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

Brown's sobering vision of his heroine's post-War life and the silence that surrounds Clotelle's son after her return to the United States constitute a less explicit, but equally critical, attempt to qualify optimistic assessments of the societal impact of Emancipation. Clotelle's landed independence, in fact, stems from a wealth that originated in passing for European, and does not imply any collective change in the economic power of African Americans. On the contrary, the author reminds his audience that "everywhere the condition of the freedmen attracted the attention of the friends of humanity" (114). Through Clotelle's post-bellum decision to put her privilege to the service of the community by opening a freedmen's school on her own property, Brown insists on the continued necessity for national activism on behalf of the exslaves, argues for the duty of restitution that should be felt by all those who have enjoyed, temporarily or permanently, the societal privileges of whiteness, and also problematizes any easy complacency in the millennium of Emancipation. In other words, Cotelle's plantation haven is not idealized, and even the defiant act of owning the place where she literally used to be owned does not totally eliminate the sense of continued defensive enclosure in a social space that is safe mostly because it is privately owned. From this vantage point, Clotelle's devotion to the freedmen seems informed by the same proto-nationalist self-help philosophy that would dominate the post-Reconstruction period.

With the end of the Civil War and the final acquisition of a home, the ex-exiled passer can exercise her genteel supportive role in favor of the larger black community, rather than solely of individual enslaved men. At the very moment when Clotelle forsakes passing, the black folk whose fictional presence had been curtailed by the novelistic needs for "narrative order and character solidity" (Heermance 183) become thematized and reenter the fictional text through Clotelle's open-ended individual commitment. Foreshadowing the role that will be played by a host of post-Reconstruction, genteel Angels of Mercy, Clotelle becomes a tool for solidarity-building, primarily within the black community. Once the elimination of slavery makes the United States a home, however inhospitable, the principal significance of Clotelle's passing will reside no longer in its subversive use, but in its relinquishment, in her statement of preference for the values of black culture, in her free, voluntary choice of belonging to the African American community.

Notes