Essay: The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (analysis)

Bakhtin wrote that, “language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated – over-populated with the intentions of others.” For Frederick Douglass, the importance of the written word over the spoken word would come to shift him from a position of public discussion surrounding slavery to shaping the discourse surrounding abolition and America’s history of slavery. Yet the difficulties that come with literacy and an understanding of language’s possibilities and its boundaries would also come to pose problems for Douglass over the course of his life, particularly in relation to The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself. Douglass’ ability to read and write offered him an intellectual agency and gives him a voice that was previously silenced. Within The Narrative, Douglass develops a quiet insistence in which his determination to be taken as more than a ‘text’ is made apparent, he is to be the authority. The authority of his experiences, even those he cannot know and an authority on the horrors undergone by the slave community. His acute grasp of language and its rhetorical opportunities allowed him to tease out a deeper emotional response from his readers, yet in doing so he side-lines an infallible truth in favour of a more personal and emotive truth, something critics would often target. Douglass’ development of a tension between a desire for truth and the unknowability of his own history and the subjectivity of experience offers a poignancy to his autobiography which enabled him to emotionally resonate with his readership. Douglass shows himself to be an eloquent and intelligent voice for the black population, who were presented as having neither. Douglass’ mastery of reading and writing give him more than a voice for millions of slaves, it allows him to openly subvert the stereotype perpetrated by the white man that the black population were intellectually inferior, Frederick Douglass embodies everything the white man claimed the black man could not be.
Writing distances Frederick Douglass from the white abolitionists as he is able to seize the power of the written word for himself and reworks the narrative framework to focus on himself and the community he speaks of and for. Douglass explained he was “generally introduced as ‘chattel’ – a ‘thing’ – a piece of Southern ‘property’ – the chairman assuring the audience it could speak.” Yet once he gained his freedom, he was able to apply his skills of reading and writing to carving out his own voice within the anti-slavery platform. In order to justify slavery, the white man needed to prove that the black man was sub-par, sub-human even. It was hard to suggest inferiority in terms of physicality, therefore the white man made it pointedly about intelligence. It was argued that the black man was inferior intellectually and could therefore be used as an object which could be owned. One way in which this was enabled was through withholding the power of reading and writing from the slaves. Therefore, Douglass’ ability to write at a base level, disproved the stereotype perpetrated by the whites and slave holders. Although reading and writing held lifelong significance and consequences for Douglass, his skills undermined an entire ideology and resonated beyond Douglass simply as an individual to the slave population.
We often see literature as an emotional outlet, perhaps a balance of empathy and sympathy. Wordsworth described poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” literature is deeply moving, and we could see literature as a way to understand the world. In some regards we can understand processes of writing, particularly literary acts, as a deeply emotional exploit for both reader and author. The Narrative divulges the significance of reading and in particular, writing for Douglass as it is through this medium, that he is able to awaken an emotional reaction within his readership, while perhaps coming to terms with events in his life. Moreover, writing lacks the painful rigidity Douglass saw in other art forms such as painting or photography, “his position [in a photograph] is now defined, and his whole personae must now conform” while writing offers the space for the development of the self without some of the constraints of the visual. Douglass takes many liberties in recounting the incidents in his life. Yet arguably his autobiography’s purpose was not solely to offer a completely accurate portrayal of his life and instead offering insight into the damages slavery has over the individual and the group at large, bringing about an emotional reaction in his readers. If this is the case, the use of figurative language and literary tropes that populate his narrative are fundamental to our understanding of the text.
Douglass’ employment of figurative language divulges his understanding of emotion as a moral driver. He opens The Narrative with a poignant explanation of his ignorance surrounding his own identity, “I have no accurate knowledge of my age.” Immediately Frederick Douglass’ lack of knowledge regarding his heritage is made apparent. He has no clear knowledge of many of the events he will recount over the next 100 pages. As a result, he searches elsewhere for a reaction within his readers, something he appears to find through figurative language and literary devices. He writes “the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses do of theirs.” His use of the simile is symbolic of how the slaves are treated and divulges the way in which the white masters consistently dehumanize their slaves. Douglass turns from the factual, “I was born in Tuckahoe” to the purely figurative. He continues by stating, “we seldom come nearer to it [knowledge of their age] than planting-time, harvest-time, cherry-time, spring-time, or fall-time.” The consistent repetition places an emphasis on the permanence of slavery but most importantly hints towards pastoral imagery, signaling a certain revision of the Western literary tradition which suggests an epistemic violence as opposed to the innocence we associate with the Romantics and the pastoral. Douglass is entering the literary canon to disrupt it. In doing so, he illuminates to his audience the horrors of slavery. While simultaneously subverting the stereotype of the black man as being intellectually inferior through his in-depth understanding of the canon, on the first page of The Narrative.
