Data Bases • Custom Term Papers • Free Term Papers • Free Research Papers • Free Essays • Free Book Reports • Plagiarism? Links • Top 100 Term Paper Sites • Top 25 Essay Sites • Top 50 Essay Sites • Search 97,000 Papers @ DirectEssays.com • Search 101,000 Papers @ ExampleEssays.com • Search 90,000 Papers @ MegaEssays.com Free Essays • Term Paper Sites • Chuck III's Free Essays • Free College Essays • TermPaperSites.com • My Term Papers • Get Free Essays • Essay World • Planet Papers	Search Lots of Essays Back to Subjects - American History The Nature of Douglass8217s Narrative The Nature of Douglass8217s Narrative The Nature of Douglass’s Narrative Frederick Douglass wrote his autobiography the Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass to tell his story and to help the abolitionist’s cause. It provides a window into his world, which is that of a former slave and of a prominent speaker. Douglass was born a slave in Maryland in 1818; his exact birthday is unknown. Unlike most slaves he had a mistress, Sophia Auld, who taught him his letters when he was about 10 and that basis of knowledge allowed him to “steal literacy” over the years. Douglass was hired out to a slave breaker named Edward Covey in order to make him more subservient. In 1834 Frederick Douglass and Edward Covey had a battle which changed the course of Douglass’s life, and shaped him into a man who speaks and acts out against injustice. After Fredrick Douglass stood up to Covey he became free in sprit, if not in body, and vowed to allow no one to control his mind again. He escaped slavery and went to New York in 1839. His career as a speaker started in 1841 and in 1845 he published the Narrative. Although, those are some of the basic facts about his life but they do little to describe the man that he was, and what his first work says about himself and what he believed. The Narrative was written after he had spent a few years as a speaker going around telling his life’s story to abolitionist and therefore was in part rehearsed and also meant to be used as propaganda in the fight for equality. The book also serves as a historical source because it documents his voyage though slavery and the movement to end it. It is important when reading his autobiography to keep both views in mind. Many people have analyzed this complex work, Donald B. Gibson wrote about Douglass’s dual focus in his writing about how he had a public and social focus and a personal focus and private. The public and social focus was to correct the moral and political ills that slavery brought. While the personal and private focused on Douglass’s own thoughts, feelings, reactions, and emotions. The social focus was what presented the first twenty-one years of Douglass’s life in a way that allowed it to serve as a weapon for abolitionism. William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips recognized the public perspective, both of which wrote prefatory material to the Narrative. In their prefatory material they both wrote about how brave Douglass was for coming forward and telling his story and its affect on the fight to end slavery.# The autobiography was written before Douglass’s break with Garrison and his followers the Garrisonians so he did have some influcence on Douglass’s style. That influence can be seen in some of Douglass’s positions on churches in America, the U.S. Constitution, political parties, and personal complicity with slaveholding. Since Douglass did write the book himself the influence is no where near as strong as it was with the narratives that were “ghostwritten”. Garrison said, “I am confident that it is essentially true in all its statements; that nothing has been set down in malice, nothing exaggerated, nothing drawn from the imagination; that comes short of the reality, rather than overstates a single fact in regard to SLAVERY AS IT IS.”# Some earlier twentieth-century scholars such Vernon Loggins and Benjamin Quarles also commented similarly on the book. Loggins believed that Douglass’s “sole purpose in writing his autobiography was to produce antislavery propaganda.” Quarles addressed whether Douglass’s facts can be trusted, stressed the issue of subjectivity and the expression of personal vision: “Douglass’ treatment of slavery in the Narrative may be almost as much the revelation of a personality as it is the description of an institution.” Frederick Douglass had the political perspective in mind when in the final paragraph he wrote, “From that time [the time of his first major oration] until now; I have been engaged in pleading the cause of my brethren.” Gibson did not believe that it was not a surprise that the public dimension should call attention to itself since every word of the Narrative related to it.# Douglass was heavily engaged in the fight to end slavery; the abolitionist crusade endowed Douglass with moral justification similar to that which evangelicals had previously used.