Plagiarama!

William Wells Brown and the Aesthetic of Attractions

Geoffrey Sanborn

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231540582
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

William Wells Brown (1814–1884) was a vocal abolitionist, a frequent antagonist of Frederick Douglass, and the author of Clotel, the first known novel by an African American. He was also an extensive plagiarist, copying at least 87,000 words from close to 300 texts. In this critical study of Brown's work and legacy, Geoffrey Sanborn offers a novel reading of the writer's plagiarism, arguing the act was a means of capitalizing on the energies of mass-cultural entertainments popularized by showmen such as P. T. Barnum. By creating the textual equivalent of a variety show, Brown animated antislavery discourse and evoked the prospect of a pleasurably integrated world.

Brown's key dramatic protagonists were the "spirit of capitalization"—the unscrupulous double of Max Weber's spirit of capitalism—and the "beautiful slave girl," a light-skinned African American woman on the verge of sale and rape. Brown's unsettling portrayal of these figures unfolded within a riotous patchwork of second-hand texts, upset convention, and provoked the imagination. Could a slippery upstart lay the groundwork for a genuinely interracial society? Could the fetishized image of a not-yet-sold woman hold open the possibility of other destinies? Sanborn's analysis of pastiche and plagiarism adds new depth to the study of nineteenth-century culture and the history of African American literature, suggesting modes of African American writing that extend beyond narratives of necessity and purpose, characterized by the works of Frederick Douglass and others.

CHAPTER

ONE

Plagiarama!

I didn’t create language, writer thought…. I’m constantly being given language. Since this language-world is rich and always changing, flowing, when I write, I enter a world which has complex relations and is, perhaps, illimitable. This world both represents and is human history, public memories and private memories turned public, the records and actualizations of human intentions. This world is more than life and death, for here life and death conjoin. I can’t make language, but in this world, I can play and be played.

—KATHY ACKER

It started small. A melodramatic flourish from a book by a Canadian political prisoner (“a shudder,—a feeling akin to horror shot through my frame”), imported into his first publication, the 1847 Narrative of William W. Brown, to describe his feelings upon being captured by slave catchers.¹ A transitional phrase from the abolitionist Stephen S. Foster’s The Brotherhood of Thieves (“Dark and revolting as is the picture here drawn”), right after a quotation from a newspaper article about slave drivers (C 41).² Three sentences from an account of a slave auction, woven into the scene in the Narrative in which he says goodbye to his mother for the last time. (“She dropped her head upon her heaving bosom, but she moved not. Neither did she weep—her emotions were too deep for tears…. I could bear no more—my heart struggled to free itself from the human form” [C 39].)³ Minor upgrades, brief samplings. Nothing that anyone would likely notice.

A year later, in the second edition of the Narrative, he took it a bit farther. In the opening section of the appendix, he drops in some lines from Tribute to the Memory of Thomas Shipley, a eulogy delivered in 1836 by the black abolitionist Robert Purvis (“You cannot keep the human mind forever locked in darkness…. For one day of freedom, oh! who would not die?”).⁴ Later on, he passes off the introduction and conclusion of Edward M. Davis’s Extracts from the American Slave Code—the paragraphs beginning “The following are mostly abridged selections from the statutes of the slave states and of the United States” and “Reader, you uphold these laws while you do nothing for their repeal”—as his own writing.⁵ Later still, he does the same with a transitional fragment (“Mr. Robert Wickliffe of Kentucky, in a speech published in the Louisville Advertiser, in opposition to those who were averse to the importation of slaves from the states, thus discourseth”) from Lewis Tappan’s Address to the Non-Slave Holders of the South.⁶ He was now masquerading, in a book whose full title includes the phrase Written by Himself, as the author of at least six other people’s written work.

But that, too, was nothing in comparison to what was about to come. At least 9 percent of Brown’s 1852 travel narrative, Three Years in Europe, is plagiarized, and the 112 passages in question—passages in which at least eight consecutive words are copied from another text—are taken from fifty-two sources. His 1853 novel, Clotel, contains at least 102 plagiarized passages, many of them extremely lengthy, from fifty-five sources; they make up 23 percent of the novel as a whole. Each of the subsequent versions of the novel—Miralda; or, the Beautiful Quadroon (1860–1861), Clotelle: A Tale of the Southern States (1864), and Clotelle; or, The Colored Heroine (1867)—contains a substantial amount of plagiarism (10 percent, 8 percent, and 6 percent, respectively), and at least 14 percent of St. Domingo: Its Revolution and Patriots (1855), 9 percent of The American Fugitive in Europe: Sketches of People and Places Abroad (1855), 3 percent of The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom (1858), 10 percent of Memoir of William Wells Brown (1859), 9 percent of The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements (1862), 12 percent of The Negro in the American Rebellion: His Heroism and His Fidelity (1867), 22 percent of The Rising Son; or, The Antecedents and Advancement of the Colored Race (1873), and 8 percent of My Southern Home; or, The South and Its People (1880) were plagiarized as well. By the end of his career, Brown had plagiarized at least 87,000 words from at least 282 texts (see appendix A). The voices of at least 265 different writers resonate along with his own (see appendix B).

