윌리엄 웰스 브라운의 『클로텔』: 미국의 패러독스

Abstract

William Wells Brown’s Clotel: The American Paradox A paradox is a technique of description that shows a veiled side of a situation in an unusual way to lead the audience in a sudden but reflected awareness. Domestication, a mode of oppression, has forced the oppressed not to objectively recognize the contradiction of a social institution or system but to fantastically identify themselves with the oppressor. Paradoxes which are supported by ironical contrasts in black literature mirror the desire to have a collective voice in a racial oppression in the U.S. and to establish a truth against the Truth concocted by white oppressors. Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter by William Wells Brown, the first novel written by an African-American writer, explores various facets of the American Antebellum society. Of those, the tragic fate of a black daughter of the American President releases the discrepancy between the professed ideals by the white and the experienced reality by the black which had taken some views of a true American scene from the viewpoint of the oppressed around 1850s. Paradoxical thinking, singing, and writing in the American racial milieu have made a significant character in the black cultural stream since the white instituted the chattel slavery in the New World. In their songs, poems, slave narratives, and novels, the black writers strive to express their desire to be free. Their stylistic particularity, that usually makes things interesting, strange, or bizarre, does not simply make laughing, but also generates sneering at something or somebody that oppresses the black in the U.S.