Clotel: Or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (Bedford Cultural Editions) (Paperback)

~ (Author), Robert Levine (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

Review

This superb teaching edition brings together a rich array of historical sources with immediate and powerful relevance to Brown's novel. Levine provides a fine introduction that surveys in jargon-free prose the editorial, interpretive, and political issues raised by the novel and its various versions and borrowings. Choice

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Product Description

William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853), the first novel written by an African American, was published in London while Brown was still legally regarded as "property" within the borders of the United States. The novel was inspired by the story of Thomas Jefferson’s purported sexual relationship with his slave Sally Hemings. Brown fictionalizes the stories of Jefferson’s mistress, daughters, and granddaughters — all of whom are slaves — in order to demythologize the dominant U.S. cultural narrative celebrating Jefferson’s America as a nation of freedom and equality for all. The documents in this edition include excerpts from Brown’s sources for the novel — fiction, political essays, sermons, and presidential proclamations; selections that illuminate the range of contemporary attitudes concerning race, slavery, and prejudice; and pieces that advocate various methods of resistance and reform.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 527 pages
• Publisher: Bedford/St. Martin's; 1st edition (February 7, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312152655
• ISBN-13: 978-0312152659
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #670,120 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars rediscovered classic, gets the treatment it deserves, February 20, 2001

By	Orrin C. Judd "brothersjudddotcom" (Hanover, NH USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This, reader, is an unvarnished narrative of one doomed by the laws of the Southern States to be a slave. It tells not only its own story of grief, but speaks of a thousand wrongs and woes beside, which never see the light; all the more bitter and dreadful, because no help can relieve, no sympathy can mitigate, and no hope can cheer. -William Wells Brown, Clotel, or The President's Daughter

Clotel would have historic interest simply by virtue of the fact that William Wells Brown appears to have been the first African American to write a novel. But it's not merely a literary curiosity; it is also an eminently readable and emotionally powerful, if forgivably melodramatic, portrait of the dehumanizing horrors of slave life in the Ante-bellum South. Brown, himself an escaped slave, tells the story of the slave Currer and her daughters, Clotel and Althesa, and of their attempts to escape from slavery. The central conceit of the story is that the unacknowledged father of the girls is Thomas Jefferson himself.

There is an immediacy to the stories here--of slave auctions, of families being torn apart, of card games where humans are wagered and lost, of sickly slaves being purchased for the express purpose of resale for medical experimentation upon their imminent deaths, of suicides and of many more indignities and brutalities--which no textbook can adequately convey. Though the characters tend too much to the archetypal, Brown does put a human face on this most repellent of American tragedies. He also makes extensive use (so extensive that he has been accused, it seems unfairly, of plagiarism) of actual sermons, lectures, political pamphlets, newspaper advertisements, and the like, to give the book something of a docudrama effect.

The Bedford Cultural Edition of the book, edited by Robert S. Levine, has extensive footnotes and a number of helpful essays on Brown and on the sources, even reproducing some of them verbatim. Overall, it gives the novel the kind of serious presentation and treatment which it deserves, but for obvious reasons has not received in the past. Brown's style is naturally a little bit dated and his passions are too distant for us to feel them immediately, but as you read the horrifying scenes of blacks being treated like chattel, you quickly come to share his moral outrage at this most shameful chapter in our history.

GRADE : B

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Reality Hits Us ALL, July 25, 2001

By	S. White (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This is a exemplary novel that also deals with the harsh realities of slavery. This novel distinctly tells a true story, which is relevant to ALL Americans (believe it or not. This is a must reader for ALL.