Clotel; or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States is an 1853 novel by United States author and playwright William Wells Brown about Clotel and her sister, fictional slave daughters of Thomas Jefferson. Brown, who escaped from slavery in 1834 at the age of 20, published the book in London. He was staying after a lecture tour to evade possible recapture due to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. Set in the early nineteenth century, it is considered the first novel published by an African American Clotel returns to Virginia to try to free her daughter Mary. After being captured in Richmond, Clotel is taken to Washington, DC for sale at its slave market. She escapes and is pursued through the city by slave catchers. Surrounded by them on the Long Bridge, she commits suicide by jumping to her death in the Potomac River.

Recent scholars have also 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 Angloid features, similar to his own appearance.

Influence

In addition to being the first novel published by an African American, Clotel became a model that influenced many other nineteenth-century African-American writers.

Style

According to Brown in its preface, he wrote Clotel as a polemic narrative

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. by 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.
  • Drew, Benjamin. "Preface", A North-Side View of Slavery. The Refugee: or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada, Boston: Jon P. Jewett and Company, 1856
  • 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.
  • Farrison, W. Edward, "The Origin of Brown's Clotel," Phylon, 1954.
  • Farrison, W. Edward, William Wells Brown, Author and Reformer, (Chicago, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1969)
  • Gabler-Hover, Janet. "'Clotel'," American History Through Literature, 1820–1870. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2005. 248–253.
  • Kirkpatrick, Mary Alice. "William Wells Brown and Summary of 'Clotel'," 2004, 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, at JSTOR.
  • Sherrard-Johnson, Cherene. "Delicate Boundaries: Passing and Other 'Crossings' in Fictionalized Slave Narratives." A Companion to American Fiction, 1780–1865. Edited by Shirley Samuels, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. 204–215.
  • Clotel: An Electronic Scholarly Edition, University of Virginia Press.
  • Clotel, Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina