• 1 Among the many subsequent African American texts which have been described as being the literary de (...)

3Slave narratives have been described as the urtext of African-American literature, that is to say the primal text of African-American literature (Depardieu, 124).1 Throughout the nineteenth century, autobiographies of fugitive or former slaves dominated the African-American narrative tradition. Approximately sixty-five American slave narratives were published in book or pamphlet form before 1865 (Andrews, 1993, 78). Owing to the popularity of the genre, slave narratives were translated into different languages. Specific characteristics made the genre very successful and attractive to nineteenth century readers. The vertical movement from the south to the north, which symbolized the revival from the pits of Hell to the Garden of Eden, the upward elevation from the debased state of subservience to the status of a freeman, the progress from the subhuman animal-like condition to humanity, as well as the transition from childhood to manhood are, among other themes, paradigmatic motifs to be found in slave narratives.

• 2 Douglass sold 5, 000 copies in the first four months and 30,000 copies between 1845 and 1860.

4Unsurprisingly, Douglass’s and Brown’s narratives, which have been hailed by scholars as seminal fugitive slave autobiographies, share many of these themes. Biographic similarities between the authors could account for this thematic communality. Frederick Douglass was born in Maryland in 1818 and escaped from slavery when he was twenty years old. When his narrative was published, in 1845, it was an immediate success. The narrative went through nine British editions in its first two years (Lee, 10).2 As to Williams Wells Brown, he was born in Kentucky in 1814. He escaped from slavery at the age of nineteen in 1834. In 1847, two years after Douglass, Brown published his own narrative, which was very successful. It reached its ninth American and British edition before 1850 (Brown & Andrews, 3-4). Douglass’s and Brown’s narratives were published by the Anti-Slavery Office of Boston under the supervision of William Lloyd Garrison, the president of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS). Before becoming authors, Douglass and Brown had extensive experience as orators. As lecturers for the AASS, they both gained wide notoriety by travelling all over the United States and to Europe in the context of abolitionist circuit tours. Douglass had already acquired oratory skills during bondage by joining a secret debating society club with some friends. Similarly, several years before lecturing for the AASS, Brown had become proficient in public speaking by organizing a temperance society in Buffalo (Farrison, 1948, 29).

• 3 As the Quaker friend who helped William Wells Brown in his escape put it: " Since thee has got out (...)

6The first element which immediately strikes the reader is the syntactic similarity of the titles. We are given the slave’s first and last name, his nationality, his legal status which is followed by the mention “written by himself.” For Douglas and Brown, the very act of signing their narratives with a first and last name was an act of existential affirmation and resistance, as well as a symbol of their transition from a state of minority to manhood.3 Douglass’s name underwent several changes on his path from slavery to freedom. He changed his name from Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey to Frederick Bailey, then to Frederick Johnson before finally settling for Frederick Douglass (Douglass, 1845, 111-112). As a child, Brown’s mother was forced to change her son’s name from William to Sandford when her master’s white nephew, who was also called William, came to live in the household. Brown resisted this name change and received several whippings for his obstinacy to cling to his former name. While he was still enslaved, Brown recalls how he “was not only hunting for [his] liberty, but also hunting for a name […]” (Brown, 1847, 97-98). After his escape, Brown eventually re-appropriated his first name William. He moreover adopted as a middle and last name, Wells Brown, the name of the Quaker who helped him in his flight (Brown, 1847, 105-106).

• 4 The formula “An American Slave” replaced “A Fugitive Slave” in Brown’s 1849 British edition.