Plagiarism is often thought to be a sign of weakness, an implicit confession of imaginative and expressive limitations. But when the scale of the plagiarism is so vast, it can begin to seem as though it indicates the reverse: an unconstrained resourcefulness, a wide-ranging awareness of, and freedom with, the materials of one’s culture. Although Brown frequently plagiarized from informational and polemical sources—antislavery journals, such as the Liberator and the National Anti-Slavery Standard; antislavery pamphlets, such as Sarah Grimké’s An Address to Free Colored Americans and William Cooper Nell’s Services of Colored Americans in the Wars of 1776 and 1812; documentary accounts of slavery, such as Theodore Weld’s American Slavery as It Is and William Bowditch’s Slavery and the Constitution; and histories of Africa and the black diaspora, such as Samuel Goodrich’s Lights and Shadows of African History and John Reilly Beard’s The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture—he was by no means confined to them. He plagiarized from Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets, for instance, as well as from William Hazlitt’s The Spirit of the Age and Washington Irving’s The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon. He plagiarized from Robert Willmot’s Pleasures, Objects, and Advantages of Literature and David Macbeth Moir’s Sketches of the Poetical Literature of the Past Half-Century, from Lydia Sigourney’s Pleasant Memories of Pleasant Lands and Elizabeth Spence’s Summer Excursions, from a captivity narrative and a pamphlet accompanying the exhibition of a panorama, from Memorials of Early Genius and Gleanings from Pious Authors, from a valedictory address in the Eclectic Medical Journal and a newspaper article about a tenement fire. He had an especial fondness for Louis-Marie de Lahaye Cormenin’s The Orators of France, from which he plagiarized seventeen passages, and George Washington Bungay’s Crayon Sketches and Off-Hand Takings, from which he plagiarized twelve. In his last extended series of plagiarisms, in the final chapter of My Southern Home, he takes four forceful passages from Robert Knox’s virulently antimiscegenationist The Races of Man and weaves them into a paean to racial intermixture. “[Our] only hope is education, professions, trades, and copying the best examples,” Brown writes midway through the chapter, “no matter from what source they come” (C 848).

The modes of his copying are equally diverse. In some places, he pastes in extremely lengthy clippings: in Clotel, he takes 673 consecutive words from Seth Gates’s description of a woman’s flight to and suicidal leap from the Long Bridge between Washington, D.C., and Alexandria, Virginia; in The Negro in the American Rebellion, he takes 847 consecutive words from an anonymous tribute to Robert Gould Shaw; and in My Southern Home, he takes 1,282 consecutive words from a journalist’s description of a Baptist sermon. Elsewhere, he uses other people’s phrasings as grace notes or decorative accents: in his biographical sketch of the African American lawyer John Mercer Langston in The Black Man, to take only one example, he incorporates fragments of sentences from Cormenin’s Orators of France (“in vigor of thought, in imagery of style, in logical connection, in vehemence, in depth, in point,” “profound without being hollow, ingenious without being subtle”) and Joel Tyler Headley’s preface to the American edition of Cormenin’s book (“a deep and majestic stream, he moves steadily onward, pouring forth his rich and harmonious sentences in strains of impassioned eloquence” [C 620]).⁷ In some cases, he retains the structure of a sentence but switches out the nouns: an encomium to four French writers in Cormenin (“Who has better known the human heart than Moliere, better painted than old Corneille the grandeur of virtue, better sighed than Racine the subtle weaknesses of love? Who had ever a sounder taste, a more exact intellect, than Voltaire?”) becomes, in Three Years in Europe, an encomium to four very different writers (“Who has better known the human feelings than Shakspere; better painted than Milton, the grandeur of Virtue; better sighed than Byron over the subtle weaknesses of Hope? Who ever had a sounder taste, a more exact intellect than Dante?”)⁸ In other cases, he keeps the nouns and changes everything else: a description of Madison Washington’s wife in The Black Man—“Her well-moulded shoulders, prominent bust, black hair which hung in ringlets, mild blue eyes, finely-chiselled mouth, with a splendid set of teeth, a turned and well-rounded chin, skin marbled with the animation of life, and veined by blood given to her by her master, she stood as the representative of two races” (C 508)—is cobbled together from bits and pieces of a character’s description in Alphonse de Lamartine’s History of the Girondists: “a prominent bust…black and soft hair, blue eyes…splendid teeth, a turned and well-rounded chin…a skin marbled with the animation of life, and veined by blood.”⁹ If at times Brown’s plagiarism appears to have enabled him to take a break from the labor of writing, at other times it appears to have expressed a distinctive literary aesthetics, at the heart of which was an intense, animating understanding of sentences as modifiable structures with nonsingular origins.

