The “Mysterious Depths” of Slave Interiority: Fiction and Intersubjective Knowledge in The Heroic Slave

This essay explores how Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave (1853) both reveals and intervenes in the often-implicit controversies over the accessibility of slave interiority for white audiences that underpinned competing representations of slavery in the antebellum public sphere. Focusing on The Heroic Slave’s exploration of white people’s desire to probe the inner lives of enslaved persons, the essay argues that The Heroic Slave not only displays Douglass’s skillful deployment of fiction, but also constitutes a complex metafictional engagement with fiction’s increasingly central role in the struggle over slavery. As fiction became an important genre for representing slavery in the early 1850s, the conventions of fiction, especially its direct narration of unspoken thoughts and feelings, increasingly mediated how white audiences understood their ability to access the inner lives of enslaved persons. In The Heroic Slave, Douglass developed alternative formal strategies for representing slave interiority in fiction in order to resist the fantasy of complete knowledge of inner life associated with conventional fictional psychonarration. Drawing on recent work on fictionality, this essay shows how Douglass retheorized fiction’s value, positing fiction as both a useful vehicle for probing inner life and a powerful means of confronting readers with the necessarily speculative nature of this revelatory access to interiority.