7Both narratives mention the author’s legal status in their title. By so doing, abolitionists primarily sought to underscore the fact that these accounts were the literary undertakings of slaves who were supposed to be illiterate. Moreover, as these narratives were advertised as being first-hand testimonies of slavery, the author’s enslaved status aroused the public’s curiosity. In Brown’s title, the adjective “fugitive” adds to the clandestinity of the whole enterprise. In Douglass’s case, laying emphasis on his nationality served several purposes.4 First, this indication pointed to the specificity of American slavery as opposed to slavery practiced in other countries. Secondly, the emphasis on the slave’s Americanness has to be analyzed against the backdrop of the colonization movement which was gaining ground in the United States. Since 1819, the American Colonization Society had been striving to send emancipated slaves and free people of color to the newly founded colony of Liberia. However, Garrison and the AASS were adamantly opposed to the colonization scheme which they found preposterous (Garrison). Indeed, abolitionists considered slaves and free people of color as being, first and foremost, Americans, despite their African origins. Finally, the use of the indefinite article “a” or “an” before the slave status of the author proved very judicious. It conveys the idea of indeterminacy. Linguistically speaking, the fugitive or American slave here is the representative of the notional class of slaves. Wisely enough, the indefinite article also plays on its other semantic value, namely the slave’s uniqueness and individuality.

• 5 Douglass’s narrative was attacked by slavery’s apologists who claimed it had been ghostwritten by w (...)

8The formula “written by himself” might seem redundant as the narrative was supposed to be an autobiography. It served several purposes. Primarily, to highlight the slaves’ mastery of literacy at a time when bondsmen were forbidden to read and write. It also stressed the fact that the slave, as the author of the narrative, claimed its paternity. By the same token, such an indication was meant to discard any accusation as to the narrative having been the work of a white abolitionist ghostwriter.5 Finally, by stressing the absence of an external mediator, even that of a white scribe, the formula partook in conferring greater authenticity to the information found in the narrative.

• 6 William Wells Brown chose lines from William Cowper as the epigraph to his narrative.

13Although the genre served as a template for subsequent literary works, slave narratives were the progeny of former or contemporary literary movements. The genre emerged between 1840 and 1860 at the time when the Romantic Movement in American literature was in its most influential phase. Slave narratives with their celebration of selfhood corresponded to romantic notions of individualism and independence (Andrews Representation, 78).6 The teleology of slave narratives centered on the moment of freedom (Mccarthy & Doughton, 7). In Douglass’s third paragraph we learn in passing that he “ran away” (Douglass, 1845, 2). However, this proleptic statement does not ruin any suspense in that the reader already knows that the narrator managed to escape. If slave narratives used the escape motif as a structuring device, the emphasis was not necessarily placed on the act of flight itself but rather on the personal development process which led to freedom (Sinanhan, 71). Thus, understandably enough, slave narratives have been compared to Bildungsromans in which a character evolves to become a better person, whilst also serving as an edifying model for the readers (Smith, 33). In both opening chapters, the narrators experience the loss of their innocence and are made aware of their servile status. There is a religious subtext to this loss of innocence as it may be equated to a form of fall which precedes a life of suffering. The reader witnesses the slave narrator’s long and difficult progress which will eventually lead him to freedom, to a New Jerusalem in the north (Foster, 84-85).

• 7 The Liberator, 30 May 1845.

15Slave narratives were intended to be inspirational and motivational (Ženíšek, 205). Their overall plot structure resembles melodrama with “vivid, artfully staged episodes” which seek to “draw tears, shock, and anger from the reader” (Matlack, 20). The stress placed on the atrocities of slavery was intended to move the reader emotionally as well as physically, that is to say to make him take action. The review of Douglass’s narrative which appeared in The Liberator clearly illustrates how slave accounts were vested with performative power. According to the reviewer, if the narrative did not “open the eyes of this people, they must be petrified into eternal sleep.”7 The call for the public’s reaction sometimes took the form of a plea. In Brown’s preface, J. C. Hattaway addresses the reader by asking him the following questions: “Reader, are you an Abolitionist? What have you done for the slave?”(Brown, 1847, ix).

• 8 Brown became a public lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1847. However, he had alrea (...)

