Sympathetic Listening in Frederick Douglass's "The Heroic Slave" and My Bondage and My Freedom

SYMPATHETIC LISTENING IN FREDERICK DOUGLASS'S "THE HEROIC SLAVE" AND MY BONDAGE AND MY FREEDOM Marianne Noble American University While Frederick Douglass was a slave employed in a shipyard in Baltimore, he endured a highly public attack. Diminishing employment opportunities and consequent salary pressures had led white workers to resent the competition of black workers, and managers were all too willing to scapegoat blacks in order to take the pressure off themselves. One day, in the sight of at least fifty white men who stood by, four white workers pummeled Douglass with a brick and hand-spike and kicked him in the eye. The attack aroused the sympathy of his owners. When Douglass got home, Sophia AuId "was again melted in pity toward me. My puffed-out eye, and my scarred and blood-covered face, moved the dear lady to tears."1 Mrs. AuId took care of him so tenderly that, as Douglass writes, "It was almost compensation for the murderous assault, and my suffering, that it furnished an occasion for the manifestation of . . . kindness" (BF, 235). But although she was almost maternally kind and loving towards Douglass, Mrs. AuId nonetheless was not politically transformed by the episode. She did not come to understand the role of racism in the economy, and she did not convert to anti-slavery. Her sympathy with Frederick's suffering did not bring her to a position where she understood the conditions of her slave's life, his extraordinary intellect, his deeply felt aspirations for his life. Jeannine DeLombard interprets this scene as encapsulating the inaccessibility for blacks of Emerson's ideal of a transcendental eyeball .2 As an anti-slavery advocate Douglass seeks the Emersonian role of all-observing critic with comprehensive knowledge and without the partiality inherent in a subjectivity grounded in corporeality. However, that role is unavailable to him; his would-be transcendental eyeball is always already burst because of his race, his body. Living in the South, he is both brutalized and silenced. But in the North too, he cannot attain the respect accruing to one with transcendent vision but rather is constrained into an identity defined by his experiences of physical violence. The legitimacy of his vision and consequently his voice are limited. The only contribution to the cause abolitionists seek from him is that of witness to sufferings. DeLombard traces how 54Marianne Noble Douglass rejects this role of eye-witness and chooses metaphors of speaking and voice over vision and body to represent his role as antislavery author. What Lacan calls "the scopic regime" consigns him to mere corporeality; an aural regime does not. DeLombard thoroughly documents Douglass's turn from a visual sense of his own authorship to an aural sense of it, and she explores certain aspects of why such study of visual culture matters. But she fails to address the critique of sympathy embedded in the scene. Mrs. AuId is moved but not changed, and the nature of sympathy that this fact implies is a primary cause of the dramatic shift in Douglass's writing . In his writings, Douglass indicates that sympathy gained through listening and speaking is superior to sympathy grounded in visual signs of physical suffering, providing a more nuanced, sensitive, and generous relationship to the other and a greater likelihood of political and psychic transformation. Aural forms of knowledge avail a more genuinely connective form of interpersonal relations than visual forms of knowledge can. They are more truly sympathetic. In rejecting visual and corporeal foundations for knowledge, Douglass also rejects sentimental abolitionist misconconceptions regarding sympathy that were prominent in his era. He suggests that certain sentimental definitions of sympathy are insufficient at best and politically regressive at worst. In turn, he gives voice to a definition ofsympathy as an emotion rooted not in the universality of physical experience but instead premised upon difference and rooted in dialogue. Douglass places a high value on true sympathy and strives to conceptualize how speaking and listening connect people in ways that get beyond surface signs and establish interpersonal contact in ways that feel authentic and significant to the individuals involved. This claim makes a significant contribution to contemporary scholarship on African American visual culture. Critics have...