Escaping the explicit: The ironic perspective of William Wells Brown

Born into slavery, William Wells Brown escaped and published a record of his experience in The Narrative of William Wells Brown (1847). This Narrative reveals much about the formation of the slave narrative genre, the conventions within which these authors operated, and the relationship of African Americans to slavery. Brown exposed slave society's incongruities and subverted the slave narrative's conventions by employing a different approach and application of irony than his peers. When he appeared to be most transparent, to reveal more than others had, Brown was in fact the most concealed. He accomplished this deception through a mastery and subversion of slave society's norms and the slave narrative's conventions, an approach that I call his ironic perspective. I explore and contextualize Brown's ironic perspective through an examination of the initial Narrative, the revision published in 1848, and his final publication My Southern Home (1880), as well as the use of Brown in Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada (1976). This exploration engages the slave narratives' use of irony which followed into later African American literature, and Brown's ironic perspective, a precursor to African American modernism. In this manner, Brown's Narrative and its iterations foreshadowed African American modernist authors' deliberations on the discrepancy between America's promise of equality with its practice of systemic inequality from the antebellum period into the twentieth-century. My exploration considers Brown in three distinct roles: a trickster within slavery, Brown subverted the attempts to control slaves; as an ironist, Brown subverted slave narrative convention; and as a protomodernist author, Brown subverted our views of slave narratives and African American literature. With this exploration, Brown's ironic perspective should alter how we examine the slave narratives as a genre and their influence on later African American literature.