16In the opening scene to his narrative, Douglass laments the lack of information and the mystery which shrouded his early life. Interestingly enough, by stepping into the limelight, Douglass, and, later on, Brown, two slaves who had been purposefully left in the dark by their masters, were to shed light on the institution of slavery and enlighten their white audiences.8

• 9 In Douglass’s preface, Garrison describes him as “one of the most efficient advocates of the slave (...)
• 10 Capitalized in the original.
• 11 This echoes DuBois’ forethought in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) in which he tells the reader that (...)
• 12 American abolitionists were merely perfecting the methods which their British counterparts had used (...)

18Hence, abolitionists knew all too well that their message would be more powerful if it were voiced by a slave. Yet, the first representative of the colored population that Garrison was able to find was a free black named Charles Lenox Remond. For many years Remond toured the country as a public lecturer with Garrison. However, Garrison knew that only an eloquent slave could deal a “stunning blow” on the institution of slavery by giving a first-hand account of the ordeals he had been through (Douglass, 1845, vi; xi). This longing for a black orator was finally satisfied when, in August 1841, Garrison was introduced to Frederick Douglass at an antislavery convention in Nantucket. Thereafter, the abolition campaign would gain significant momentum as a slave representative had been found (Douglass, 1845, iii).9 In his introductory letter to Douglass’s narrative, Wendell Phillips praised the fact that thanks to the fugitive slave, Americans would finally be able to hear the other side of the story as they had “been left long enough to gather character of slavery from the involuntary evidence of the masters” (Douglass, 1845, xxi). Likewise, in Brown’s preface, Hattaway informs the reader that “[f]ew persons have had greater facilities for becoming acquainted with slavery, in all its horrible aspects, than WILLIAM W. BROWN.”10 Indeed, prefiguring W.E.B Dubois’ later veil, Brown had “been behind the curtain” (Brown, 1847, viii).11 By producing first-hand evidence of the inhumanity of slavery, abolitionists could now consistently oppose the arguments put forward by slaveholders.12 Consequently, slave narratives carefully gave precise historical and geographical details in order to fend off any critiques as to the veracity of the account. Thus, Garrison insists on the fact that Douglass “disclosed the place of his birth, the names of those who claimed ownership in his body and soul, and the names also of those who committed the crimes which he has alleged against them.” Hence, “his statements” could easily be “disproved” if they were “untrue” (Douglass, 1845, xvii).

• 13 As Costronovo posits: “the slave’s accomplishments were not viewed as his own property, but as the (...)

19Lecturing for the AASS was not an easy task. Due to the racism that was prevalent in the north, slave lecturers sometimes faced a hostile audience (Graham, 4). In many lecture halls, Douglass and Brown were physically abused and booed off stage (Douglass, 1881, 234; Patsy, 98-99; Farrison, 15; Levine Martin Delany, 19). Therefore, along with fighting against slavery, abolitionists also had to combat racial prejudice in the north. By having the story told by an articulate and intelligent black orator/narrator, abolitionists sought to debunk rationales of inferiority based on race. Despite these efforts, white audiences remained skeptical. Soon enough, Douglass was denounced to be an impostor who had never been “south of Mason and Dixon’s line” (Douglass, 1855, 362). White audiences were so dumbfounded by Brown’s eloquence, that some journalists attributed it to a form of ventriloquism. Newspapers also imputed his rhetorical skills to his mixed-race ancestry (Castronovo, 211).13 Notwithstanding, abolitionists deemed Brown and Douglass to be good slave representatives because their experience of bondage had placed them in different jobs, whether it was as a domestic servant, a skilled slave, or a field hand.

• 14 As slave narratives became a very popular genre some publishers sought to make profits out it (Goul (...)

21Before fugitive slave lecturers took the floor, a white chairman made introductory remarks in which he generally assured an eager audience that this “chattel”, this “piece of southern property” could speak (Douglass, 1881, 218). Quite analogously, slave narratives were introduced by a preface penned by abolitionists. These introductory remarks, or the preface, served to authenticate the lecture, or narrative, which was to follow. In the case of narratives, the authenticating preface was also a means to differentiate them from fictionalized slave biographies which were very popular at the time.14 These prefatory remarks also vouched for the slave’s honesty and good character. Paradoxically enough, by prefacing the narratives, white abolitionists were in fact authorizing the account, thereby placing the slave author in a subordinate position. To what extent were Brown’s and Douglass’s narratives free from major editorial tampering and intrusion?

