Jimmy Demer
6 Oct 2004/Eng 525/Tolliver
Paper 1/Clotel
Lords of In-Between:
The Transvestite, the Trickster, and Plantation Culture in William Wells Brown’s Clotel
In his comparison of ancient trickster myths with more recent texts and art, Trickster Makes This World, Lewis Hyde defines the trickster as “the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox, [who will] cross the line and confuse the distinction… the lord of in-between” (6-7). Hyde makes a seemingly unlikely but cogent argument that Frederick Douglass embodies many characteristics of the trickster. As a mulatto, “born into a world where two distinct moral systems conflicted, [Douglass] found himself forced to mediate between them… Douglass dwelt on the boundaries of plantation culture, and in that setting he became a cunning go-between, a thief of reapportionment who quit the periphery and moved to the center” (227). Much of Hyde’s theory regarding Douglass’s trickster aesthetic can be applied in a comparative critical investigation of cross-dressing in William Wells Brown’s novel Clotel and Brown’s source material for his cross-dressing scenes, William Craft’s narrative of his and his wife’s brazen escape from slavery, Running A Thousand Miles For Freedom. Michael Berthold examines cross-dressing in Clotel in his essay “Cross-dressing and forgetfulness of self in William Wells Brown’s Clotel,” and this paper endeavors to expand Berthold’s observations using Hyde’s model of the trickster, a model that invites scrutiny of the transvestite’s ability to confuse binary distinctions and occupy a unique position of observation within the chasm of cultural polarities. In Craft’s gleeful and ironic narrative, the shame inherent in Brown’s recapitulation of the scene is absent, and Craft and his wife “unravel the trap of shame that contain them and weave another in its stead” (Hyde 237), leading the pair to freedom. But Brown’s discomfort with the sexual and social potentialities his characters occasionally exhibit creates a protean Clotel who cross-dresses her way not to freedom, but to death.
Hyde admits that plantation culture was “first and foremost a culture of terror, bloodshed, and fear” (229), but he also examines the more subtle “shame culture” that “could often be relied upon to hold the line” (229) of the master’s power. “Douglass’s repeated use of the word ‘impudent’ bespeaks this internalized threshold, [and] a slave who tried to justify his conduct when he had been censured for it would be thought ‘guilty of impudence, -one of the greatest crimes of which a slave can be guilty’” (229-230). Brown’s “internalized threshold” is apparent when Berthold quotes him as writing that “extravagance in dress is a great and growing evil with our people.” Likewise, Brown’s “internalized threshold” forces the “tempering of Clotel’s cross-dressings,” and diminishes Brown’s “governance of the sexual and social possibilities of her male disguises” (Berthold 1). Berthold offers the possibility that Brown used cross-dressing “merely as a means of resolving vicissitudes of plot,” but argues more forcefully that the cross-dressing in Clotel illuminates the “aesthetic dissonances” that transvestism calls to attention. The implication is that the sort of cultural disruption – tricksterism, if you will -created by transvestism acts as metaphor for the “dissonance [that is] in fact scaffold and tonality for the novel” (Berthold 1-2). But the aesthetic dissonances in Clotel are ambiguous, while the intent of Brown’s work is not: the book is an abolitionist screed so right in its moralism that any ambiguity seems to reveal Brown’s lack of artistry rather than some deeper understanding of human complexity. For example, Clotel is characterized by her unbending, unassailable moral and ethical rectitude. She is also as fair as “those who were waiting with a wish to become her purchasers; her features as finely defined as any of her sex of pure Anglo-Saxon… her whole appearance indicating one superior to her position” (Brown 52). Why Brown makes his heroine more physically like a “pure Anglo-Saxon” is troubling, and the text offers no definitive or acceptable answer. Further, the example of Clotel’s physicality betrays Brown’s discomfort with anyone in the novel existing in that chasm between two cultures. Can a character, in Brown’s conception, exhibit both “extravagance in dress” and a superior intellect or moral rectitude? The shamelessness inherent in cross-dressing pushes Brown to moderate the potentiality of cross-dressing as a method to disrupt societal constructs of power, gender and their binaristic labels.
