Mitchell stated that Brown emphasized romantic conventions, dramatic incidents, and a political outlook in his novel. Recent scholars have also analyzed Clotel for its representations of gender and race. Sherrard-Johnson notes that Brown portrayed both the "tragic central characters" and the "heroic figures" as mulattoes with Anglo-Saxon features, similar to his own appearance. She thinks he uses the cases of "near-white" slaves to gain sympathy for his characters. Note that he borrowed elements from the plot of abolitionist Lydia Maria Child in her short story "The Quadroons" (1842). It also incorporated notable elements of recent events, such as the escape of the Crafts and the court case for the freedom of Salome, an enslaved woman in Louisiana who claimed to be a German-born immigrant. Martha Cutter notes that Brown portrayed his female characters generally as passive victims of slavery and as representations of real women and the cult of domesticity, which were emphasized for women at the time. They are not depicted as desiring or seeking freedom, but as existing through love and suffering. Cutter asks, if Mary could free George, why didn't she free herself? Although Brown published three subsequent versions of Clotel, she did not seriously change this characterization of African American women. Enslaved women like Ellen Craft were known to have escaped slavery, but Brown did not portray such women as fully successful