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 crossdressing scenes, William Craft’s narrative of his and his wife’s brazen escape from
slavery, Running A Thousand Miles For Freedom. Michael Berthold examines crossdressing 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
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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’” (229230). 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
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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
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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
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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,
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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
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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 crossdressers 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
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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 crossdressing 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.
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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 AfricanAmerican 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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