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

Examining Brown's representation of resistance as gendered makes it possible to reconcile his use of the octoroon as a "narrative device of mediation" (Carby 89) with the often underestimated militancy of his novel: Brown's "recipe" for manly resistance is grounded in, and masked by, the portrayal of passing as an unheroic means to escape, rather than defy, the brutality of slave life. In its first version, the sentimental female plot of Clotel is as deceiving as the fabulistic frame of African American folk animal stories (Stuckey 423; Hemenway 24-31): In both cases, irony and an unthreateningly fictitious context hide disruptive double meanings. On the one hand, the mulatto qualifies as a device of mediation both for her mixed genealogy and her gender: As a "white Negro," she appropriates the qualities of ideal white womanhood and complements them with loyalty, understanding, and support for individual black men. On the other hand, whereas Brown foregrounds the traditionally relational ideal of female courage as devotion and self-sacrifice, his male heroes loom in the background as powerful, cunning, and potentially violent freedom fighters: Nat Turner is openly praised in the novel, and other male characters share in varying degrees his manly anger at injustice and his power of defiance.

This first edition of the novel, entitled Clotel, or, The President's Daughter, was published in 1853 in England, where Brown was spending a forced exile caused by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 that threatened to send him back to slavery should he return to the United States. Catering very outspokenly and, it would seem, exclusively to the "British Christians" (245) whose abolitionist sympathies he hoped would be "publicly manifested" (246), Brown articulated a scathing, comprehensive critique of slavery in the American South, race prejudice in the American North, and religious hypocrisy in the American nation as a whole (180).

Structurally, even more than stylistically, the volume that contains Clotel frames it as a most obvious transition from autobiography to fiction. The novel is preceded by a shortened, revised version of the author's Narrative of William Wells Brown, a Fugitive Slave (1847), now retitled Narrative of the Life and Escape of William Wells Brown. Critic Robert Stepto's discussion of this procedure as "a successful rhetorical device authenticating [Brown's] access to the incidents, characters, scenes, and tales which collectively make up Clotel" (30) effectively argues Brown's distrust of his audience and consciousness of his pioneering role as the first African American author to move openly into the realm of prose fiction. To collaborate his right of access to fictional authorship, in the 1853 Narrative Brown chooses to function as "the editor of his resume" (Stepto 29) by quoting from his own travelogue, abolitionist speeches, and previous Narrative. With this decision, however, Brown does not leave his text "bereft of authorship," as Stepto asserts (28); on the contrary, Brown affirms his own accomplishments as a writer with an objective tone that results from his treating himself as a secondary source. In the process, he authenticates his ability to elaborate on his personal experiences (instead of simply recounting them) and seizes the authority to make use of various sources to create his "story" (Brown, Clotel 245).