• 15 As Marie Jeanne Rossignol and Claire Parfait have noted, it is impossible to ascertain to what exte (...)

22Given the scarcity of sources, the question of editorial intrusion in Douglass’s and Brown’s narratives remains a matter of debate. Nevertheless, a number of objective elements seem to indicate that Douglass’s and Brown’s abolitionist sponsors influenced the content of their narratives. In Brown’s preface, without being specific, Edmund Quincy informs the reader that he suggested “a few curtailments” to the account (Brown, 1847, vi).15 We also have an inkling that some editing process occurred when Wendell Phillips tells us the following about Douglass’s narrative: “In reading your life, no one can say that we have unfairly picked out some rare specimens of cruelty” (Douglass, 1845, xxii). If Phillips’s statement could be interpreted as a guarantee that white abolitionists did not alter the original manuscript in order to serve their agenda, the verb “pick” evidently suggests that some selection was made and that some events were deliberately left out while others were purposefully retained. Moreover, the personal pronoun “we” reinforces the idea that the editorial process was a collegial enterprise. Had Douglass benefitted from full editorial decisionary power Phillip’s sentence would have read: “in reading your life, no one can say you have unfairly picked out […]”. Could it then be argued that Douglass and Brown were only subject to mild editorial pressure and that their narratives anticipated the requirements of the abolitionist agenda?

• 16 Concerning the constraints placed on Douglass’s first narrative, see Robert S. Levine and Ashraf Ru (...)

23It seems Douglass and Brown were bridled in their expression.16 In his second autobiography published in 1855, Douglass gave an account of the period that preceded the publication of his 1845 narrative. While describing his experience as a lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, he recounted one leading abolitionist, John Collins, telling him “give us the facts […] we will take care of the philosophy” (Douglass, 1855, 361). Abolitionists were concerned that Douglass’s rhetorical flourishes would lead the public to doubt that he had ever been a slave. Therefore, Collins advised him that it was “better [to] have a little of that plantation speech than not” and added that it was not “best that [he] seem[ed] so learned” (Douglass, 1855, 362). In the same fashion, just as Douglass was about to step on stage to deliver his lectures, Garrison would whisper to him: “Tell your story, Frederick”. However, the fugitive slave lecturer was finding it hard to comply to the injunction as he “was now reading and thinking” and “[n]ew views of the subject” of slavery “were presented to [his] mind” (Douglass, 1855, 361-362). Evidently, abolitionists needed a slave representative who would conform to their political agenda, not a rebel. Thus, any personal outburst, or even comment, from the fugitive slave was proscribed.

• 17 Namely, James Williams’s, Frederick Douglass’s and William Wells Brown’s narratives. The AASS finan (...)
• 18 For instance, Douglass accepted an annual salary of $450, which is the equivalent to $34, 000 in to (...)
• 19 In 1845, Douglass described how The Liberator became his “meat” and his “drink” (Douglass, 1845, 11 (...)

