| Episodes |
1) Modern science, then, seems to have proven what historians could not: the rumor most Jefferson biographers had long condemned as hysterical fiction was actually historical fact. The founding father really was a founding father, with an estimated 75,000 to 100,000 black and white descendants living today.
Ann duCille 446
2) Brown employs Clotel as "the archetype of the beautiful heroine whose mixed blood, noble spirit, and poetic nature make her a tragic figure." Thus, Brown introduces the theme of the tragic mulatto to the African-American literary tradition. That Clotel's function is primarily as an abolitionist instrument is clear from the nature of Brown's plot and characterization; the narrative movement is so rapid and episodic that readers never see her at any one time long enough to get a clear impression of her character and feelings.
Angelyn Mitchell 9
3) What's wrong with Clotel, for Naylor as cited here, is that it is essentially a sentimental novel, saturated with the ambience, the ideology, of the cult of true (white) womanhood.
Sara Blair 464
4) For Brown it is the paradox of American culture that stands at the heart of this novel [Clotel] -- the violation of the highest principles of Jeffersonian democracy.
Sharon Monteith 34
5) In Clotel Brown appropriated the familiar mulatta figure to indict the foundational tenets of American supremacy.
Eve Allegra Raimon 64
6) [William Wells Brown] takes a supposedly historical fact and relates it as an anecdote in the course of his fictional tale about Currer and her two daughters Clotel and Althesa. He thereby fuses the historical and the literary.
Lee Schweninger 23
7) The classic slave narratives by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and William Wells Brown need to be read and reread. Not because slavery per se is likely to come again but because certain of the assumptions that made slavery palatable still prevail. Capitalist slaveholders to whom an entire class of individuals is less than human, brutal white overseers who enforce the will of the slaveholders, auction slaves, the breakup of families, the degradation of young female slaves by white males with money: these are still with us in transmogrified, euphemistic forms. That "race" is even a valid intellectual category might be questioned.
Joyce Carol Oates 249
8) Brown's novel grew out of his desire, not to attack the character of Thomas Jefferson per se, but to win attention, by means of an entrancing story, to a comprehensive and persuasive argument against American slavery.
William Farrison, "Clotel" 218
9) An important part of Brown's project involves questioning both the impermeability of the categories of fact and fiction, and the claim to authority that white authors and historians have for their versions of truth.
Mary Getchell 86
10) At the heart of Brown's ideological approach to the institution of slavery lies the debunking of the Jeffersonian myth of the happy plantation and the virtuous farmer. Only by disposing of the pretense of the humble, contented slave and exposing to light the hidden, unacknowledged recesses of the Jeffersonian myth could slavery be objectively viewed and measured against our democratic values. For Brown, this meant not only representing the Southern plantation and the institution of slavery in all its stark inequities but re-assessing the veracity of antebellum America's historical and genealogical narratives. Perhaps no other antebellum figure is as utterly haunted by Jefferson's ghost as the mulatto, whose lost white paternity problematizes both her personal and national identity. Brown dedicated his life's work to holding responsible America's white fathers, past and present, for what they begot.
Stephen Hodin 170-71
11) Although there was considerable circumstantial evidence to support "The Miscegenation Legend" long before DNA analysis confirmed it, it was largely word of mouth among African Americans that kept Sally Hemings' story alive, even as the scholarly community labored to suppress it. But this oral evidence was never simply the idle gossip of maiden aunts, distant cousins, and community busybodies. It was the carefully guarded family records of a people denied access to their own heritage, except by word of mouth.
Ann duCille 447
12) His [Brown's] objective, prevalent throughout this propaganda novel, situates him as a moral propagandist. Any device that would damage the "peculiar institution" of slavery -- sentimentality, melodrama, contrived plots, or newspaper articles -- was employed. In light of this purpose, the sexual licentiousness of the slave owner and the control he and his family wielded over Black women receive particular attention. For Brown, illegitimacy, the result of the ravaging of Black women and the inevitable destruction of the family structure, is a corrupt principle upon which slavery is founded.
Angelyn Mitchell 11
13) I am deeply struck not by Clotel's absence of irony, pace Gloria Naylor (with the aside that irony is itself a highly particular historically bound criterion of excellence), but by the complexities and gaps, the interpretive demands and affective range, created by this work that unabashedly conjoins autobiographical narrative, travelogue, political oratory, medical discourse, sentimental lyric, popular song, biography, advertising and book reviews, folklore and urban legend, and proslavery and abolition pamphlets, to say nothing of the intricacies and intimacies of melodrama vernacular speech, the picaresque, the gothic, and allegory.
