Chris Wissel

The Slave Narrative as Abolitionist Romance

The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is an astonishing piece of work, and as highly affecting today as it was when it was published in 1845. Almost twenty years prior to the abolition of slavery, Douglass’s voice is one of strength and oratorical confidence. While the work is highly realistic, it is also romantic in nature. I want to show how the Romantic elements serve to create the highest possible effect for abolitionism.

             Prior to Frederick Douglass’s entrance in to the forum of Abolitionism, it was clearly recognized that blacks needed to speak with their own voices. But as Alex Bontemps illustrates in his book The Punished Self, “so deafening has the silence (and silencing) of black voices been to historians of slavery in American that it has virtually drowned out. . . . the subjectivity of blacks and blacks as subjects in their own right” (Bontemps 4). Asserting an alternative view of African American slaves proved to be difficult, as millions of Negro slaves have found themselves unrepresented in any authentic form.

            David Walker, a prominent abolitionist, revolutionary, and writer for African American publications, wrote in his famous Appeal, In Four Articles, first published in 1828, that the full story of American history would only be told when historians of color would rise up and present the crimes of the nation, and wrote that only blacks could speak for blacks. Only with the voices of those who have experienced the trials of such an institution are qualified to speak about its nature (Bruce 182). In this way, blacks who speak about their own experiences with slavery are able to take a stance of moral superiority.

            The success of Frederick Douglas’ work, outside of his passion and eloquence, came from the idea that it was self-written. As Dickson Bruce states in the Origins of African American Literature 1680-1865, the unique role of African Americans in the abolitionist movement allowed for a moral superiority, as the audience could see the voice as one of authority, experience, and moral standing (Bruce 227). As someone of profound intelligence and oratory abilities, Frederick Douglass could command the kind of respect capable of energizing the movement.

Furthermore, his work excited the passions of the rest of the movement in a very Romantic way. The reader cannot help but go with him on his physical and mental journey across the haunted spaces of the slave’s life. Through the content and scope of his narrative, Douglas showed his audience how to experience the desire and loss of his past, and rise above the centuries of oppressive institutions designed to turn him into a beast. He educated them how to use his intellect to passionately fight for identity, a task willing to risk death for a chance to self-invent. Granted, the rules of rhetoric and reality-based concepts affected a sound argument and a clear, concise tone, but that was merely an introduction to Douglass’s life. The true power to overcome the instructional oppression inherent in slavery lay in his ability to express himself through these aspects of Romanticism.

The entire form of the slave narrative is a genre that can be compared to the romance. While the content is radically different, there are many common elements in the structure. While the reality of Douglass’s experiences is anything but a romance, his story shares many things with the genre. Some of a romance’s characteristics are a journey and a separation culminating in a need to rescue someone. The action can be a transformation of the self, or a reinvention of social class, leading to transcendence. The characters in a romance are also moral absolutes, representing good and evil (Lit 4533: Tragedy, White online).

For the slave narratives, the romantic journey is both mental and physical. As a slave, the journey is a constant theme, as family members are separated, and each person is forced to travel any distance as property, left to the whims of economics and the slaveholder’s desires. The transcendence of this travail is freedom, causing a second set of journeys. First, there is the mental journey, which is one of self-identity and resolution for freedom. This desire leads to a very real, very hazardous physical journey. The author must rescue himself or find his spirit crushed and his will to live perish under unending and systematic dehumanization.

The narrative also creates a justified moral superiority that speaks of the relationship between slave and master as elements of good and evil. The slaveholder, in participation with such an institution, cannot be anything but evil. The escaped slave, by contrast, “receives a moral superiority based on his increasing autonomy of action and self-representation that encompassed more than the processes of mutual authentication” (Bruce 250).

As a slave, Douglass’s experiences introduce the scope of the slaveholder’s oppression:

I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason (Douglas 133).

