Reading Post: Clotel; or, the President's Daughter

I'm saturated with news about the coronavirus -- sometimes there's something new and interesting, like the bit about how losing one's sense of smell/taste is a strong clue that one has it -- but mostly it's just more deaths, more people infected in more areas, more idiotic remarks from the Prez, more congressional fighting. And I feel depressed and want to help, but I believe the most important thing I can do is stay home. Mostly I just want to sleep. If I sleep during the day, though, I might not sleep at night, and sleeping at night is essential, so I try to stay awake until bedtime.

Reading is a good way to pass the time, when I'm not cooking, cleaning, or trying to get the twins to stop fighting/do something other than play video games. Thus, this post, on the fourth book I've read for the Classics Challenge. This one fits in category #7, "Classic with a Person's Name in the Title." The book is Clotel; or, the President's Daughter by William Wells Brown, published in 1853.

I had requested this book from the CU library and it was "in transit," according to the library website, when Boulder shut its libraries on March 14th. So I thought I wouldn't be able to make any more progress on the classics challenge unless I read my chosen books out of order, which I don't want to do. But then I made a trip to our local used bookstore, the Bookworm (closed as of today) and in their African-American Studies section I found a copy of Clotel, along with a few other books on my list. I'm still interested in seeing CU's copy, in case it includes some interesting commentary, but I think I've read enough to be able to post a review.

So, Clotel. I'm glad I read it, because of its importance as the first novel by an African-American. But the book is terrible! It's similar to Uncle Tom's Cabin in that it was intended to further abolitionist aims, but it's so much worse. There's no coherent narrative; it's a pastiche of stories that Brown borrowed from various sources, just barely tied together by the story of Clotel, who is supposedly Thomas Jefferson's daughter, and her sister Althesa, who along with their mother Currer are sold into slavery, initiating the story's action. Currer is supposed to be a stand-in for Sally Hemings, though Sally Hemings and her four children by Jefferson were never sold -- two children were freed in Jefferson's will and two children were "allowed to leave" a few years before Jefferson died, as was Sally, after Jefferson died. The children were 7/8 white (Sally was 3/4 white), so some just "passed" into white society and were lost to history.

The characterization in Clotel is weirdly perfunctory. Instead of wringing every last emotion out of his characters' miseries, as Harriet Beecher Stowe does in Uncle Tom's Cabin, Brown often just sticks in a brief mention of a major plot point and then moves on.

The death of Currer, from yellow fever, was a great trial to Mrs. Carlton; for she had not only become much attached to her, but had heard with painful interest the story of her wrongs, and would, in all probability, have restored her to her daughter in New Orleans.

Oh, well, so much for Currer (this is the only mention of her death). Mrs. Carlton, usually referred to as Georgiana, a very positive white character who is 19 when we first meet her and much later is described as "only a little more than eighteen years of age," is suddenly found to be dying from consumption and is gone in a jiffy. Thus she would probably not have been able to restore Currer to her daughter in New Orleans, had Currer lived, but never mind, I'm quibbling.

Althesa is disposed of just as quickly, not even mentioned by name. After a long paragraph describing the scourge of yellow fever in 1831, we get this:

Henry Morton and wife were among the thirteen thousand swept away by the raging disorder that year.

Bye, Althesa. The story moves immediately to the sad fates of Henry and Althesa's daughters.

In the chapter before this one, some characters "in a stage-coach" discuss their choices for President in the 1840 election. According to the notes and the introduction, Brown often appropriated a famous story about slavery and inserted his characters into it, whether it was a good fit or not, and he also seems not to have bothered about chronological coherence.

I could go on complaining about the book, but it's not worth it. William Wells Brown wrote this when he was living in England as an escaped slave (he eventually managed to buy his freedom). He probably wrote it quickly and under difficult circumstances. During his lifetime he also wrote several other books, in a variety of genres. I might try reading his Three Years in Europe, which sounds more interesting. It seems a shame that he is known mainly for Clotel, but life is funny that way.