# The private dimension of the Narrative contained Douglass’s specific and personal response to and perceptions of his experiences. Douglass, like every other human being, is a unique person he was an unusually intelligent and talented man who related to experiences in his own way. For example, lots of slaves were separated from their mothers at an early age, but that it happened specifically to Douglass and its meaning was made clear to the audience by his articulation of that fact. Throughout the autobiography personal experiences of slavery were used to lend authority to whatever observations or judgments were being made about the abstraction “slavery”. Douglass used personal experiences even when it was not clear whether he witnessed an event or heard of it. Two examples were his wife’s cousin’s killing or the old man who was killed while fishing for oysters. The fact that Douglass perceived them as actual lends them the weight of fact. Most of the events in the Narrative are shown as direct experienced. That opened the door for debate about how factual the work is however the two focuses work together to deal with the problem. “In one sense the two perspectives are perpetually at war; in another they work together, one supporting and lending authority and significance to the other.” The first chapter revealed the relation between the perspectives, a relationship that was continued until the end where they are melded into one. Throughout the chapter and in fact the whole book Douglass took a statement of fact about his life and than expanded it to a statement about the evil of slavery and its affects on the human sprit. The practice was two-fold; it sustained the balance between the public and private focus and helped ground the abstractions of the evils of slavery to one person in the hope of rendering the argument more powerful. Douglass was so engaged in keeping the balance and fighting for an end the slavery that he never allowed his story to become just an adventure story or to ever let the plot govern his story. # White abolitionists wanted factually correct slave memoirs to be written. The narratives were used to give northern whites a comprehensive picture of a slave’s life. “Accompanying the commonly rehearsed themes of mistreatment were emphatic portraits of stable black families, presided over by resourceful men and women who acquired skills, built institutions, and satisfied material needs on their own.” Historians have confirmed the accuracy of the narratives, using them with other sources of data to help reconstruction of the black culture of American slavery.# Douglass knew his part in helping to end slavery in fact he often pointed out that a black person particularly a former slave had the most reason to call for an end to it. He had a right to say what he wished and how he wished to say it because he knew first hand what it was like to belong to someone and to suffer. Everything he said and wrote was to help fight “the cause” in one way or another. ?This is an example of the kind of fliers that were printed up and passed out by northern abolitionist. It shows how facts were presented in a way to make the point that slavery should be ended. The way that Fredrick Douglass was made to look in both clothes and actions puts all the attention on the public grabbing idea of a dangerous slave eccape. Douglass himself put more of an infucne on his mental escape them his phyical. Pictures like this were used while Douglass was lecturing and to help sell his autobiography. They served to grab the attention of whites to shock them into action with words like “His Brothers in Bonds” and “A Graduate from the Peculiar Institution”. That is just an example of how as a speaker, writer and public figure Douglass functioned as a abolitionist. Douglass’s autobiography was part of a growing movement by blacks in America. When taken as a group slave narratives can be considered as a literary genre for several reasons. They were united by the common goal of pointing out the evils of slavery and fighting against the antebellum notion of black inferiority. In the narratives, there were striking similarity of language, simple and often dramatic accounts of personal events, strong revelation of the character of “ordinary” and “extraordinary” men and women, and other submerged elements of protest literature.# Northern whites often helped slaves and former slaves and the whites encouraged them to speak and writing about their experiences with slavery however the whites had their own agenda in mind. “The antislavery movement did not provide them a forum for their speaking and writing just so they could express themselves. Slave narratives were solicited and published to promote the great social aim of abolitionism, not the personal needs of the individual.”# David W. Blight offered another theory on the Narrative he, along with others, believed it to be a jeremiad. The jeremiad is one of America’s oldest literary traditions it’s a kind of political sermon and a literary form. It functioned as a lamentation and an optimistic statement of the America myth of its own mission. Blight said “Douglass’s burning contempt for “pious slaveholders” was not merely abolitionist propaganda, as it is too often portrayed. It was the fuel, the bitterly ironic energy of a spiritual autobiography.”# When reading Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass it is important to take in to account the time period in which it was written, who the author was and their background, and the purpose that the work was written for. Douglass was a slave and an abolitionist who wrote about his life for two reasons, to give the facts and to convince people that slavery was wrong. The way he wrote both parts are intertwined so that they compliment and support each other it exist as a work of abolitionist propaganda and as an historical source. Bibliography: Bibliography Andrews, William L., To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Douglass, Fredrick, Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass: An American Slave, ed. David Blight. New York: St. Martins, 1993. Gibson, Donald B., Reconciling Public and Private in Frederick Douglass’ Narrative, Rutgers University. Polsky, Milton. The American Slave Narrative: Dramatic Resource Material for the Classroom. Hunter College of CUNY. Stewart, James Brewer, Holy Warriors The Abolitionists and American Slavery. New York: Hill and Wang, 1976. Word Count: 1723
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