As the scope of the narrative shows, Douglas works hard to show how the oppression is not just circumstantial, but an active form of control that must be overcome. In part, this was due to the rapid increase in number of black slaves in the south, creating a need for active discrimination and cruelty to instill an unambiguous appearance of complete subservience (Bontemps 55). Douglas himself recalls the need to suppress the truth about slaveholding masters, who would go so far as to plant spies to learn of any discontent (43).

            To overcome this, Douglas creates a need to invent a self that is truly his, outside of the active oppression around him. This Romantic process began early in his life. His first glimmer of understanding regarding his slavery was a romantic dream, as opposed to the realities of beatings or forced labor. As he says, the feeling came from the songs of his fellow slaves. “Those songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathies for my brethren in bonds (37). He is also quick to state that these songs have also serves as justification for how happy slaves are, working in the fields – this could not be further from the truth. By illustrating his desire for freedom with the sadness of song, he shows that black slaves had their own voices, carrying the yearning for romantic self-invention, and the stark affliction of desire and loss capable in the emotive capacities of song, or perhaps poetry.

            Another aspect of Douglass’s desire for self-invention is his earnest campaign to learn to read and write. Chronicled in mostly chapter six and seven, this is a Romantic vision shared by many slaves. As Heather Williams says in her book Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom, “access to the written word, whether scriptural or political, revealed a world beyond bondage in which African Americans could imagine themselves free to think and behave as they choose” (7). This sense of freedom allowed slaves to reach a state of romantic transcendence free from reality’s grasp, at least for a little while. Douglass himself saw the power of literacy as a pathway to freedom, and desired the skill as much as the rest of the institution’s victims.

Unfortunately, Douglass learned early on that reading was to be forbidden, and in many cases, outlawed. Williams says that cognizant of the revolutionary potential of black literacy, white elites enacted laws in slave states to proscribe teaching. . . to read or write” (13). Faced with such laws, Douglass and his fellow slaves had to employ creative tactics, struggling to loosen their bonds through intellectual might. In Douglass’s experience, he employed the white youth, trading bread and kindnesses for a quick reading lesson in the streets (65). This romantic subterfuge was elegant, and allowed Douglass to develop his reading and writing skills to a high capacity.

            In Douglass’s experience, learning to read and write meant rebelling against the cultural norms of the slave’s life. The willingness to gain the efficacy of literacy meant inventing spaces where they had some measure of control. Many slaves hid spelling books under their hats at all times, showing a readiness to engage in self-invention whenever the opportunity arose. Outside the cities, slave attended “pit schools,” digging large holes in the ground and covering the top with bushes and vines (Williams 20). All of these practices were illegal, bearing the consequence of corporal punishment, and sometimes death.

            Yet, despite these negative consequences, Douglass and his fellow slaves found that reading inflamed his passion for freedom as much as his master’s forbade it. In literacy, Douglass found a voice for his afflictions, and used that literacy to undergo a journey towards full self-expression. This journey was a romantic response to the reality in which he found himself, projecting to a future period in his life where he might know real freedom.

Slaveholders, on the other hand, also justified their practices by considering blacks to be inferior mentally and socially. John Patrick Daly’s illustrated many of the slaveholder’s justifications for slavery in When Slavery Was Called Freedom, as whites had “long used negative stereotypes of blacks to reinforce their own self-image and self-esteem.” In this way, blacks became the locus of generalized debasement, perpetuating the myths of African Americans a brutish, unintelligent, and incapable of handling the rigors of freedom (Daly 83). In many cases, Douglas shows how these stereotypes were reinforced during the Christmas holidays, by systematically disgusting slaves with freedom. Slaveholders would provide large amounts of whiskey during the time off, and make attempts to keep the slaves as drunk and debauched as possible. In this way, the idea of returning to the fields after the New Year was almost seen as a relief (107).