27Given that both narratives were produced within a constraining framework, a combination of factors influenced their form and ideological content. It is hard to fathom that the AASS, which only financed the publication of three slave narratives, did not closely supervise their editorial process.17 Moreover, as the aforementioned Syracuse incident shows, it is highly improbable that slave authors, who were financially dependent on the abolitionist society for their livelihood as lecturers, were prone to contradict editing decisions made by their employers.18 Whereas economic factors undoubtedly played a role in restricting fugitive slave lecturers’ / authors’ freedom of expression, other more subtle reasons contributed to their ideological alignment. As Douglass’s vocal opposition to Collin’s initiative illustrates, portraying Douglass and Brown as passive instrumentalized agents in the abolitionist crusade against slavery would be altogether incorrect and simplistic. Both lecturers’ worldview was strongly influenced by the abolitionist ideology to which they adhered and were deeply committed. For instance, before becoming a lecturer for the AASS, Frederick Douglass had been an avid reader of The Liberator for three years. He was impregnated by the abolitionist newspaper’s rhetoric and literary discursive codes. Douglass was fascinated by its editor, Garrison, whom he considered to be a “hero” and a “Moses, raised up by God, to deliver his modern Israel from bondage”. Douglass explained how reading The Liberator on a weekly basis and mastering its contents, as well as listening to Garrison, enabled him to get “a clear comprehension of the principles of the anti-slavery movement” (Douglass, 1881, 214-215).19 So strong was Douglass’s reverence and deference for the president of the AASS that, in 1852, he confided privately to Charles Sumner that their relationship resembled “something like that of a child to a parent” (quoted in Andrews, 1986, 234). Given the peculiar nature of their relationship, Douglass was certainly more inclined to make concessions when negotiating with his mentor Garrison. Douglass’s inferior position in the relationship might also account for the paternalistic and somewhat condescending tone Garrison uses in the 1845 narrative to present his slave protégé. In the preface, Garrison informs the reader that Douglass “has borne himself with gentleness and meekness, yet with true manliness of character” (Douglass, 1845, xii). Here, Garrison lauds Douglass’s valiancy in attacking the peculiar institution. Yet, in keeping with the racial etiquette of the time, his demeanor and docility are praised too. Paradoxically enough, these latter qualities were often to be found in certificates of good conduct masters had to deliver to court before they could emancipate a slave. In the same vein, stressing Douglass’s gentleness and meekness, which are either childlike characteristics or stereotypical feminine traits, has an emasculating - or at least, subduing - effect on his manliness, thereby relegating him to the status of a minor.

• 20 As William Andrews has noted, as “public men and professional fugitives these men were the creature (...)

28Ultimately, in both narratives, the issue is not so much about the truth of the narrated events but rather on what white abolitionist editors suggested Douglass and Brown should emphasize, or thematize, in order to make their message more forceful and credible. Abolitionists needed slave representatives to give credence and impetus to their movement in order to achieve the immediate abolition of slavery. Thus, abolitionists fashioned the slave’s image, speech, and narrative according to what a nineteenth-century white audience or readership was ready to hear or believe. Yet, in their endeavor to disprove the stereotype of the animal-like illiterate slave, abolitionists created a new mold and archetype which fugitive bondsmen had to conform to. As Olney puts it: “in one sense the narrative lives of the ex-slaves were as much possessed and used by the abolitionists as their actual lives had been by slaveholders” (1984, 51).20 By suggesting “a few curtailments” to fugitive slaves’ lives, abolitionist editors involuntarily erased bondsmen’s personal experiences in an endeavor to make them representative of the experience of slaves in general. By so doing, multiple voices were subsumed into one and became a “collective utterance” (Gates, 2). Thus, the personal pronoun subject “I” in slave narratives bears a holistic value and stands for “we,” namely all slaves.

• 21 Regarding prejudice, as early as 1855, Douglass explained how abolitionists “[I]n their eagerness, (...)

