Harriet Jacobs and the Recirculation of Print Culture

Following a brief introductory paragraph, William Wells Brown reprints two advertisements in the opening to the third chapter of Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (1853). The advertisements are said to be from newspapers “published in the vicinity” of Natchez, where the character Currer is living, and they attest to the brutality of slaveholders and slavecatchers in the area by showing, as Brown states, “how they catch their negroes” (96). Visually set off from the narrative prose, these advertisements conform to familiar typographic conventions, which include listing the names of the subscribers and the dates of publication at the end of each block of text (see fig. 1). Brown’s novel is littered with reprinted texts such as these—texts that frequently trouble the boundary between the documentary and the literary.

Later in this third chapter, there is a long, reprinted account of a lynching sourced from the Natchez Free Trader and another reprinted account that describes the discovery of a runaway slave den in a Southern swamp (98–99). Even while these newspaper items document the historical reality of violence perpetrated against runaway slaves, the chapter ends with Brown precariously asserting that Currer—the fictional character mentioned at the start of the chapter—was present at the lynching described in the first newspaper account. This conclusion presents a jumble of documentary, fictional, reprinted, and original texts all within the space of a page, and Brown’s claim that his fictional character was a witness to a historical event destabilizes the relationship between the reprinted texts and the fictional prose. In the case of Clotel, it seems impossible to decide whether the reprinted texts are an apparatus that serves the fiction or whether the fiction is simply an occasion for the interlacing of diverse source materials. Indeed, this question has been a subject of scholarly debate since the mid-twentieth century; early critics of the novel described the now canonical 1853 edition as a “loosely structured skeleton of a plot” (Heermance 164) by a “limited and pedestrian writer” (Davis xii) while later critics praised the same text as “a stunning example of literary pastiche” (Levine 7) that exhibits Brown’s “brilliant experimentation with literary form” (Fabi xxv). Whether these reprinted texts are evidence of Brown’s “patchwork aesthetic” (Cohen 164) or Clotel’s “lack of fixity” (Sanborn 69), we can be certain that the presence of such texts ensures that the imaginative space of the novel is densely populated with artifacts from the print culture of the period.¹

Figure 1.

Slavecatcher advertisements, Chapter Three, Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (1853), by William Wells Brown.

With this anecdote, I am purposely narrowing the field of Brown’s citations to texts that indicate their status as reprinted materials either by visually signaling their “printedness” or by way of description in the narrative. I have done this to highlight Brown’s practice of representing print materials as such—a practice he shares with Frances E. W. Harper, Moses Roper, Frederick Douglass, David Walker, and Harriet Jacobs, along with several other early African American writers. By maintaining typographic conventions or mentioning the newspaper, broadside, or other print format that originally delivered the reproduced texts, writers insist we recognize these materials as imports from nineteenth-century print culture. Brown’s Clotel is a complex and well-documented case of an early African American text that recirculates print culture; the novel’s pastiche quality provokes investigation into other, more subtle examples of strategic recirculation, such as those at work in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861).

In recent years scholars have energetically responded to calls from Frances Smith Foster and Leon Jackson for greater attention to book history in African American literary studies by demonstrating that we must consider typography (Dinius 55–57), read “histotextually” (Foreman, “Christian” 331; Foreman, Activist 6–7), remove the geographic limits of our archive (Gardner 11–15), and see the...