Faced with such harsh prejudices and attempts to drag him down to a more manageable morality, Douglass had to use romance to envision a future where his tendency was upward (116). Instead of a lifetime of imagined vistas, he had to make that romantic vision manifest in physical reality. He had to be free. Using the literacy he had gained in rebellion, he began to conceive the preparations for his transformative journey from slavery to freedom. During this time, he met with his fellows, conspired and dreamed about our hopes, fearful of the consequences of getting caught:

On the one hand stood slavery, a stern reality, glaring frightfully upon us . . . on the other hand, away back in the dim distance, under the flickering light of the North Star, stood a doubtful freedom – half frozen - beckoning us to come and share its hospitality (118).

To seek freedom with such little chance of success is romantic, and a direct denial of the African American identity as a brutish person incapable of bravery, intellect, and hope.

            In addition, it also serves the narrative as an example of the intense desire for freedom, and the constant loss associated with slavery. Nothing can evidence this loss more than Douglass’s separation from his mother.  He speculates that he was taken away from his mother as early as 12 months of age, a common practice among slaveholders, meant to hinder the development of affection toward the new slave’s family ties (Douglass 24). Orlando Patterson elaborated further on this practice, calling it social death. He says that from a structural viewpoint, slavery is composed of several transitional phases, where he is desocialized and depersonalized (38). The goal of slaveholder’s was to keep the African American as a dependant entity, one that cannot stand alone, and cannot want a social existence outside of the master’s.

            For Douglass, being parentless and cast to the winds of his master’s whims was a loss that he was not meant to feel. He says himself that he considered the loss of his mother the way he would a stranger (25). However, as a general tactic of debasement, the process was still ineffective, only serving to accentuate the ties Douglass felt with his fellow slaves. In a sense, instead of the destruction of his sentiment forward family, Douglass responded romantically by creating his own extended family in his fellow slaves. “We were linked and interlinked with each other. I loved them with a love stronger than any thing I have experienced since. (115)” For slaves, family ties are forged outside of blood, held together by common experience, and the desire to create love where none previously existed.

            For Douglass, and his fellow slaves in bondage, self-invention never comes without loss. One of the most powerful deterrents in the pursuit of freedom is its associated loneliness:

The thought of leaving my friends was decidedly the most painful thought with which I had to contend. The love of them was my tender point, and shook my decision more than all things else (Douglass 142).

In this sense, to pursue freedom means recasting the self into certain aspects of the Byronic hero. For the slave, fulfilling desire cannot come without personal loss, and a haunted fear that cut oneself from the rest of the world, and Douglass felt it greatly. He was alone in the north, in a strange country, staying in the shadows for fear of being caught, free yes, but also separate and unestablished (144).

             In addition to this touch of self-haunted darkness, Douglass uses several passages in the narrative to plays upon gothic elements as well. Some of the harshest of these are the passages that deal with his own whippings and beatings, and of those he once knew. These instances are not only realistic depictions of his experiences; they also serve to recast the dual nature of good and evil in terms of gothic romanticism. For example, in the first chapter he graphically describes two examples of severe beatings he remembered from childhood.

            The gothic in romantic literature suggests haunted mental spaces, and Douglass uses these tactics to set a tone for the rest of the book. The specter of death loomed constantly over his servitude. On the plantation, there was a continued sense of macabre decay. Douglas shows that going hungry from lack of food, or subsisting within the ramshackle patchwork of poor shelter and worn clothing shows how the sense of abject dissolution existed around him at all times. (33) The pain endured by his Aunt, for example, was something that haunted him. He says that he “shall never forget while he remembers any such thing” (30) Instead of a haunted physical space, such as a house or a forest, we also have a mental space, the dark specter of his childhood, a constant fear of unwarranted, violent punishment.

