From Author Love to Freedom: Fugitive Tourism and William Wells Brown's Authorial Self-Invention

In William Wells Brown’s 1864 edition of Clotelle (published in a series marketed to Union soldiers), Brown extends the narrative to include a honeymoon in Geneva, where Clotelle and Jerome encounter a madman at their... [ view full abstract ]

In William Wells Brown’s 1864 edition of Clotelle (published in a series marketed to Union soldiers), Brown extends the narrative to include a honeymoon in Geneva, where Clotelle and Jerome encounter a madman at their hotel.  This Mr. Linwood turns out to be Clotelle’s father and former owner.  Remarkably, the climate of author love that permeates Geneva for these fugitive tourists inspires Linwood to free his slaves. Three weeks of literary tourism follows, as this new interracial family emerges in the transformative climate of Geneva, where “Rousseau… Byron, Gibbon, Voltaire, De Stael, Shelley…” had “transfused their spirit… into the spirit of other lovers of literature and everything that treated of great authors.” In this paper, I argue that this late addition is no aberration but rather indicative of how Brown invented himself as a professional literary author and discovered what would become his characteristic style while immersed in the politicized literary tourism and public performance of radicalized author love that culminated in the publication of Three Years in Europe (1852). In our own climate of increased attention to Brown’s literary method, my reading of the touristic aesthetics underlying Three Years in Europe adds another view of the fugitive poetics—of assemblage, citation, plagiarism, and performance—that make Brown’s work both innovative and difficult to see.