Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter

I know we were only given a small section of the novel to read, but even still there is a lot to unpack.

First , there was the line of text that seemed to contradict what Harriet Jacobs wrote in Incidents. Brown recognizes the lack of a “safeguard” placed around a female slave’s virtue in the South, but unlike Harriet Jacobs, this immorality is almost romanticized and used for the slave woman’s advantage. Brown says that ” the slave women have no higher aspiration than that of becoming the finely-dressed mistress of some white man” (272-273). This could mean that Brown and Jacobs were simply in different parts of the South where different amounts of value were placed on a slave woman’s virtue, or it could be a lack of understanding on Brown’s part due to his being a man.

Second, we once again see the reoccurring scenario of the separation of a child from his or her mother. Never is there a case when such an action isn’t devastating and sickening, but most slave mothers recognize the separation of their children from them as a constant possibility. Brown’s character, Clotel, didn’t live with this fear. She loved Horatio, and he loved her. He wasn’t supposed to grow tired of his mulatto wife and daughter. He wasn’t supposed to sell his wife and give his daughter to his new, white wife. Brown’s writing style doesn’t allow us to completely feel the emotional turmoil Clotel felt over the loss of her child, but her actions later in the novel– risking her life and going back to the South after escaping to find Mary– certainly speak louder than any words of sorrow would.

Third, is the degrading idea that slaves are objects. Surprisingly, this one plays a humorous part in Clotel when a former-slave uses the notion to his advantage. Rather than being allowed to sit in first class or even in coach, the black man is asked to sit in the luggage compartment. He complies, but he refuses to pay the normal $2 fare, paying instead the usual price for a piece of luggage. The story is amusing in that the so called unintelligent, sub-human black man was able to out-smart the white fare collector, but it’s also horrible in that this black man had to ride with things and belongings rather than his fellow human beings.

There were other elements I could mention, but these were the ones that stuck out to me the most. I hope to one day get my hands on the full novel so I can read it in its entirety.