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American Literature 73.4 (2001) 779-810



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Narrative Reversals and Power Exchanges: Frederick Douglass and British Culture

Paul Giles

Within the last thirty years, Frederick Douglass’s first two autobiographies—Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855)—have become canonical texts. One reason for this rapid institutionalization is that Douglass’s “cult of the self-made man” who triumphs over adversity dovetails with a much more traditional American ethic of individual virtue. 1 As Joseph Fichtelberg has observed, Douglass appears to present himself as a kind of black Benjamin Franklin, an exemplar of heroic self-reliance, striving “to embody the millennial ideals of an America foretold in the Declaration of Independence.” 2 My purpose in this essay is to problematize these critical homologies that yoke Douglass and an abstract idea of American nationalism by considering his two autobiographies in light of his engagement with British political culture. I will argue that the melodramatic representations of violence in the 1845 Narrative are reformulated in My Bondage and My Freedom by a textual dynamic of self-contradiction, which works deliberately to disrupt indigenous perspectives of all kinds. This dynamic can be linked to the impact on Douglass’s work of transnationalism, which he began to regard as a literary and discursive phenomenon as well as a social imperative. Nationalism for Douglass thus came to involve not so much a positive or universal ideal but, rather, a set of fluctuating contrary terms. I will argue, accordingly, that there is a correlation between Douglass’s aesthetic structures of ironic displacement and the epistemological paradoxes that frame his political career, such that his point of identification keeps shifting, and power is represented as a material commodity to be recycled and exchanged. [End Page 779]

Power Politics

In the early nineteenth century, Britain enjoyed a reputation among American abolitionists as the world’s leading antislavery power. An alliance between British military forces and African Americans had formed during the Wars of Independence in the 1780s, when, out of its own strategic interest, Britain promised freedom to any rebellious slave who would rise up against the mutual enemy. Subsequently, leaders of the American reform movement came to venerate well-known British figures like William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, whose influence helped to bring about the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies on 1 August 1834. 3 This date is regularly commemorated in Douglass’s speeches and writings; in 1861, for example, shortly after the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War, Douglass looks back to what he calls this “sublime event . . . the one of all others most creditable to the age.” He goes on to express the hope that the U.S. sectarian conflict will have the effect of “breaking the chains of every American slave, and placing America side by side with noble old England in the glorious career of Liberty and Civilization.” 4

It was in “noble old England,” moreover, that much of the momentum behind William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist movement was generated during the 1830s and 1840s. Garrison first visited England in 1833, when he struck up a firm friendship with George Thompson, president of the British Anti-Slavery League, who himself crossed the Atlantic in 1835 to campaign in Boston. Garrison subsequently attended the International Antislavery Convention held in London in 1840 and returned to the country for a lecture tour in 1846. Indeed, despite various differences of opinion—notably over women antislavery delegates, to which the British were firmly opposed—Garrison at this time felt that his movement enjoyed more general support in Britain than back in the United States. “We owe Mr. Garrison our grateful homage,” remarked Douglass in 1857, “in that he was among the first of his countrymen who zealously applied the British argument for abolition, against American slavery.” 5 As Douglass suggests, much of the impetus behind Garrison’s early success in the United States came from his visible association with British emancipationists who had recently secured their famous victory in the Caribbean. Douglass’s own hugely...

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