner, with whom she has daughters Jane and Ellen. Their daughters are enslaved after Althesa and Morton both die. Ellen commits suicide to escape sexual enslavement and Jane dies from heartbreak.
Green and Clotel have a mixed-race daughter named Mary. Becoming ambitious and involved in local politics, Green abandons Clotel and Mary. He marries "a white woman who forces him to sell Clotel and enslave his child."
Dressing as a white man, Clotel escapes to Ohio (an account based on the 1849 escape of Ellen Craft
Ellen Craft
Ellen Craft and William Craft were slaves from Macon, Georgia in the United States who escaped to the North in December 1848 by traveling openly by train and steamboat, arriving in Philadelphia on Christmas Day. She posed as a white male planter and he as her personal servant...
and William Craft). Her accomplice, William, continues to Canada. Clotel returns to Virginia in an attempt to free Mary. After being captured in Richmond, she is held in a slave pen in Washington, DC for sale but eventually escapes. Pursued by slave catchers, she is surrounded on the Long Bridge and commits suicide by jumping into the Potomac River
Potomac River
The Potomac River flows into the Chesapeake Bay, located along the mid-Atlantic coast of the United States. The river is approximately long, with a drainage area of about 14,700 square miles...
.
Mary works as a servant to her father Horace Green and his wife. Mary arranges to trade places with the slave George, her lover, in prison and he escapes to Canada. Sold to a slave trader, Mary is purchased by a French man who takes her to Europe. Ten years later, George and Mary reunite in Dunkirk. The novel ends with their marriage.
Primary Characters
CurrerSemi-autonomous slave of Thomas Jefferson; mother of Clotel and Althesa.
Currer is "Sally Hemings fictional counterpart." Instead of being a source of direct labor for Jefferson, she works as a laundresses and exchanges her income for a "pseudo-freedom" for her and her daughters. She is purchased by Rev. Peck.
Clotel
Daughter of Currer and Jefferson; sister to Althesa. At 16 years old, she is purchased by Horatio Green, with whom she later has a daughter, Mary. Later in the narrative, she escapes from another owner in Vicksburg, MS, with William while disguised as a gentleman, Mr. Johnson.
Althesa
Daughter of Currer and Jefferson; sister to Clotel. Purchased at 14 years old by James Crawford and resold to Dr. Morton, who married her and with whom they had two daughters, Jane and Ellen.
Mary
Daughter of Clotel and Horatio Green; George Green’s lover and future wife. She switches places with George in prison, allowing him to escape dressed as a woman. She is eventually sold to a French man who takes her to Europe, where, after the death of the French man, she is reunited with George and they wed.
George Green
Slave in the service of Horatio Green; Mary’s lover and future husband.
After escaping prison, he flees to the free states, evades recapture in Ohio with the help of a Quaker, and then goes to Britain via Canada. Ten years after arriving in England, he travels to Dunkirk, France, where he reencounters Mary.
Horatio Green
First man to purchase Clotel after Jefferson’s death; Clotel’s lover; Mary’s biological father.
Georgiana Peck
Daughter of Reverend Peck.
Reverend Peck
Father of Georgiana Peck. He purchases Currer and then tasks her with kitchen and household affairs.
William
A mechanic enslaved alongside Clotel in Vicksburg. After having paid his master from his earnings as a mechanic, he was able to secret away $150, which he and Clotel then leverage in an escape.
Critical Reception
Clotel demonstrates the "pervasive, recurring victimization of black women under slavery. Even individuals of mixed-race status who attempt to pass as white nevertheless suffer horrifically." It exposes "the insidious intersection of economic gain and political ambition—represented by founding fathers such as Jefferson and Horatio Green." It is a "scathing, sarcastic, comprehensive critique of slavery in the American South, race prejudice in the American North, and religious hypocrisy in the American notion as a whole." The novel and the title "walk a precarious line between oral history, written history, and artistic license."Recent scholars have analyzed Clotel for its representations of gender and race. Sherrard-Johnson notes that Brown portrayed both the "tragic central characters " and the "heroic figures" as mulattoes with Anglo features, similar to his own appearance. She thinks he uses the cases of "nearly white" slaves to gain sympathy for his characters. She notes that he borrowed elements from the abolitionist Lydia Maria Child's plot in her short story, "The Quadroons" (1842). He also incorporated notable elements of recent events, such as the escape of the Crafts, and the freedom suit court case of Salome
Salome
Salome , the Daughter of Herodias , is known from the New Testament...
