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LITR 5431 Seminar in American Literature:
Romanticism lecture notes |
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Slave Narratives: Douglass, Jacobs
1a. Unlike a Poe story, slavery really happened as history, but slave narratives also became popular literature. Why? What’s inherently “Romantic” about the slave narrative? How does its structure or sequence resemble the romance narrative? (Sometimes Douglass is even classified as a Transcendentalist--Why?)
Romantic
6.7 city over town, anti romance (cf. Jacobs 6.22)
FD [10D.8] I felt as I never felt before. It was a glorious resurrection, from the tomb of slavery, to the heaven of freedom. My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place; and I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact.
FD 1.11blood-stained
gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery
11.23-29 New Bedford
1b. What's not Romantic? At what points do historical realities contradict Romanticism or disrupt the romance narrative?
11.13 leave escape unexplained
11.18 marriage ceremony
cf. Jacobs 21.1 gothic > attic
Gates, Introduction to Classic Slave Narratives
1 created a genre
inextricable link in Af Am tradition b/w literacy and freedom
60,000 slaves escaped?
over 100 wrote book-length narratives
b/w 1703 & 1944 (G W Carver), 6006 narrated
2 interviews, essays, books
indict both those who enslaved them and the metaphysical system
most enduring weapon at their disposal, the printing press
slave narratives came to resemble each other in content and formal shape [genre]
imitation and repetition
communal utterance, a collective tale (cultural narrative)
knew that al black slaves would be judged on this published evidence
emblem of every black person's potential for higher education and desire to be free
3 response to and refutation of claims that blacks could not write
how lost to us for such a dark period?
extraordinarily popular texts (cf. women's writing in 70s and on)
Solomon Northup's narrative
4 often direct extensions of their speeches
"startling incidents authenticated, far excelling fiction"
5 direct relation b/w reading and writing on one hand, and legal freedom on the other (cf. American Indians)
foundation upon which most subsequent Af Am fictional and nonfictional narrative forms are based
essentially polemical intentions
6 Douglass's elegant simplicity, compelling lucidity, literary complexity
opens itself to all classes of readers, adventure story, fine emotional detail
command of rhetorical figures
8 Equiano: overlapping of slave's arduous journey to freedom and simultaneous journey from orality to literacy
believable account of cultural life among the Igbo peoples
from African freedom, through European enslavement, to Anglican freedom
two distinct voices
9 Mary Prince, first woman slave narrative
sexual brutalization of the black woman slave
enforced severance of a mother's natural relation to her children and the lover of her choice
the daily price ofher bondage
sadism as commonly practiced by white women
10 slavery brutalized men and women, mistress and master, the enslaved and the free
differences b/w popular white myths or impressions about the feelings of lsaves and the actual feelings of the slaves themselves
11 Jacobs, "written by herself"
12 1981 Jean Fagan Yellin
fusion of two major literary forms: popular sentimental novel, slave narrative genre
graphically renders sexual aspect of economic exploitation in a manner unimaginable before
an object to be raped, bred, or abused
13 framing story w/ descriptions of strength, dignity, nobility of her family, esp. grandmother
literary female bonding in black tradition
"Rise up, ye women . . . "
chiasmus
4.2-4.5 chiasmus
metaphor
FD 5.9 white face, kindly emotions
FD 6.1 by trade a weaver [class]
FD 7.6-7 anti-slavery + Catholic emancipation
HJ 6.20 w/ jealous mistress
11.8 civil disobedience
27, 29 4, 7, 16 (limits), 25 (expansion), 27, 29
FD
[10D.8] I felt as I never felt before.
It was a glorious resurrection, from the
tomb of slavery, to the heaven of freedom. My
long-crushed spirit rose,
cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place; and I now resolved that,
however long I might remain a slave in form,
the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact.
FD 1.11blood-stained
gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery
11.23-29 New Bedford
styles of language cross cultural lines
so can law
FD 4.8, 4.9
HJ 1.7 cf. MF 18
MF 28 one law for all souls
MF 19 Private action
HJ 5.4 no shadow of law
5.9 grandmother's influence
so do human genes
one language, same human race
HJ 1.2, 1.3, 1.6; 14.1
FD
1.2-3
10H.6
Problem of discussing slavery, especially in a Confederate state like Texas (i. e., 150 years ago, some of us would be slaveholders or slaves)
Avoid good guys / bad guys approach; Fuller shows one way how
But always a difficult problem, so solutions are sometimes hard to imagine, and "good guys-bad guys" makes for an easier story.
Problem with slave narratives, though: some of us would have been the bad guys!
Fuller and Stanton: anti-slavery forces pitch in for women
Jacobs: combines both stories: she's a slave, and a woman slave . . .
