English 251: American Lit. (1600-1865)

INTRODUCTION + READING ASSIGNMENT + WRITING ASSIGNMENT

Assignment 24:
FREDERICK DOUGLASS (Part 1)

The American 1840s seemed to be focused on the West. An expeditionary force led by John C. Fremont made several treks to California and back, mapping routes and gathering other geographical, biological and anthropological information which, when published by the government, would be indispensably useful to settlers bound for Oregon in 1846-48, and California in 1849-50. In 1846, the Mexican War would lead to the annexation of a huge, new territory to the Union. With the discovery of gold in 1848 at Sutter's Mill, the gaze of the eastern states seemed to be fixated on the West.

Yet The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself was also a product of this decade. Published in 1845, it reminds us that there were other, decisively important agendas on the table in that decade. In this case: slavery.

Douglass's Narrative stands in a direct line of literary inheritance from Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative of 1789. Before Douglass, a scattering of similar slave narratives had appeared: in 1842, for example, with The Narrative of Lunsford Lane. After Douglass's narrative, a host of similar books would be published; before the Civil War, dozens of them would issue from northern presses. During this period, from 1789 to 1861, the slave narrative became a new literary form. Douglass's book remains the classic example of it.

What were its origins? Certainly the slave narrative owes a distant debt to the narratives of Indian captivity. After Mary Rowlandson's book was published in 1682, a number of similar accounts appeared; they were reprinted and remained popular well into the 19th century. (Indeed, a testament to the continuing popularity of these books may be seen in Hawthorne's depiction of Roger Chillingworth in The Scarlet Letter as a man just redeemed from Indian captivity.) Yet the slave narrative also stands in a direct line of descent from autobiographical narratives, such as Franklin's; it can also be seen drawing on the 19th century novel for some of its stylistic and narrative techniques. Working from this heritage, slave narratives were a highly developed mode of African-American autobiography. However, while engaged in narrating a life, they also functioned as testimony, as documentary evidence useful in the fight against slavery.

As such, the slave narrative was also an explicitly political mode of writing. Shepherded into print by white abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, who both appended introductory comments to Douglass's text, the slave narrative was engaged in the work of cultural and social change. As such, historians have long questioned their reliability as historical evidence, the more so because many of them were heavily edited or even ghost-written by white abolitionists. As literary texts, however, the questions about their "authenticity" serve to spotlight key themes of the form.

For example, the titles of many slave narratives often contain the phrase, notable in Douglass's case, "Written by Himself." Such phrases certainly served to insure readers that the text remained a personal, unforced, and therefore truthful account. A secondary effect, though, is to spotlight the very theme of literacy. For the slave's ability to read and write--abilities slaveholding culture systematically denied the slave, in order to keep him or her compliantly in darkness--are therefore not only what enables the book we read, but also feasibly enables the conditions of freedom that put the book in our hands. Slave narratives are poignantly conscious of the power of literacy, and a central focus in all of them will be on the slaves' means of acquiring literacy skills, then on the ways that such skills enabled the slave's reinvention of a new, free, democratic self. If the American is by definition the self-made or self-authored man, as Franklin and Crevecoeur insisted, then the slave's literacy becomes a key step in his or her claim to an American identity. But that identity is a deeply troubled and troubling thing. For acquiring the power to read and write means, in addition, being assimilated by dominant, white culture. It means writing in the language of the oppressor. It therefore also means, confronting the terms of oppression coded into the slaveholder's own language. This is Douglass's greatest achievement in his Narrative. He confronts the hypocrisy and contradictoriness of white, Christian, slave-holding civilization. And, confronting it, he illustrates for us that literacy by itself lacks the power to overthrow injustices which are so deeply embedded in the parent culture.

Reading Assignment

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, prefaces, Chs. 1-9 (pp. 1990-2026).

Writing Assignment

Consider the ways that the "Preface" to Douglass's Narrative, written by William Lloyd Garrison, does just that: it puts a "first face" on the text. In what specific ways does he think the book will operate on readers, and their society?
Add to your considerations the prefatory "Letter" by Wendell Phillips. Taken together, how do these texts serve to "authorize" Douglass's text? That is, how do they authorize him to speak, witness to his veracity, and set the terms for reading his book? Discuss.
What are the plain facts about Douglass's birth and early years, and how are such facts significant?
Look carefully at Douglass's prose style in the opening chapters. Using examples, show when (and for what effects) Douglass uses a simple sentence, in contrast with other moments when (once more, for certain effects) he uses a complex sentence.
According to Douglass, in what ways, and by what specific means, do slaveholders "dehumanize" their slaves?
What does the murder of Demby teach Douglass and, by implication, ourselves as readers?
How does it come about that Douglass is sent to Baltimore, to live with the Aulds?
Chapter VI begins the story of Douglass's quest for literacy. What reasons does he give--or, put another way, what is the logic--for his wanting to learn to read? What specific means does he use, and what texts does he read and study? What significance do we attach to these facts? (For example, what values or themes does he derive from these readings; and what habits of subversion or resistance to slavery does Douglass learn from learning to read and write?) Discuss, in several well written paragraphs.

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