When Clotel persuades William to join her in escaping to freedom, Brown’s inability to come to terms with the duplicity and paradox of his characters’ moral sense is revealed. In Craft’s narrative, the pair of escapees is husband and wife, and the fact of their bond secures the narrative’s believability, whereas Clotel and William are nothing more than acquaintances or co-workers. By joining forces to escape together, they both become exponentially more endangered than if Clotel was to try to escape solo. But the inclusion of William in the text shows the complexity of the cultural chasm, and how William assumes dual roles within his own culture. He speaks to Clotel in standard English – her English – while he speaks to other servants in vernacular. And to other whites, he uses standard English, such as his successful argument for paying his train fare by his weight. This is the duplicity of survival: William, “whose very countenance beamed with intelligence” (Brown 150), must have somehow snuffed out his beaming before whites.
The idea of language as a tool of power and a revealer of intelligence is evidenced in Brown and Douglass, and a comparison can be made. Hyde calls literacy Douglass’s “central theft” (227), because “to write and to speak… by themselves undercut plantation culture, for that culture had as one of its ‘eternals’ the notion that writing and speaking belonged inherently to whites, that their absence was inherent to blacks” (229). Craft and his wife must deal with their own illiteracy – they won’t be able to sign a ship’s or hotel’s registry, which might reveal their true identities – in a way that Clotel never will.
Comparing Brown’s and Craft’s versions of events, Berthold writes that “in both cases, the masquerade brilliantly parodies slavery’s arrangements of race, gender, and property, allowing both Ellen Craft and Clotel an intermittent empowerment. They are freed of the sexual objectification of and abuse that dogged the slave woman (Clotel’s flight, in fact, is precipitated by her master’s attempt to seduce her… and the implicit threat that he will rape her if she refuses)” (2). But Clotel’s “intermittent empowerment” leads to her symbolic rape by the police in her hotel room, to her imprisonment and finally, to her death. Whatever liberation was at hand during the cross-dressing scenes in Clotel is obliterated by her end.
Berthold reminds us that Brown’s condensation of Craft’s cross-dressing scene “suggests his more vigilant superintendence of transvestism’s dangers… there is less pleasure taken than in the Craft narrative in the machinations of the disguise, less revelling… ‘in the dramatic ironies’ the ‘ruse makes possible’ for the Crafts” (3). As for transvestism’s dangers, Brown suggests Clotel’s fear by curtailing her speech (when cross-dressed) to a mere few lines, while Craft and his wife (or master, as he refers to her), seem to be constantly talking, arguing and pleading their way to freedom. Craft plays a go-between trickster handily against the whites on the train, while Clotel’s William merely plays his part. Craft revels in his duplicity when he promises a white man to “be attentive to [his] good master.” Craft continues, “I promised that I would do so, and have ever since endeavored to keep my pledge” (Craft 303). Craft can’t help but enjoy the ignorance of the white travelers. In his narrative, Craft responds retroactively to conversations he had with whites during his escape journey, giving voice to thoughts unvoiced at the time.
“By refusing plantation culture’s rules of silence and speaking from and across its internal boundaries…Douglass dispels its enchantment. His main tool in this enterprise is a form of speech expressly forbidden to slaves, ‘contradiction’ or ‘answering back’” (231), and Craft’s narrative delights in “answering back” the white power structure. The contradiction occurs because the whites are unaware they are even part of Craft’s game. This type of contradiction “confuses polarity; it baffles those who were moving in a pure, straight line; it uncovers hidden duplicity” (Hyde 231). Douglass uses contradiction, irony and antithetical constructions to display a “series of oppositions particular to plantation culture,” oppositions that help keep the power structure intact: “blacks tell time by the seasons, whites by the calendar; blacks do not know their ages, whites do; blacks are set in nature, whites in culture; blacks belong to night and the earth, whites to daylight and the heavens. Blacks, in short, are like beasts, and whites are human beings” (Hyde 232). Hyde continues that for Douglass, “coming from the supposed sphere of silence, any diction is contradiction… speech itself is impudent regardless of its content, and threatens the design of this world.”