, a slave in Louisiana who claimed to be a native-born German immigrant.
Martha Cutter notes that Brown portrayed his women characters generally as passive victims of slavery and as representations of True Women and the cult of domesticity, which were emphasized at the time for women. They are not portrayed as wanting or seeking freedom, but as existing through love and suffering. Cutter asks, if Mary could free George, why did she not free herself? Although Brown published three other versions of Clotel, he did not seriously change this characterization of the African-American women. There were women who were known to have escaped slavery, including Ellen Craft, but Brown did not portray such women fully achieving freedom. Other women legally challenged slavery in the courts by freedom suits
Freedom suits
Freedom suits were legal petitions filed by slaves for freedom in the United States and its territories before the American Civil War, including during the colonial period. Most were filed during the nineteenth century. After the American Revolution, most northern states had abolished slavery, and...
.
Influence
In addition to being the first novel published by an African American, Clotel became the model for other nineteenth century African American writers. It is also the first instance of an African American writer "to dramatize the underlying hypocrisy of democratic principles in the face of African American slavery."Through Clotel, Brown introduces into African American literature the "tragic mulatto" character that was later developed by "Webb, Wilson, Chesnutt, Johnson, and other novelists."
Adaptations
Brown published three variations of Clotel in the 1860s, but did not markedly change his portrayal of the African-American women characters.Style
According to its preface, Clotel is a polemic narrative against slavery written for a British audience:It is also considered a propagandistic narrative, in that Brown leveraged "sentimentality, melodrama, contrived plots, [and] newspaper articles" as devices "to damage the ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery."
Chapters predominantly open "with an epigraph underscoring the romance’s urgent message: 'chattel slavery in America undermines the entire social condition of man.'"
Clotel is told through the use of a "third-person limited omniscient narrator." The narrator is "morally didactic and consistently ironic." The narrative is fragmented, in that it "combines fact, fiction, and external literary sources." It presents the reader with a structure that is episodic and is informed by "legends, myths, music, and concrete eye-witness accounts of the fugitive slaves themselves" and it also "draws on antislavery lectures and techniques" such as "abolitionist verse and fiction, newspaper stories and ads, legislative reports, public addresses, private letters, and personal anecdotes."
Sources
- Bell, Bernard. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987.
- Brown, William Wells. Clotel; or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States. 1853. Ed. Robert Levine. Boston: Bedford, 2000.
- Castronovo, Russ. "National Narrative and National History." A Companion to American Fiction, 1780-1865. Ed. Shirley Samuels. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. 434-444.
- Cutter, Martha. Unruly Tongue: Identity and Voice in American Women's Writing, 1850-1930. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1999.
- duCille, Ann. "Where in the World Is William Wells Brown? Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and the DNA of African-American Literary History." American Literary History 12.3 (Autumn, 2000). 443-462. JSTOR.
- Fabi, M. Giulia. Passing and the Rise of the African American Novel. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001.
- Gabler-Hover, Janet. "Clotel." American History Through Literature, 1820-1870. New York: Charles Scribners & Sons, 2005. 248-253.
- Kirkpatrick, Mary Alice. "William Wells Brown and Summary of 'Clotel.'" Documenting the American South. University of North Carolina, accessed 7 May 2011.
- Mitchell, Angelyn. "Her Side of His Story: A Feminist Analysis of Two Nineteenth-Century Antebellum Novels—William Wells Brown’s Clotel and Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig." American Literary Realism 24.3 (April 1992). 7-21.
- Sherrard-Johnson, Cherene. "Delicate Boundaries: Passing and Other 'Crossings' in Fictionalized Slave Narratives." A Companion to American Fiction, 1780-1865. Ed. Shirley Samuels. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. 204-215.
External links
- Clotel: An Electronic Scholarly Edition, University of Virginia PressUniversity of Virginia PressThe University of Virginia Press , founded in 1963, is a university press that is part of the University of Virginia.-External links:*...
. - Clotel, Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina