Throughout Clotel, William Wells Brown’s ideologies and messages at times seem to contradict each other. The reader is left to distinguish if these contradictions, such as characterizing Sam in an anti-slavery novel, are because of this own failings and/or internalized racism within the author, or if they are intentional contradictions to highlight the perfidious nature of certain American ideologies. In Clotel, Brown brings the ideological divide of the North and South U.S. several times. In places, he utilizes the narrative that the North and the people within it, as more enlightened to the evils of slavery, to women’s rights, and to general social issues. He writes through the voice of Georgiana, “Of course, papa will overlook my differing from him, for although I am a native of the South, I am by education and sympathy a Northerner” (100). However, Brown also challenges this narrative of the stark divide between Northern and Southern ideologies and practices, challenging, to an extent, the idea of Southern exceptionalism. 

After William has escaped slavery with Clotel, Brown inserts, “The prejudice that exists in the Free States against coloured persons, on account of their colour, is attributable solely to the influence of slavery, and is but another form of slavery itself. And even the slave who escapes from the Southern plantations, is surprised when he reaches the North, at the amount and withering influence of this prejudice” (159). Here, Brown connects racism in the North to the institution of slavery in the South. So, to an extent, he still perpetuates ideas of Southern exceptionalism- that the southern United States is significantly distinct from the northern United States. Further, he ignores other roots of slavery and racism, which can largely be attributed to Europeans/ European Americans holding ideas of superiority of whiteness or Christianness, and using these racist concepts to enslave African and Black folks, and also, the colonial/Imperial roots of slavery, which connect to profit and abusing and extorting other human beings as tools for profit.

However, in these same lines, Brown also acknowledges the connections between the North and South because he notes that racism and slavery in the South also infects and affects racism in the North. Thus, Brown begins to break down and challenge the contrasting narratives, usually perpetuated by affluent white folks (which readers can especially see in conversations Georgiana has with others and within herself), around the romanticized ideologies of the North and South. Brown also does this by pointing out that the North is not really the beacon of hope or freedom that a person who has escaped slavery may hope it to be. When William gets to the North, he is immediately faced with a racist train ticketer, who attempts to charge him more just because he is a Black man. With this, and Brown’s observations about racism in the North, Brown further complicated the Romanticized ideas that the North is a space of freedom and progress that can be contrasted against the South, a space of enslavement and antiquated ideas. 

Several of the reviews of Clotel from British newspapers, note the contradiction of Thomas Jefferson, the “author of the celebrated ‘Declaration of Independence,’ one of the noblest announcements of human freedom ever penned. We may well exclaim, alas consistency! When we find such a man holding slaves, some of them his own children, and leaving them in bondage at his death,” writes the London-based paper, the Anti-Slavery Advocate in 1854 (220-221). The Bristol Mercury also made the observation of this contradiction: “The little volume narrates the fortunes of two slave girls and their mother, the former being the offspring of Jefferson, the celebrated President of the United States, who, says the writer, ‘is not the only American statesman who has spoken high-sounding words in favor of freedom, and then left his own children to die slaves’” (223). Since British folks are not attached to the mythology and narratives around the founding fathers and Jefferson, they can bluntly repeat and publish this character discrepancy they see in Jefferson and American ideologies that Brown writes about in Clotel.

I attempted to look for American reviews of Clotel, so I could compare and contrast them to the British ones; however, I could not find any with my brief search. This perhaps, speaks volumes in itself. What I did find was a web page by the Encyclopedia Virginia, which recorded, “The novel appeared in London in 1853, in New York in 1860–1861, in Boston in 1864, and again in Boston in 1867. It may have been reviewed, but no reviews have been found. And, as the scholar Henry Louis Gates has noted, ‘black fiction was not popularly reviewed.’” This statement must have been about American reviews and reviewers. This makes it more remarkable than I realized that Clotel had so many reviews so soon after it was published in London. Also, looking at those publication dates, it is interesting that Clotel was not published in the United States until 1860-1861: the beginning of the Civil War, even though it had been published in England in ‘54. This seems a bit fishy —  as if, William Wells Brown’s book was published in New York at this time for a political reason, attributed to the war, not necessarily just the importance of writing and the importance of highlighting the abuses of slavery. 

Brown, William Wells. Clotel, edited by Geoffery Sanborn, Broadview, 2016.

Mulvey, Christopher. “Clotel; or the President’s Daughter (1853).” Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Humanities, 4 Jan. 2019. Web. 9 Mar. 2020.