William Wells Brown, Three Years in Europe , and Fugitive Tourism

Abstract

At start of his career as an agent for Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, William Wells Brown participated in two events that highlight issues at stake in his later travels abroad. First, sometime in spring of 1847, he visited Boston exhibition of Panorama of Mississippi River, which amazed him with its mild portrayal of and gave him idea of constructing panorama of his own that would counter proslavery bias of this apparently innocuous, but obviously partial view of celebrated landscape. (1) Later, in November of that year, he famously declared to Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society that slavery has never been represented; Slavery never can be represented (Lecture 4). The problem, as Brown presents it, is not just lack of public knowledge about slavery, but also inevitable failure of any effort to do more than [slavery] as we think it is. No representation, not even his own, can convey the real condition of (4). If Brown's visit to attraction in Boston reminded him of how thoroughly proslavery images pervaded antebellum culture--and how often they went unremarked--then his urge to counter Mississippi panorama with his own account of may have sharpened his sense of problems inherent in any attempt to represent either individual or collective experience of trauma on scale of in United States. Brown also understands, as he makes clear in Salem, that his efforts are constrained by what he calls fastidiousness of his predominantly white audience and by generic expectations they bring to slave narrative. When Brown traveled to Europe in 1849, he continued to address these problems as both professional lecturer and as tourist, that is, as celebrated fugitive slave publicly performing conventional practices of nineteenthcentury aesthetic tourism. (2) This essay argues that Brown's experience as tourist led him to unlikely discovery that growing popularity of presented opportunities to extend his audience and provided new set of genetic and aesthetic conventions that could serve his work as writer and antislavery activist. In contrast to his predecessor Frederick Douglass, who emphasizes radically different meanings Great Britain held for him as rude, uncultivated fugitive and for young gentlemen in search of knowledge, ... pleasure, and refinement of their rough democratic manners (Autobiographies 677), William Wells Brown publicly adopts role of cultivated fugitive, integrating and its representational strategies into his own antislavery discourse. (3) With publication of Three Years in Europe, Brown produces new kind of tourism that adopts key conventions of Anglo-American travel historical sightseeing, museum-going, literary pilgrimages, and sentimental encounter with Other--and transforms them into powerful counter-narratives that expose instability of monumental histories of nation, empire, and race. tourism enabled Brown to represent slavery--and to represent himself as fugitive slave--in ways that facilitated his career-long critique of parochialism, historical myopia, and barely concealed violence that sustained in United States. By embracing conventions of Anglo-American as no African writer had before, Brown politicizes antebellum travel, further exposes fallacies and hypocrisies of slaveowning republic, and establishes for himself what his first biographer calls a position among literary men never before enjoyed by any colored American (J. Brown 82). (4) In both Three in Years Europe; or, Places I have Seen and People I have Met, and later U. S. edition of Brown s travels, The Fugitive in Europe, Brown chronicles visits to an exhausting array of conventional attractions, He visits picturesque ruins and palaces, climbs church towers and monuments, and revels in his proximity to European celebrities living and dead. …