ABSTRACT
Readers of William Wells Brown’s 1864 revised edition of Clotelle: A Tale of the Southern States would have been overly familiar with its conventional seduction plot. While en route from New Orleans to Mobile with her mistress to escape the fever, the tragic mulatta Clotelle encounters the dashing stranger Guy Devenant, who woos her with the promise “to buy [her] and make [her] free and happy” (Brown 1864: 63). The virtuous woman’s proper response should have equally been an unsurprising didactic conclusion, one that Brown had all too clearly underscored through the negative example of Clotelle’s mother, who had been seduced and betrayed by the disingenuous plantation master Mr. Linwood. Yet in Brown’s altered 1864 ending for his novel-reconceived at the height of the Civil War and after Lincoln’s emancipation of the slaves-Clotelle fi nds virtue rewarded by succumbing to the suitor’s solicitations. And it is, it is important to note, an odd seduction: Guy Devenant’s fascination for Clotelle stems not from her beauty, her purity, or even her marketability, but her resemblance to his deceased sister: “The love . . . which I had for my sister is transferred to you” (63). Inspired by this sincere appeal to fraternité, Clotelle absconds from America with Devenant to France. While Clotelle still later weds the “pure black” American-born Jerome after the death of her French husband as in the original 1853 version, in Brown’s Reconstruction-era text, the migratory Clotelle now lectures her Southern plantation father, whom she meets at the birthplace of Rousseau on the French Declaration of the Rights
of Man and Citizen: in response to his deathbed apologies, Clotelle asserts uncompromisingly, “One of the cardinal principles of Christianity and freedom is the equality and brotherhood of man” (103).
