Sanctuaries of Lust and Legacies of Dust in William Wells Brown's Clotel; or, The President's Daughter
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33806/ijaes1159Keywords:
Clotel, identity, miscegenation, mixed race, 'tragic mulattas', William Wells BrownAbstract
William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853) depicts the tragic experience of a family of biracial female slaves, viewing their familial separation and dehumanization in antebellum American South as a cross-generational struggle that cannot be dismissed when defining and contextualizing biracial identity in the cultural milieu of the nineteenth century. This historical-cultural context, we believe, represents the total value of Brown’s narrative, which neither romanticizes nor mischaracterizes the struggle of racially mixed people, but instead authentically historicizes their experience and ordeal in the white American South that once advocated for slavery. By interpreting key and relevant textual and contextual clues in Clotel, we argue that the biracial female slaves' racial precariousness, their half-white lineage and perceived racial superiority, increasingly affirm, to the contrary, their state of tragic wretchedness, their sexual vulnerability and marketability, and especially their sustained inferiority. In Clotel, this state of precariousness, we conclude, emerges not only as an embodiment of intergenerational unresolved conflict but also as a central narrative arc of denouncing miscegenation. Strongly tied to these insights is the claim that miscegenation in Clotel is eventually revealed to be a form of racially targeted sexual exploitation normalized by the enslavers' sexualized fixation on a specific race category, that of mixed-race.
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