Soft Canons: American Women Writers

Body Politics and the Body Politic in William Wells Brown’s "Clotel" and Harriet Wilson’s "Our Nig"

William Wells Brown’s Clotel is generally regarded as the first published African American novel; Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig is frequently identified as the first African American novel written by a woman and the first African American novel published in America. While both writers, then, in some sense confront a “soft” canon — the novel is a malleable form for antebellum African Americans — this, of course, does not mean these novels are genreless. Both take as their central character a female, and, though Our Nig deals with the plight of an African American servant in a Northern state and Clotel with the sufferings of enslaved Southern African American women, both deal with servitude (Frado, the heroine of Our Nig, despite living in the “free” North, is a bond-servant until she reaches eighteen). Both also explore the inflammable ambiguities of African American–white sexual relations and the baleful influence of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. The two novels that result accordingly draw on the genres of sentimental fiction and abolitionist slave narrative. But in the process they exhibit an uneasy generic hybridity as they construct an alliance between aesthetics and politics.1 Both Brown and Wilson negotiate with the act of turning, as African Americans, to fiction, but their negotiations turn out differently. I will focus on the ways in which Brown and Wilson handle the potentials and problems that they encounter when deploying the conventions of the sentimental genre. Critics have responded differently to the presence of the sentimental in antebellum writing about slavery. For Jean Fagan Yellin the sentimental genre is an Body Politics and the Body Politic in William Wells Brown’s Clotel and Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig r. j. ellis “inadequate vehicle to express black experience,” while Philip Fisher and Jane Tompkins view it as possessing a potent emotional purchase on the reader, making it highly effective in confronting slavery. Fisher, indeed, describes it as “the appropriate form” for depicting “the modest homestead or family farm with its corrosive fact of slavery.”2 This partial disagreement provides me with a starting point for exploring the ways in which Brown and Wilson represent cruelties meted out upon the body. Suffering is central to these two novels, but whereas in Brown’s Clotel suffering is measured — sentimentally, sensationally, and documentarily — against the body politic, in Wilson’s Our Nig suffering is measured out physically upon the body — as body politics, with punishment represented as a “political tactic” and the body as “directly involved in a political field.”3 As a consequence, though neither novel resides comfortably in the sentimental genre, Our Nig fractures generic boundaries more fundamentally than Clotel. This distinction can initially be made apparent by setting the two fictions alongside a key text lying behind them both, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Clotel and Our Nig bear an intertextual relationship to Stowe’s novel, and both deviate from this intertext; however, they do so in different ways.4 Schematizing the central plot bifurcation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin helps clarify this difference. As George and Eliza Harris escape north, Tom progresses southward, deeper into servitude and suffering . As George and Eliza travel north, their story increasingly engages with the public politics of abolitionism and the solutions posited by those abolitionists who saw the remedy for slavery as residing primarily in political change. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act was a key defeat for them, but it simultaneously demonstrated that political action could indeed drastically affect slavery’s impact in the United States. The bitter irony was that this act resulted in a dramatic extension of slavery’s impact on the nation. Stowe’s novel, as it traces the progress of George and Eliza northward , focuses on these consequences: bounty hunters strive to retake the Harrises during their journey to Canada; Senator and Mrs. Bird debate the act’s rectitude; George makes his “Declaration of Independence” in an armed standoff; and, finally, the British colony of Canada is ironically identified as representing the blessed land of freedom for the runaways. In counterpoint with this political, northward plot line, Tom’s 100 : genre matters involuntary progress south engages with the arguments of those abolitionists who saw a resolution to the issue of slavery residing not in the political arena (since the Constitution itself countenanced slavery) but in the persuasive efficacy of the moral arguments against both slavery (Little Eva’s...