Douglass builds up moments of extreme pain and personal anguish which resonate with his readers in order to further amplify the horrors of slavery. He allows for the past tense of narration to be punctured by the present day. He tells us that the “hearing of the wild notes” of the slave songs “always depressed my spirit” yet his narration shifts into the present when he admits that “writing these lines, an expression of feeling has already found its way down my cheek.” The emotive power of the extract finds itself in the pain still felt by Douglass all these years later, something he is able to divulge through his intricate mastery of language. The text continually interacts with writing, such as when he admits that his “feet have been so cracked with frost, that the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes.” The brutality of his injuries are replaced here with a tool of Douglass’ emancipation, the pen. Douglass continues to reiterate the significance of the act of writing on his literal and intellectual freedom from the slaveholders. His torment over his position as a slave is illustrated in his “apostrophe to the moving multitude of ships.” The section has an accretive force through the repetition of ‘O,’ “O that I were free! O, that I were one of your gallant decks.” The ‘O’ appears to have no syntactic function and instead serves as an emphatic act. Douglass includes a series of emotional episodes to build the intensity of the misery of slavery, transmitting that to the reader.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. would come to describe Douglass as the “black master of the verbal arts,” and in many ways this is no better illustrated than through his self-fashioning done in the most fraught circumstances and in his clear understanding that his text is dependent on the events of his life. Douglass would continually revisit and revise extracts of his autobiography in order to examine different aspects of the black experience and his evolution. He divulges an awareness of the possibilities of writing and each interpretation they may hold. Acts of writing seem cleansing and cathartic to Douglass, as he grows and develops intellectually, he may come to change a passage from an earlier text. An example of a revisiting would be the whipping of Aunt Hester, which in the 1845 narrative, is presented as a primal scene, as though it were Douglass’ initiation to life as a slave, “I remember the first time I ever witnessed this horrible exhibition [whipping.]” Douglass falls from innocence to experience in a chapter which has thus far been about heritage and genealogy. This torture scene has an uncomfortable tone of voyeurism, “I hid myself in a closet,” in which Douglass’ sense of self appears altered due to his witnessing of the act. The voyeurism appears perverse and fetishizing in its depiction of Aunt Hester’s naked body, “stripped her from neck to waist, leaving her neck, shoulders, and back, entirely naked.” The description of Aunt Hester is dehumanizing and feeds into notions of the animalization of women. The torture scene has a sense of perverting feminine ideals as it takes place in a kitchen, a traditionally female environment. Douglass can only focus on his reaction to pain, suggesting a certain sense of irrepresentability in one’s pain. In doing so Douglass is also hinting towards the boundaries of language, as Virginia Woolf explains, “English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear has no words for the shiver or the headache.” Pain appears to resist language and actively destroy it, something Douglass appears acutely aware of and he must instead focus on his reaction to pain. He does so through projection as an adult writer, such as when he speaks of “the warm, red blood.” He cannot know the blood is warm and simply imagines.
In My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass would revisit the scene, he appears aware of the pornographic possibilities the scene previously held and there is a notable shift in tone. The scene has transformed from something primal to a steady and gradual initiation into slavery, “I happened to see this exhibition of his rage and cruelty towards Esther.” The voyeuristic feel is lost through the presentation of the event as chance. Douglass also changes Hester’s name to Esther, offering the scene a more Biblical feel. In this extract, Esther is also given a voice, something withheld from her in the 1845 narrative, “Have mercy; Oh! Have mercy, she cried,” whereas Anthony is silenced, contrasting with his viciousness in the earlier version. In losing the sense of voyeurism, Douglass has gained a sense of sentimentality. In many slave narratives of the time, scenes of torture became increasingly graphic due to audience demands , Douglass refuses to feed into notions of fan service, by rewriting the scene graphically to act as simply another literary device. Douglass’ ability to write offers him that power over a white audience, something he would never have previously had had.
