Achievements

William Wells Brown was the first African-American to publish a novel, a play, a travel book, a military study of his people, and a study of black sociology. Throughout his life he was committed to the abolition of slavery. He made eloquent speeches putting forward ideas for reform. Later in life he took up the cause of the temperance movement.

| Top | Primary Works

Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself, 1847, (1849 E-Text); Three Years in Europe; or Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met, 1852; Clotel; or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States, 1853; The Escape; or, A Leap of Freedom. A Drama in Five Acts, 1858; Memoir of WWB, An American Bondman. Written by Himself, 1859; The Black Man. His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements, 1863; The Negro in the American Rebellion. His Heroism and His Fidelity, 1867; The Rising Son; or, The Antecedents and Advancement of the Colored Race, 1873; and My Southern Home: or, The South and Its People, 1880.

| Top | Selected Bibliography: Books

Bone, Robert A. The Negro Novel in America. New Haven: Yale UP, 1965.

Farrison, William Wells Brown: Author and Reformer. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1969.

Loggins, Vernon. The Negro Author: His Development in America to 1900. NY: Columbia UP, 1931.

Yellin, Jean F. The Intricate Knot: The Negro in American Literature 1776-1863. NY: NY UP, 1971.

| Top | Selected Bibliography: Articles

"The Travels of WWB: Narrative of WWB, Fugitive Slave and The American Fugitive in Europe." (book reviews) Publishers Weekly 53.1 (Aug 23 1991): 53(1).

Berthold, Michael. "Cross-Dressing and Forgetfulness of Self in WWB's Clotel." College Literature 20.3 (Oct 1993): 19-.

Dorsey, Peter A. "De-Authorizing Slavery: Realism in Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Brown's Clotel." ESQ 41.4 (1995): 256-88.

Fabi, Giulia. "The `Unguarded Expressions of the Feelings of the Negroes': Gender, Slave Resistance, and WWB's Revisions of Clotel." African-American Review 27.4 (Win 1993): 639-654.

Farrison, W. Edward. "Clotel, Thomas Jefferson, and Sally Hemings." College Language Association Journal 17 (?): 147-74.

Jackson, Blyden. "The First Negro Novelist." in A History of Afro-American Literature. Vol. 1. Baton Rouge: Louisiana SU P, 1989. 326-332.

Joshi, Madhu. "`Black Men Don't be Afraid to Show Your Colors and to Own Them': A Case for the Study of WWB's Clotel." Indian Journal Of American Studies 19.1/2 (Wint 1989): 99-.

Lewis, Richard O. "Literary Conventions in the Novels of WWB." CLAJ 29.2 (Dec 1985): 129-156.

Mitchell, Angelyn. "Her Side of His Story: A Feminist Analysis of Two Nineteenth-Century Antebellum Novels - WWB's Clotel and Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig." American Literary Realism 24.3 (Sprg 1992): 7-.

Mulvey, Christopher. "The Fugitive Self and the New World of the North: William Wells Brown's Discovery of America." The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African American Literature and Culture. Eds. Werner Sollors and Maria Diedrich. Cambridge, MA : Harvard UP, 1994. 99-111.

Rosselot, Gerald S. "Clotel, a Black Romance." College Language Association Journal 23 (1980): 296-302.

Simson, Rennie. "Christianity: Hypocrisy and Honesty in the Afro American Novel of the Mid 19th Century." University of Dayton Review 15.3 (Sprg 1982): 11-16.

Sloss, Phyllis A. "Hierarchy, Irony, and the Thesis of Death in William Wells Brown's Clotel; or, The President's Daughter." DIA 37 (1976): 974A.

Yellin, Jean F. "Preface." Clotel, or, the President's Daughter. NY: Arno Press, 1969.

| Top | Study Questions

1. Write an essay in which you explore An Indian's Looking-Glass for the White Man as an American work. To what extent does it address American themes? To what extent does the emergence of a Native American literature in the English language coincide with and contribute to the emergence of an indigenous (here, as distinguished from imitative) American tradition?

2. Compare and contrast Apess's Indian's Looking-Glass with Frederick Douglass's The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro.

3. William Cullen Bryant wrote his poem The Prairies within a year of Apess's Indian's Looking-Glass. Read The Prairies with Apess's perspective and comment on Bryant's portrait of "the red man" in light of Apess's text.

4. Chapter II:

(a) How is the idea as well as the historical reality of slaves being treated as dehumanized property expressed in Brown's language and imagery?

(b) How does the auction process reveal the complete dichotomy between the interests of the slaves and those of their traders and owners?

(c) What is the intended effect of Brown's description of Isabella on the auction block?

(d) Why does Brown link the image of the auction block with that of the church spires in this chapter?

5. Chapter X:

(a) What is the symbolic/thematic effect of Brown's description of Isabella's garden?

(b) What does this chapter reveal about the sexual exploitation of both female slaves and the wives of the white masters? What contradiction does it suggest about the possibly comforting concept of a "good master"?

(c) Have we been given enough information to explain Linwood's behavior? How do we account for Isabella's continued kindness toward him?

| Top | 6. Chapter XI:

(a) Why doesn't Linwood accept Isabella's offer to release him from his promise to her?

(b) Do you think a nineteenth-century reader might react differently from a modern one to the unbelievability of Linwood's mutterings in his sleep? If so, why?

(c) What is the function of religion for Isabella?

7. Chapter XVIII:

(a) How do you explain Brown's incongruous physical description of Jerome?

(b) Who are George Combe and Fowler, and why are they alluded to here?

(c) What do the allusions to certain well-known lovers reveal about Brown's reading?

8. (a) Comparison with details of slave life, especially female concubinage found in Harriet A. Jacobs, Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987).

(b) Discussion of Isabella and Clotelle as representatives of the popular "tragic octoroon" stereotype.

(c) Comparison of Clotelle with another nineteenth-century African-American novel about a female slave and her liberation, Frances E. W. Harper'sIola Leroy (Philadelphia, 1892).

(d) Discussion of Jerome as a "counterstereotype" intended to refute negative popular images of blacks. A look at Frederick Douglass'sNarrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Boston, 1845) as well as Thomas Dixon, Jr.'s, The Clansman (1902) would provide polar contexts for this subject.

MLA Style Citation of this Web Page:

Reuben, Paul P. "Chapter 3: Early Nineteenth Century - William Wells Brown." PAL: Perspectives in American Literature- A Research and Reference Guide. WWW URL: http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap3/brown.html (provide page date or date of your login). 

| Top | Back | Chap 3 | Alphabetical List | Contents | PAL Home | Literature | Home |