The interplay of white and black is also juxtaposed in these early, graphic passages, where the symbols of good and evil are reversed. White, once a symbol of good and purity, is perverted by the act of being a slaveowner. Black, once thought of as evil, is now a victim, an innocent whose persecutions are endless. Another color in the gothic style, red, is prominent in the descriptions as well. In almost every case, Douglass makes a point to describe how the blood flowed. He even goes so far as to consider the witnessing of the event a “blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery” (28), further accentuating the kinds of demonic images found in the gothic. “Slavery will pervert master and mistress into monsters of cupidity and power-madness and reduce their servant to a nearly helpless object of exploitation and cruelty” (Andrews 64). It is as if the red blood is a binding tie, the ultimate symbol of violence that held a slave in the power of the slaveholder. Black and white, baptized in red blood, cast into their respective roles by the institution’s inhumanities.

Douglass confirms this himself in his narrative, when he discusses the effect slave owning had on Mrs. Auld, a person that Douglass describes at first as having the kindest heart and warmest feelings (57). She was even the one who began his desire for literacy, teaching him ABCs and giving him access to books. Unfortunately, the institution of slavery prevented the wholesome relationship to continue, and “slavery proved as be as injurious to her as it was to me” (63). She began to accede to her husband’s wishes, preventing Douglass from reading. Soon after, she was even more zealous, watching him endlessly, and growing extremely angry at the first sight of him with a newspaper or book (64). This transition from saint to demon only highlighted the disastrous effect of slavery and the juxtaposed nature of white and black. Perversity and innocence are always reversed through the use of such a blood-letting institution.

Still, there was more romance in these gothic symbols, namely, in Douglass’s passion to be free. Just as the interplay of black and white served to keep him in bondage, it also affected his increased desire. Slavery was red as both a covenant of bloodshed, but also as an stoker of anger. As Douglas grew to manhood, this moral outrage boiled over as near madness, a longing for self-definition, and finally an active, physical rebellion. When he fought his slave master Mr. Covey in Chapter Ten, an act he says “rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood” (103). Blood was shed again, but this time, it was of Douglass’s own volition. For a few moments, the color symbols, and the link between them, changed. White became a symbol of exposed weakness preying on the sanction of the victim, and black became powerful, and capable of determining its own fate. With that sense of empowerment, Douglass felt resurrected, just as he resolved that he would rather die than be whipped again in his life.

This rare moment of exultation also crystallizes the ultimate desire to self-invent, as Douglass was wiling to give up his own life for its continued pursuit. Before describing the incident with Mr. Covey, Douglass prefaced the episode by stating, “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man” (97). From that moment onward, he was filled with the hope of freedom, using his literacy and his creative capacity to eventually affect his own freedom.

 As a moment of rebellion, Douglass’s scene with Mr. Covey typifies many aspects of America’s own Declaration of Independence. In Slavery and the Literary Imagination, James Olney makes a very poignant comparison between that document, and the narrative of Frederick Douglass. Benjamin Franklin, like Douglass, was a self-made man, and eventually a founding father of the United States. Douglass, according to Olney, was also self-made, achieving both literacy and oratorical stature in an environment where such actions were never intended (4).

Douglass’s power to inspire also had many of the same effects as our nation’s romantic Declaration of Independence. The Declaration served to inspire men of a similar ilk “to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed . . . it is their duty to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security” (Norton 338). Where the Declaration existed to give voice to a nation that did not exist, Frederick’s narrative gives voice to an oppressed people who were not seen. Both use the romance of self-invention to execute an alterative vision for their futures.

Douglass is a man of incredible statue and sense of self worth. His ability to overcome incredible odds and survive a life of slavery with his mind and spirit intact is a testament to his will and intelligence. He is a titanic figure in the abolitionist movement, serving as a voice of authenticity and authority. His ability to self-invent is an example of romanticism made flesh. His ability to inform and inspire the reader to action is powerful and emotional. He is not only an example of abolitionism, human rights, and the power to overcome with intellect and determination; he is also a figure capable of expressing the core qualities of romance inherent in the human spirit.