Sojourner Truth's status as African + woman
compare Jacobs as "double minority" or "double outsider"
i. e., both women and people of color excluded from power
Jacobs comments about special burdens of woman slave
But "double minority" can be "alliance"
That is, the same dynamic that oppresses women and blacks
may lead abolition and women's rights to work together
Douglass notes
Preview LITR 4332 & 4333
Classic + representative: learn of other existences in
only voice that can tell whole truth of that experience; literature as
escape and education
Phillips letter [2] cf. Fuller
1.3 father
white man,
whispered
1.3 part mothers from children, blunt and destroy natural
affection
1.4 see me in the night
1.5 profitable as well as pleasurable
1.7 very different-looking class of people
1.11blood-stained
gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery
2.4 night as slave’s time
2.7, 2.11 double language
3.1-2 garden excludes slaves
3.5 never utter a word
3.7 penalty of telling the truth
4.2-4.5 chiasmus
5.3 evolutionary / capitalist metaphor
5.9 white face, kindly emotions
6.1 by trade a weaver [class]
6.5 literacy, white man’s power to enslave black man
6.6 chiasmus
6.7 city over town, anti-romance
7.2 slavery as injurious to her
7.3 slavery and education incompatible
7.5 bread of knowledge
7.6-7 anti-slavery + Catholic emancipation
7.8 slavers as
robbers, gone to
7.11 Irishmen
7.13 copy-book as board fence
8.2 all ranked together
8.9 brandy and slavery
8.11 knowledge to run away
9.2 Methodist
camp meeting, 2nd
Great Awakening
9.4 learn to read New Testament, broke up
9.7 Covey a professor of religion
10A.1 Covey as “the snake” + 2 power to deceive
10B.2 cf. Emerson
10C.1 chiasmus
10D.
10D.7 turning point in career as slave
10D.8 glorious resurrection from tomb of slavery
10E slaves’ holidays
10E.3 vicious dissipation
10F.2 no pretensions to religion; religion of the south
10G.1
10G.3 society of my fellow-slaves
10G.7 Patrick Henry, liberty or death
10H.5 cf. law enforcement
10H.6 yellow mulatto devil
10H.10 slave traders as pirates
10H.13 stone
prison to
10i.3 class / race conflict
10i.7 Mrs. Auld
10J.3 money to master
11.3 underground railroad
11.5 continued to think
11.7 camp meeting
11.8 civil disobedience
11.13 leave escape unexplained
11.18 marriage ceremony
11.22 change my name
11.23 absence of slaves > wealth
11.28 starting point of new existence
A.2 slaveholding religion
Jacobs notes
P3 Uncle Tom’s Cabin 10 years earlier
P3 gothic pit
Child
4 Indecorum
1.2
mulattoes, merchandise
1.3 maternal grandmother, daughter of a planter, freed,
returned
1.5 bake crackers at night
1.6 Anglo-Saxon ancestors
1.7 slave, being property, can hold no property (cf.
women)
1.12 future . . . what they would do with me
1.13 taught me to read and spell
3.6 happy free women
3.7 children torn from her
5.2 subdue = seduce?
5.3 vile monster, sacred commandments of nature
5.4 no shadow of law
5.5 beauty as greatest curse; admiration > degradation
5.7 silence or death
5.9 [private influence of grandmother;
5.11 two beautiful children playing together
6.1 [family dynamics disrupted]
6.3 literacy as trap
6.20 I was touched by her grief; incapable of feeling,
not very refined (class difference)
6.22 color of his soul! (color code)
6.22 rejoice to live in town; contrast supposedly
romantic plantation
6.23 whispers
6.26 romantic notions of a sunny clime
6.27 children as property, marketable as pigs
6.29 deadens moral sense in white women
7.3 laws no sanction to marriage
7.16 romantic codes of
honor
7.20-21 rights?
7.31 marriage no protection
7.32 get to the north
10.6 confuses all principles of morality
10.7 different standards
14.6 double minority
14.8 no claim to a name
14.11 genealogies of slavery (skeins metaphor)
14.12 chains metaphor
21.1 gothic? Attic
21.4 all must be done in darkness
21.5 verisimilitude x romanticism
41.9 domesticity—home of my own
Problem of discussing slavery, especially in a Confederate state like Texas (i. e., 150 years ago, some of us would be slaveholders or slaves)
Avoid good guys / bad guys approach; Fuller shows one way how
But always a difficult problem, so solutions are sometimes hard to imagine, and "good guys-bad guys" makes for an easier story.
Problem with slave narratives, though: some of us would have been the bad guys!
Fuller and Stanton: anti-slavery forces pitch in for women
Jacobs: combines both stories: she's a slave, and a woman slave . . .
Sojourner Truth's status as African + woman
compare Jacobs as "double minority" or "double outsider"
i. e., both women and people of color excluded from power
Jacobs comments about special burdens of woman slave
But "double minority" can be "alliance"
That is, the same dynamic that oppresses women and blacks
may lead abolition and women's rights to work together
