Doing it for #1

Clotel comes as the American Industrial Revolution is getting started, and it shows. The optimistic tones about what could be are gone. All we get are the sour notes of a changing world. Coupling is a business transaction that is found to fail, People are only out to help themselves, etc. I think that this is a fitting end to a semester where we have focused on authors who are battles with the questions of relationship to their fellow human being. Clotel gives us the answer: Your relations with other people are around chiefly to help you get what you want. Anything more is bound to fall away. Green is the example of this when he buys Clotel and does everything he can to make her happy. Once he no longer finds enjoyment in the relationship, though, he moves on to another girl. The statement is clear: Green is doing all of these things for Clotel because it makes him happy, and once that happiness runs out, he has no interest in it.

Brown is likely overstating the fraying of human ties here. Not everyone is concerned only for themselves. e shows hints of that with the mother-child bond, but looser ties still have something between them. I would imagine that the feeling of capitalism and competition was pretty crushing to those who wanted to live in an egalitarian(ish) society. Melville, Whitman and the like were really hoping that some sort of brotherhood would develop where people would treat each other as an extension of themselves, but the humanity that emerged cared more about their own happiness, derived from power and self-interest.

It is not that these authors did not see the writing on the wall. Hawthorne told us that a system of equality would never work; people were too interested in coupling and having power. The debate between forces of equality and hierarchy is addressed in Temple House, but it is by no means settled for equality. The difference is that the authors of these earlier works had some hope. while the portrait in Clotel is a hopeless one. The idyllic world that sees everyone working to better humanity loses out to one where people are working to help themselves.

“If you’re not first, you’re last.”