The obvious problem in applying Hyde’s theory – that any diction is contradiction in a world dependant on the oppositions used to control it - to the character of Clotel is that she has knowledge of the “white” world, the world of speech, gentility, so-called civilization even, in a way that the Crafts do not. Like Douglass, Clotel, a mulatto, exists in some sense between two cultures, but Brown never allows her any essential understanding of black plantation culture beyond its obvious characteristic of moral reprehensibility. Likewise, Clotel is more in touch with those things that Douglass viewed as part of white culture, so her ability to straddle the two worlds is lacking. The Crafts, on the other hand, had to devise a way to hide not only their enslavement, but their illiteracy. Their contradiction, their answering back, was first the simple fact of their navigation through a world foreign to them, a world where literacy was power. They were forced to navigate the written word – written passes, signing registries – as well as spoken arguments. Clotel’s advantage here cannot be overstated.
In conclusion, how then does cross-dressing relate to the implications of the power of literacy, of the “internal prohibition” of impudence, of diction as contradiction, of aesthetic dissonance? What is the mythic trickster’s relation to Clotel, and how does the concept of the trickster illuminate larger issues in the book? As Hyde’s definition of the trickster - “the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox, [who will] cross the line and confuse the distinction… the lord of in-between” (6-7) – again reminds us, Clotel’s discomfort throughout the novel is often generated by her existence in-between cultures. When she cross-dresses, she fully embodies ambiguity and duplicity, she confuses distinctions. But where Craft embraced the new vision – the new world, really, that opened before him – allowed by his wife’s cross-dressing, the recontextualization of Clotel as a white man opens no vista for her. For both the Crafts and Clotel, cross-dressing begins as nothing more than a means to an end, but Brown’s tempering of the “potentially transgressive [nature of] cross-dressing” (Berthold 3) inhibits Clotel’s potentiality to overcome the tragedy that has been inflicted upon her, as well as the tragedy that awaits her. The same conservatism that may have kept Brown from imagining a beautiful, intelligent and moral yet dark-skinned Clotel also keeps him from exploiting her role as a “lord of in-between.”
The train is a perfect place to recontextualize the theater of slavery, for a number of reasons: the train as gathering place for strangers, freed of their roles and standings in their communities; the trickster is always imagined on the road, because the road is always in-between; and because the train acts as a theater of self-reinvention, as well as possessing a mythical presence in the American psyche. In this loaded context, Clotel does cross the line by the simple fact of her cross-dressing. But unlike other cross-dressers in American culture such as Bugs Bunny, whose transvestism always confuses Elmer Fudd into some violent confrontation (usually with himself), Clotel gains nothing by her duplicity, contradiction, and balance-shifting. Finally, Clotel dies leaping from a bridge, another symbol of the in-between. Aesthetic dissonance, as Berthold argues, is both “scaffold and tonality for the novel” (2), but that dissonance is not one made of artistic control, but rather of the author’s limitations, his disallowing of his characters to evolve beyond type, and his unwillingness to reconcoct his source material – such as the Craft narrative – to work to the story’s advantage. Aesthetic dissonance is achieved through Brown’s shifts rather constant shifts in time and place, as well as the multitude of characters and plot-lines and occasional dismissal of characters a reader expected to see again, and Berthold rightly argues that “the seemingly formless… inchoate texture of the novel…might also suggest a valid mode for the novelization of slavery” (6).
Berthold cogently closes his article by saying, “Clotel’s catalogue of excesses – its exploding steamboats, persevering packs of dogs, violated bodies, insurrections, conflagrations, pestilences – itself establishes a context that the outrageousness of cross-dressing at once participates in and is mitigated by” (6). But because the instance of Clotel’s existence in the chasm between cultures – her cross-dressing scenes – leads not to enlightenment (she’s already enlightened, we are to believe) or freedom, but to death, the provocation and promise that cross-dressing manifests dies with her.
Bibliography/Works Cited
Berthold, Michael. “Cross-Dressing and Forgetfulness of elf in William Wells Brown’s Clotel.” College Literature 20(1993): 19-30.
Brown, William Wells. Clotel; or The President’s Daughter. Three Classic African- American Novels. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Vintage, 1990. 3-223.
Craft, William. Running a Thousand Miles For Freedom; or, The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery. Great Slave Narratives. Ed. Arna Bontemps. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. 269-331.
Hyde, Lewis. Trickster Makes This World. New York: North Point Press, 1998.
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