32Other reasons may also have contributed to Douglass’s growing bitterness. Although Douglass attracted huge audiences to his lectures, he received less pay than white agents of the society (Stauffer, 2007, 208). Moreover, Douglass undoubtedly suffered from the racial prejudice which existed among abolitionists. In 1856, he wrote that “opposing slavery and hating its victims” was “a very common form of abolitionism” (Matlack, 15).21 In an attempt to gain more freedom of expression, Douglass set about to launch an abolitionist newspaper with the help of some British friends and benefactors. Garrison was reluctant to let Douglass step down from the stage to undertake editorial work. He refused to relinquish any further responsibilities to Douglass other than being a lecturer (Sinanhan, 69). In order to quell Douglass’s desire to create his own paper, Garrison arranged to have him contribute to abolitionist newspapers, thereby keeping him indirectly under some kind of editorial control (Patsy, 98). Ultimately, although Garrison opposed the idea, Douglass broke free from the yoke of his sponsor and, in 1847, created his own newspaper The North Star (Levine, 1997, 19-20). Douglass justified his decision to launch his anti-slavery newspaper by saying that “it is evident” that blacks “must be [their] own representatives and advocates, not exclusively, but not peculiarly - not distinct from, but in connection with [their] white friends” (cited in Martin, 30). The emphasis placed on cooperation seems to further accredit the fact that Douglass’s former dealings with white abolitionists were based on a relationship of subordination.

• 22 Charles Lenox Remond and James McCune Smith were also women suffrage activists (Quarles, 35). The m (...)

33Eventually, over time, Brown and Douglass chose to leave the narrow confines of abolitionism. They both enlarged their field of political and social activism by, for instance, becoming zealous advocates for women’s rights.22 By representing and fighting for another oppressed group, they adopted a humanist approach which transcended and transgressed racial as well as gender borders. They were all the freer to distance themselves from their former white sponsors’ guiding influence that after 1847 and 1854, Douglass and Brown had respectively managed, with the help of English friends, to buy their freedom from their masters (Wu, 48; Brown & Greenspan, xxxii).

• 23 However, “so much more concerned was Brown with argument than with art that he left in the story nu (...)

34Literary-wise, in the 1850’s, both sought to abandon the traditional slave narrative genre by trying their hands at writing novels. Although Brown’s Clotel or the President’s Daughter was published while he was in England in 1853, it is credited as being the first novel written by an African-American. The same year, Frederick Douglass published his novel entitled The Heroic Slave. By writing literature, Brown and Douglass were now creating fictional characters and were, theoretically, no longer literally representing themselves in the diegetic foreground. However, both authors chose not to make a complete and radical transition from the autobiographic genre, and its representation of real life events, to literary fiction. Although they were prose fiction, Brown’s and Douglass’s novels were historically grounded and still strove to fight against slavery.23 Brown elaborated his plot on the rumors of Thomas Jefferson’s supposedly slave mistress and her mulatto daughters. Douglass chose to fictionalize the story of a real slave, Madison Washington, who was the instigator of a slave revolt on a vessel in 1841. Ironically, Douglass was editing another slave’s biography and romancing it.

• 24 Bold text not in the original.
• 25 Bold text not in the original.

• 26 The Escape; Or, A Leap for Freedom: A Drama, in Five Acts by William Wells Brown, was published in (...)

37After 1856, Brown stopped touring for the AASS and devoted his time to giving lectures and reading his drama on stage (Ernest, 1109).26 Brown’s plays revolved around slavery. In the preface to his play The Escape; Or, A Leap for Freedom, Brown authenticated some of the events that were to follow as having been personally experienced by him during his enslavement (Abramson, 372). In so doing, Brown was self-authenticating the verisimilitude of fictional events in the hope that his readers would suspend their disbelief. It is interesting to note that, even though the piece was fictional, Brown could not refrain from representing himself and staging events from his personal life thus blending reality and fiction. Moreover, by singly performing all the roles on stage, Brown was subsuming a multiplicity of voices, across racial and gender lines, into his.

• 27 Namely, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881). In 18 (...)
• 28 By then, Garrison had stopped recommending Douglass’s newspaper The North Star as being an abolitio (...)
• 29 Moreover, as the title My Bondage and My Freedom suggests, one half of the book is dedicated to his (...)
• 30 By which he meant that “Naturalists tell us that a full grown man is a resultant or representative (...)