We are clearly in unfamiliar critical territory here. Although the existing scholarship on plagiarism can be of some use in this case, insofar as it can help us understand the cultural and historical contexts of the practice—it is important to know, for instance, that plagiarism was, throughout Brown’s life, a scandalous thing, and that the reputations of writers like Coleridge were badly damaged by the discovery of their unauthorized copyings—it can do little to help us make sense of plagiarism on this scale.¹⁰ Because Brown plagiarized from so many different texts, any effort to argue for a revisionary relationship to one of them, along the lines of Hannah Crafts’s relationship to Dickens’s Bleak House in The Bondwoman’s Narrative, inevitably raises the question of his relationship to the other 281 on the list.¹¹ Because he plagiarized from those texts in so many different ways, moreover, any effort to characterize the mode of his plagiarism in familiar, stable terms—as, for instance, a partial metabolization of the original or as a selective importation of high-quality goods—is bound to seem unconvincing. It may well be that the critical territory we are entering here will rapidly expand; online databases, the means of my discovery of most of his plagiarisms—a few were already known—may eventually reveal that a great many writers used published texts in similar ways. In the course of phrase searching for instances of plagiarism in Brown’s work, for example, I discovered that three writers, William Hunt, Wilson Armistead, and Pauline Hopkins, plagiarized either from Brown or from a common source text (more on this below). It may also be, however, that even in an expanded plagiaristic environment, the scope and style of Brown’s use of other people’s language will turn out to be singular. It may turn out to be, that is, that he is the sublimest of the nonsublime, the most original artist of nonoriginality in American literary history.

That evaluation will only take hold, however, if the popular and scholarly perception of plagiarism undergoes a significant change. In the minds of many, plagiarism is, in Thomas Mallon’s words, “irredeemably sleazy.”¹² It leads to court cases, job losses, withdrawals of books from circulation, and shame, shame, shame.¹³ In the same issue of African American Review in which I first reported the extent of Brown’s plagiarisms in Clotel, for instance, Erika Renée Williams castigates Nella Larsen, whose career was destroyed by a revelation of plagiarism, for repeating elements of the opening paragraph of John Galsworthy’s “The First and the Last” in the opening paragraph of her first novel, Quicksand. “I believe that no rhetoric of formalist innovation can mitigate the error of an author’s verbatim copying from another author,” Williams writes. For her, Larsen’s “illicit and derivative use of source texts exploits her fellow authors by enacting violence upon their texts, whose fragments she lifts only to bury in the confines of her own literary output.”¹⁴ In the end, Williams speculates, the plagiarist’s violence is visited upon herself or himself as well, even if the plagiarism is not discovered. “By drawing considerably from Galsworthy for the opening passage of her novel, and then, passing as an originating author,” she writes, “Larsen neglected to honor…her own text, and therefore, herself.” The remedy, Williams concludes, is sunlight: “only by acknowledging Larsen’s plagiarism, by daring not to, in Larsen’s words, avoid ‘mention’ of untoward ‘things’ and thus, maintain the pretense that ‘they do not exist,’ might we mitigate the ethos of secrecy that sustains errors in judgment and acts of self-deception alike.”¹⁵

This kind of moralism is, I think, misplaced. We have pluralized so much in contemporary American culture, yet we are still, for the most part, fundamentalists about plagiarism, respond...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Introduction
• 1. Plagiarama!
• 2. The Spirit of Capitalization
• 3. The Aesthetic of Attractions
• 4. The Beautiful Slave Girl
• 5. The Sound of Fame
• Appendix A: Plagiarism in Brown’s Works
• Appendix B: Bibliography of Plagiarized Works
• Notes
• Index