Sara Blair 463
14) The kind of fictions and histories which allow Sally Hemings a place or space within them seek to legitimize an illegitimate legacy that has stood outside America's narration of itself.
Sharon Monteith 38
15) Given these inconsistencies, then, how does Brown, who seems oblivious to historical veracity and chronological consistency, wish these documents to function? The suggestion is that Brown takes a socio-historical fact and creates or retells an anecdote as a means of making literary that socio-historical reality. The anecdote's reference to the real while remaining literary, then, is precisely what enables Brown to authenticate his narrative.
Lee Schweninger 24
16) This claim not merely of white blood, but of aristocratic white blood is another means of authenticating one's right to speak intimately of race, with a suggestion too that the figure of mixed-blood ancestry "knows" more than ordinary African Americans and Caucasians. The most self-aware and idealistic characters in Clotel are "mulatto."
Joyce Carol Oates 251
17) [William Wells Brown] was aware, however, that such reports concerning Jefferson's fathering and neglecting such children could have and even might have been true. He knew that similar reports certainly were true of many other slaveholders, some of whom he had known personally. He did not worry, then, about whether the reports concerning Jefferson were literally true in every detail; he merely used them for their sensational value to illustrate the ironical inconsistencies that exists between the theories and the practices of soi-disant democratic American slaveholders, of whom the famous author of the Declaration of Independence and Notes on the State of Virginia with its especially remarkable "Query XVII" might be taken, he thought, as an archetype.
William Farrison, "Clotel" 217-18
18) The sentimental heroines of the novel are given an historical savor; Brown claims Clotel and her sister are the daughters of Thomas Jefferson, their mother having been his longtime mistress.
Mary Getchell 87
19) For a closer reading of literary history necessarily reveals not just how much Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Mark Twain were "indebted to African-American slave and freedom narratives," as duCille asserts, but how busy, freighted, and bidirectional was the traffic in letters across color lines. Clotel bears closer reading, it seems to me, not in spite of its entanglements with sentimental culture and rhetorical strategies, but precisely because of them.
Sara Blair 464
20) As not simply the president's but the nation's illegitimate daughter -- as (within the) pale as any white woman -- Clotel symbolizes the hypocrisy of a social order that puts one woman on an auction block and another on a pedestal, even though they look the same. The result of being rocked to death in the cradle of that hypocrisy, Clotel's death is less suicide than infanticide. Her eulogy is a scathing indictment of America's own human rights violations.
Ann duCille 456
21) Contrary to prevailing notions of American national mythology held by his white majority audience, "Americanness," or U.S. national identity, Brown thus insists, is interracial -- and tragic -- from its founding onward.
Eve Allegra Raimon 85
22) For the "tragic mulatta" the erotic attractions of a light skin and Caucasian features don't confer power but constitute a fairy-tale curse of the sort suffered by Cinderella and Snow White.
Joyce Carol Oates 251
23) Brown is more insistent on the particular political moment he represents than the universal or spiritual state of man. He draws attention to moral and political hypocrisy by relating his sentimental characters not to abstract or transcendent conditions, but to the level of genuine individual suffering and survival.
Mary Getchell 85
24) Moreover, even if Carter was a real person, he was not known widely enough to command attention as a typical, hypocritical slaveholding American statesman, moralist, and churchman, which Brown wanted to portray. But there was Thomas Jefferson, who had written magnificently about human freedom and had kept on buying, working, and selling slaves, who had been president of the United States, and whom tradition had credited with begetting slave children and forgetting them. . . . For Brown facts and tradition thus made Jefferson an example par excellence of the American democrat whose professions and practices were altogether inconsistent -- an example which would be sure, Brown thought, to shock readers into attention. Accordingly he replaced the Carter of the "true story" with the Thomas Jefferson of a traditional one and combined the details of these stories with many others, some factual and some fictitious, into an episodic narrative abounding in tragedy and melodrama.
William Farrison, "Origins" 350
25) Southern gentlemanly customs also sanctioned Negro concubinage as the preferred outlet for male sexual desires too excessive or base to be inflicted on true-woman white wives. The authorized historical record suggests that Jefferson was not above adultery with married white women, so why not a sexual liaison with a slave like the father-in-law he admired and a great many of his fellow statesmen?
Ann duCille 449
26) DuCille's essay reminds us how thoroughly we need to revise our own sense of origins, as a thematic, as a historiographic problem, and as a point of departure: not necessarily fixed, or even consistently localized in particular figures or texts, but always already hybrid, miscegenated, in complex dialogue with historical contexts we can only reconstruct.