40Altogether, Douglass wrote four autobiographies during his lifetime. In the process, he rewrote himself.27 By the time Douglass’s second autobiography was published in 1855, his divorce with Garrison was already consumed (Olney, 1984, 64).28 His second autobiography took twice as many words to tell the story of his life under slavery until the moment of his escape (Matlack, 23).29 This wordiness could be interpreted as Douglass’s growth but also to the fact that his expression was now unleashed. Quite tellingly, Dr. James McCune Smith, an African-American physician, wrote the preface to his second autobiography, thereby officially severing Douglass’s filiation with white paternalist authenticators. In the preface, McCune Smith referred to Douglass as a “Representative American man.”30

• 31 Bold text not in the original.
• 32 Bold text not in the original.

• 33 Waldo E. Martin attributes this “lost white patrimony”, in the 1855 narrative, to Douglass’s “chang (...)

42Whereas Douglass’s first narrative immediately immersed the reader behind the curtain of slavery through the I/eye of the narrator, Douglass’s second autobiography starts with a spatial description. Unlike the straightforward first sentence of his first autobiography, which gave information about his birth, in his second narrative, Douglass uses a long windy description, on the second page, to explain how and where he was born. In the 1845 narrative, there is a movement from the personal subject “I” to the outside world, which symbolically imitates a birth. In the second autobiography, Douglass first takes the reader on a tour of Talbot County, and then introduces its white and black inhabitants, before finally mentioning his birth on the second page of the narrative. Likewise, we have this same dilatory impression in relation to his mother’s identity. She only appears at a much later time in the second narrative, just like his father who, surprisingly, happens to have slightly changed races!33 Moreover, in his second narrative, Douglass offers the reader much more information concerning his mother. For instance, he reiterates that she would pay him visits at night by walking twelve miles on foot. However, he nuances this assertion by saying that she sometimes was lucky to ride on a horse. Interestingly enough, the first narrative portrays his mother as a reified child-bearing field-hand which was a mere stranger to Douglass. However, ten years later, Douglass evokes detailed episodes of tenderness between him and his mother, for example when she offered him a large ginger “sweet cake” in the shape of a heart (Douglass, 1855, 56). More importantly, the first narrative does not mention the crucial information concerning Douglass’s mother’s literacy. Could this omission be attributed to the fact that it didn’t exactly fit the portrayal that abolitionists wanted to give of female field slaves? Finally, whereas the narrative published by the Anti-Slavery office immediately stressed Douglass’s slave status, the second narrative, much later on in the narration, informs us that the narrator had no inkling that he was a slave for “a long time”.

• 34 Douglass’s 1845 narrative is replete with hypotactic constructions. Yet, contrary to his second nar (...)

43In 1855, Douglass had grown as an author. Whilst remaining an intradiegetic-homodiegetic narrator, Douglass offers greater access to his consciousness by giving the reader more psychological insight. He also adopts a more omniscient narratorial stance when, for instance, he speculates on what the slaves of Talbot County were thinking about. Furthermore, he displays the richness of his descriptive vocabulary in an attempt to demonstrate his artistic literary progress. In 1855, it seems Douglass is no longer caught up in the immediate flow of events and adopts a more analytical point of view. He substitutes more of the factual paratactic constructions, which are typical of speech, for greater poetic license.34 Whereas, in 1845, Douglass was pressed for facts by white abolitionist editors, in 1855, in the third chapter of his autobiography entitled “The Author’s Parentage”, he begs for the reader’s patience: “If the reader will now be kind enough to allow me time to grow bigger, and afford me an opportunity for my experience to become greater, I will tell him something, by-and-by, of slave life, as I saw, felt, and heard it […]” (Douglass, 1855, 51). In 1855, Douglass was unrestrained by any editorial control. He could now present to the reader, at his own pace, the facts concerning his life, during and after his enslavement, as well as his sensory perceptions. More importantly, he could now expose his personal point of view and “take care of the philosophy”, by, for example, reflecting on how his “new circumstances” in life had fostered his “mental development” and made him “re-think” the Garissonian ideology he had formerly been fervently committed to (Douglass, 1855, 395-397).