Clotel and Abolitionism

Clotel and Abolitionism

by Minna Ibrahim and Demir Leflore

William Wells Brown: Activism and Life as Slave

Brown was born into slavery in 1814 near Mount Sterling, Kentucky by his mom Elizabeth and a white planter who was the cousin of their owner. Brown lived most of his early life as a slave learning many trades but would later escape from his owner’s steamboat, which had been docked in Cincinnati, OH. He declared himself a free man on January 1, 1834. Brown settled down in Boston where he started to get into the abolitionist movement and advocate for the end of slavery. Brown was forced to move to London, England following the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. There he wrote the novel Clotel, the first novel written by an African American. A British couple paid for Brown’s freedom which allowed him to return to the US. He would then rejoin the abolitionist movement. He spent the greater half of his life advocating for the abolitionist movement. He gave many lectures around New York and Massachusetts for the movement, and later focused on anti-slavery advocacy.

Analysis of Clotel

In Clotel, Brown illustrates the hypocrisy of slavery by condemning Christian white slave owners. He allows the reader to see the idiocy behind calling yourself a “Christian” and then committing heinous acts against enslaved people. As he writes in Clotel, “the very man who but a few hours before, had arrested poor panting, fugitive slaves, now read a chapter from the Bible and offered a prayer to God”. Brown also allows us to see that Christian slave owners would use the Bible to justify their behavior. Religious instruction was calculated and only preached to enslaved people to further dehumanize and subjugate them.

The mulatto racial category refers to the unique social, cultural, psychological experiences of individuals of mixed racial heritage, typically one white and one black parent, particularly in societies with a history of racial segregation and hierarchy. Clotel delves into the many complexities that come from being of mixed race, especially during that time period. The book is a potent critique of slavery and its degrading effects on people and families in addition to being a work of fiction. Apart from its thematic associations with abolitionism, Clotel held a noteworthy position in the literary and cultural context of that century.

Abolitionist Writings and Comparisons

Clotel and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, are two novels that help readers see the injustice and cruelty behind slavery. An instance of these novels achieving this goal is done through the portrayal of two white women. In Clotel, there is a woman named Georgiana. She lives on the plantation and she is able to see the hypocrisy and evil in slavery. Uncle Tom’s Cabin features Eva who, like Georgiana, advocates for anti-slavery.

The reasoning behind implementing these characters in the novels is to show how wrong slavery is through feminine ideals and morality. The North Star was a newspaper published by Frederick Douglass. It was a newspaper where Douglass spoke out against slavery. Clotel and The North Star were both written to serve the same purpose. The key difference between the two is that The North Star is non-fiction whereas Clotel is a fictional story. Regardless, both pieces of writing were very influential to the abolitionist movement against slavery.

Works Cited

Aiken, George L, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. [Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Or, Life among the Lowly. A Domestic Drama, in Six Acts. Dramatized by G.L. Aiken [from the Novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe], Etc.]. London, 1883.

Brown, William Wells. Clotel. New York, Random House International; London, 2000.

Fabi, M. Giulia. “The “Unguarded Expressions of the Feelings of the Negroes”: Gender, Slave Resistance, and William Wells Brown’s Revisions of
Clotel.” African American Review, vol. 27, no. 4, 1993, p. 639, https://doi.org/
10.2307/3041902. Accessed 16 Mar. 2021.

Pace, Lorenzo. Frederick Douglass and the North Star. The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc, 15 Jan. 2015.

West, Elizabeth J. “The Enigmatic “Clear Black” in William Wells Brown’s “Clotel.”” CLA Journal, vol. 56, no. 2, 2012, pp. 170–183, www.jstor.org/stable/
pdf/44325821. Accessed 19 Feb. 2024.