Sara Blair 466
27) Focusing on interracial foundational relationships such as that between Captain John Smith -- the white Jamestown colonist -- and Pocahontas, as well as the particular relationship under discussion here, helps us to reassess the ways in which sex and race have been submerged with the civic discourse of American national identity. . . . The women remain alien presences, even the Native American Pocahontas. They have been annexed away from the abstract ideals inscribed in two monumental heroes -- Smith and Jefferson -- who are axiomatic to the "invention" of America. Most specifically, Sally Hemings if read in Lyotard's terms is a disavowed petit recit in the grand narrative of Jeffersonian democracy.
Sharon Monteith 37-38
28) Almost 150 years before leading theorists in American literary studies would declare sentimental culture dead, Brown was probing its possibilities and limits in ways that defy boundaries we continue to erect -- between white and black traditions (and between race as a matter of black and white versus a matter of the "mulatto," the hybrid, the relational), between allegory and history, between mawkish sentimentality and the rigors of irony, or "hysterical fiction" and actual" historical fact."
Sara Blair 465
29) Closely examining the incongruity of genres in Clotel draws the reader's attention to the persistent juxtaposition of fact and fiction, and reveals the implicit referentiality between what is contained within the sentimental plot of Clotel and what is tangential to it.
Mary Getchell 84
30) However offensive to those sensible individuals for whom mere lightness of skin and Caucasian features don't signify a special destiny, whether blessed or doomed, the "tragic" mulatta/mulatto has been irresistible as symbol; the archetype most closely resembles the childlike thinking of fairy tale and myth than the common-sense subtleties of realistic literature.
Joyce Carol Oates 256
31) In an odd way, the intellectual response to the DNA revelations -- the reprints, revisions, resurrections, and apologia -- may tell us more about the writing of American and African-American literary history than any of the texts themselves. For where in the world in all of this historical hoopla is William Wells Brown, who told the tale -- a fictionalized version of it anyway --145 years ago? It is possible . . . to read the novel's [Clotel's] inconspicuous absence as a comment on the condition of our multicultural literacy. Clotel's absence from the discussion may say as much about the African-American literary tradition as the Hemingses' exclusion from the Jefferson lineage says about American history.
Ann duCille 451-52
32) Sally Hemings has touched the imaginations of those writers of fiction and of screenplays who reinstate her as a peculiarly American foremother. Her position outside of public record has rendered her especially appealing to those enquiring into alienation and citizenship. Unlike Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings remains an obscure alien presence in American official history, but she is becoming a powerful presence in fiction and film, in ways which dramatize the relationship between race and rights as an interracial drama of American nationhood.
Sharon Monteith 44
33) Brown invokes the image of Jefferson as a literally paternal (as well as a conflicted paternalistic) figure in Clotel, and thereby transforms his sentimental heroines into instruments of political critiqueâ€"rhetorical representations of the hypocrisy of American slavery.
Mary Getchell 88
34) The trouble with Clotel as an originary African-American novel -- as the founding father of the African-American literary tradition -- is not that it speaks a suppressed historical truth that has now been scientifically authenticated, but that it does not. Its pages are liberally peppered with real life incidents and historical events, but the novel itself has never been true, authentic, or certifiably "black." Often historically inaccurate and heavily dependent on the borrowed conventions of "white" sentimental fiction, Clotel has never quite walked the party line of the black experience.
Ann duCille 453
35) Clotel is an American fairy tale in which royal-blooded Cinderella isn't claimed by her royal destiny but "deposited" into a beggar's grave.
Joyce Carol Oates 252
36) By presenting African American "word of mouth" history, Brown is able to authorize (rather than authenticate) such unofficial accounts of national events. While authenticating the Hemings story would entail providing evidence to confirm the rumor as fact, a gesture that would presuppose the questionability of the story's source, Brown's novel is instead interested in empowering the authorizing voice of the African American community.
Mary Getchell 88
37) Brown's overriding purpose in deploying the "tragic mulatta" emblem is to imprint indelibly in readers' minds the inescapable alliance between American selfhood and racial perfidy, the pernicious mendacity of the nation's founding ideals.
Eve Allegra Raimon 87
38) Anecdote allows Brown to move from within the specific time and place to the timeless and the universal, allows him to demonstrate that in a slave culture all are potential slaves, regardless of parentage, regardless of skin color, regardless of nationality and ethnicity.
Lee Schweninger 33
39) Reading Clotel, as a parable reveals Brown's emphasis on the authority of the larger authentic African American experience and the role of slaves in the larger narrative of national history.
Mary Getchell 95
