The "unguarded expressions of the feelings of the negroes": gender, slave resistance, and William Wells Brown's Revisions of 'Clotel.'

Such changes enable Brown to insert in the sentimental plot a sustained discussion of the continued impact of skin color that complements the condemnation of racial prejudice implicit in his revelation of the expediency of passing for white. Both in Canada and in Britain, Jerome prospers as a free black man because he is given a chance to prove his working skills, and his courageous "self-forgetfulness" (90) gains him admission into high British society. As a clerk in a British manufacturing house, however, Jerome becomes by no means so rich as the white-skinned George in 1853 (232) or as the successful passer Clotelle--a fact which ultimately confirms Jerome's self-reliant black manhood. In fact, though he is not the one to ensure that the title heroine's "rags-to-riches" movement becomes permanent (Baym 35), Jerome's successful fight against an American nation "in which his right to manhood had been denied him" (87) elevates him to a heroic stature unparalleled by the more glamorous, but also less self-reliant, success of Clotelle's deceased French husband.(22)

Though integral to the main sentimental plot, Brown's glorification of the real-life plight of black men is submerged beneath a series of romantic coincidences and happy meetings. In an attempt to improve "the work as art, if not as argument" (Farrison 328), and in implicit recognition of the racial conservatism and self-consciousness of his American audience, Brown's greater focus on the sentimental plot results in a new closure that underscores the possibility of future reconciliation while still insisting on the present necessity of war. Brown emphasizes survival by renaming the protagonists, a decision that shifts centrality from the tragic to the successful passer: The brave heroine who prefers death to bondage is renamed Isabella, and the new Clotelle who succeeds in escaping to France is Isabella's daughter. At the same time, though the ending still takes place abroad, the final reconciliation comes to include not only Clotelle's long-lost lover Jerome, but also her slaveholding father who, after being forgiven for his earlier desertion, is converted by his daughter into freeing his slaves and escaping the perverse influence of slavery by relocating in France (103). The passer thus develops from a genteel saboteur into the agent of moral suasion (a role harmonious with Clotelle's accomplished ladyhood), and continues to complement more active male abolitionist activities like Jerome's eloquent defense of the slaves' "right to be free" (103). As a result of their efforts, the forced homelessness of Clotelle and Jerome is compounded by the aristocratic slaveholder's voluntary exile, which expands the impact of abolitionism and grounds it in a discourse of future sectional reconciliation: Union soldiers (black and white, as Brown makes clear in the third edition of the novel) thus emerge as the rescuers not only of blacks in bondage, but also of a white South that has fallen victim to the wickedness of its own institutions.