Gender race and inequality in brownish s clotel

Sexuality Inequality, Inequality, Antebellum America, Slavery

Excerpt from Dissertation:

Brown’s Clotel

William Wells Brownish defies thoughts of race and gender in his new Clotel, and also the President’s Girl by subverting the traditional norms associated with gender via the “cult of domesticity” that condensed the American public consciousness throughout the nineteenth century, finding true womanhood within the household work and life of the house. Brown’s characterization of womanhood, however , in Clotel contradicts the “cult” mentality simply by depicting not just a strong woman but a strong black girl – which usually challenges the racial stereotypes and “ethnic notions” made famous by American media in the antebellum years as well. This paper displays how Dark brown achieves this contrasting view of competition and gender in his new by developing the character of Clotel in such a way that she resists all stereotypes and even takes on the character of the tragic heroine once she advances to her loss of life at the end with the novel in order to avoid being put back into captivity.

Brown’s depiction of Clotel is the one that defies the favorite notions of race and gender inside the 19th 100 years in America. Blacks were viewed as buffoons or as human-simian hybrids, and as chattel. Brownish showed through Clotel that there was more to blacks than what the white business was giving them credit intended for. Clotel just visited once a self-sacrificing strong, girl heroine and an independent female who can rise above her obstacles to approach the destiny that she select for herself. At a single point, Brownish even provides Clotel dressing in male’s clothes to escape to freedom – a gender-defying, non-traditional act that clearly determines Clotel within a category along with that of Shakespeare’s heroines.

Clotel’s daughter Mary moreover can be described as race-defying personality – the fruit of Clotel and Horatio – a mixed-race servant, who resembles the blossom depicted simply by Lydia Nancy Child (1842) in “The Quadroons” – “the Take great pride in of Cina mixed its oriental-looking leaves with the majestic magnolia” (p. 115): Martha is the fruits of the mixture of Horatio and Clotel, thus the take great pride in of two different “races” that is but a beautiful bloom in her own correct – still considered as very much a foreigner inside the South because the “oriental-looking foliage” of Child’s history. For this reason, Martha is enslaved by Horatio’s wife, who also feels insulted by Horatio’s relations with Clotel. For this reason Horatio is definitely reduced to “the deepest humiliation” as he is forced to view “his personal child, brought into his house as a servant” (Brown, 1853, p. 153). And in this fashion, Mary appears like Clotel, who may be the girl of an additional slave owner who watched his children grow up in slavery, nevertheless he also showed several care for all of them. It is a challenging situation all the way through, but Horatio’s wife offers the human weak point side than it: “His wife felt that she have been deceived, and determined to punish her deceiver” – that is, simply by hurting Mary she is trying to hurt Horatio (Brown, 1853, p. 153). It is a bad cycle of human screwing up that operates deeper than race or perhaps gender and touches everyone – the necessity to act out regardless, to specific revenge, to injure in whatever way possible. In this fashion, Brown crosses all unoriginal boundaries and puts all people on an equal, human ground, regardless of competition, gender or liberty: they are all a human with needs, thoughts, and sensitivities, and some act with higher tenderness than others and some with more cruelty for desire of the appropriate spirit with which to strategy others.

As well, Fabi (2001) notes that “Brown’s portrayal of amount of resistance as gendered makes it possible to reconcile his use of the octoroon as a ‘narrative device of mediation’ while using often underestimated militancy of his novel” (p. 10). In other words, there is certainly some draw between manly heroics plus the “feminine method to escape” that Dark brown depicts: or, in short, the act of escape can be depicted in a gendered method, which is feminine. At the same time, the militant handle that Clotel

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