Houston Baker Jr, took a different stance to Gates Jr, in which he argues that in gaining literacy, Douglass’s voice for “the unwritten self, once it is subjected to the linguistic codes, literary conventions, and audience expectations of a literate population, is perhaps never again the authentic voice of black American slavery.” Although literacy potentially creates a distance between Douglass and the illiterate slaves, in no way does this diminish the authenticity of his voice, as a black American slave, when recounting his experiences. In gaining literacy, he is able to bridge the gap between the black slaves and the white masters and enter the discourse surrounding slavery and is arguably able to speak for those who are unable to speak for themselves. Moreover, in a later revision of the scene in which Douglass fights back against Covey he divulges a stronger sense of unity between slaves, in which his voice arguably shifts from one in which he divulges personal experience to that of a shared experience between slaves. In the 1845 extract, Douglass portrays himself almost as a Christ like figure. The scene is tinged with religious imagery and we are told it “was a glorious resurrection from the tomb of slavery, to the heaven of freedom.” Yet he later comes to downplay the imagery of Christianity and instead appears to favour a communal focus, Douglass writes that Bill “affected ignorance [when Covey called for help]” and Caroline “was in no humor to take a hand in any such sport.” The freedom found in revolt is stressed through a group rebellion in which resistance and defiance is celebrated, “we were all in open rebellion.” It appears that Douglass is not simply writing for himself, but is writing for the community of black people still in the shackles of slavery.
Despite Douglass’ ability to interlink his voice and the voices of the multitude of oppressed black slaves, The Narrative was still heavily criticized for its apparent construction of events and lies surrounding the treatment of the slaves. A. C. C. Thompson wrote that the narrative was a “budget of falsehoods from beginning to end.” Thompson appears to be pointing to the aspects of the narrative which are exaggerated, or which Douglass could not have known, such as his grandmother’s death in Chapter 8. He imagines her demise in which “she stands – she sits – she staggers – she falls – she groans – she dies – and there are none of her children and grandchildren present, to wipe her wrinkled brow the cold sweat of death.” Douglass is able to capture a whole life in a single sentence. Clearly, he was not present and can simply describe what may have transpired yet arguably his leap of imagination is due to the familial bond he shares with his grandmother, a bond which may be widened to encompass the slave population. Thompson appears to desire an objective truth, and he makes no way for an emotional truth. The Narrative appears to be as much about the emotional scars left by slavery as simply the events of Douglass’ life. This tension between Douglass’ construction of events and critics’ desire for factual truth is hinted at in the novel’s preface. Early on Douglass’ admits of his ignorance surrounding some aspects of his life yet Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison offer assurance of the narrative’s credibility. Garrison writes that “nothing has been set down in malice, nothing exaggerated, nothing drawn from the imagination,” as an attempt to offer the narrative credibility. The insistence on the narrative’s factual truth may be genuine yet in some ways it suggests that for a black narrative to be palatable to a white audience it must remain framed by the white man. Douglass appears aware of the political necessity of having white abolitionists onside but in continually revising and revisiting his writings he is able to show how he has become more than an exhibition for the white abolitionist. Slaves are to no longer deliver facts and instead be integrated into the conversation. Douglass diverts the white man’s discourse in which “the diploma on [his] back” served merely as physical evidence to them, to seizing the power of the written word and placing the attention on his mind.
In acquiring the ability to read and write Douglass is able to untangle the way in which a dominant system can downplay or promote a set of values or specific discourse. The paper replaces Douglass’ need for sustenance as it offers him what has always been held beyond his reach. When Frederick Douglass departed from wholly fact-based writing and reportage of events, he was developing his literary skills. His literary descriptions, though perhaps a departure from actual fact, in no way diminished the strength and truth of the slave experience. In fact it made the horrors and misery of the slave experience all the more acute, more visceral, than merely a journalistic rendition of events and the facts The Narrative of Frederick Douglass has grown from more than simply an autobiography of a freed slave but to an authority on the abolitionist movement. In writing the narrative, Douglass was defined as more than his experiences while in slavery and puts forward a powerful plea to narrate his life as he sees fit.