Clotel - The President's Daughter: Post #3

Upon reaching Chapter V, "The Slave Market," Brown furthermore uses descriptive writing, "gang of human cattle" (103) to enrapture the sharp boundary between the state of happiness and misery, which also ties into what I said earlier about his continuous pattern throughout this book. His utilization of the cycle of happy vs. reality within Clotel really serves a purpose: to understand the path that the human nature must endure to reach their inner "perfectionism," but I also have realized another element to this concept. I also think it represents the notion of paternal benevolence and the conviction of how many Southern slave owners believed that slavery was vested by God in the scriptures, even though the nature of slavery, in reality, was immensely jarring and unconstitutional. He uses this technique to encompass the beliefs of the slave owners of when this book had been written, and also, to allow his readers to fully absorb and remain interested in the novel.

Through the lines of "human agony and suffering which sends its cry from the slave markets and negro pens, unheard and unheeded by man up to his ear; mothers weeping for their children, burst of bitter lamentation, while from others the loud hysteric laugh," (105), readers are able to acknowledge what Brown's visible verdict of how unjust slavery is. He does this throughout the entire book so far, which makes it extremely easy for his readers to understand what he is trying to drill into the minds of his readers. He ends this chapter with the sense that there is no hope for the slaves, and begins chapter six with another poem about how slavery was "rightful" in the scriptures, what I had mentioned earlier: "What! preach and enslave men? Give thanks - and rob thy own afflicted poor?" (106). Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" is also referred to in this chapter (108) signifying the influence of his talk of independence, and even though this was set in the Romantic period, the Rationalism period truly set the values and ideals of Romanticism, as well. This reinforces that although each American literature time period consists of different values and beliefs, the foundation for those beliefs come from the movement or movements before it, which in turn is an impetus for the next and future literary movements.