During Clotel and The Escape, enslaved women are being desired by their owners. It was common during this time for white men to want a relationship with their enslaved women, which many were and became known as their mistresses. In both stories, Brown uses mulatto characters to demonstrate the theme of mixed-culture. Both Clotel and Melinda are mulattas that are embraced by their owners. “When slaveholders developed feelings of affection for enslaved women, the emotional and psychological cost of holding their enslaved partners as property occasionally won out over their fiscal need for human laborers” (24, Millward). Clotel however, was a much more depressing story than The Escape, the female characters in Clotel were forced to marry their owners and have sexual intercourse, which caused some women to commit suicide. “The power of kidnapping, forced migration, rape, brutality, starvation, natal alienation, and family separation gave slaves readily imaginable motives for suicidal responses to their captors and owners” (42, Snyder). In The Escape, Brown does not go into detail if Melinda was forced to do anything with Mr. Gaines but it is important to grasp that both of these women dealt wanting marriages that they actually wanted, denied. Clotel and Horatio Green were not allowed to marry because he is white and she is a mualatta. Melinda and Glenn are denied their marriage because Dr. Gaines would not allow it, and they were constantly separated from one another. Melinda and Clotel are characters that demonstrate the sexual violence that enslaved women had to go through, and the only way to flee from the uncomfortable physical actions of their masters was to escape with their true loved ones. A scholar of African American studies such as Deborah Walker King argues that sexual violence during slavery acted as one of the key imprints in the African American "culture of pain" (23, Millward).
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