I should like to thank my colleague Michele Stepto for several conversations on the significance of familial relationships in Douglass's Narrative.ġ1. Like the additional personal material in his later autobiographies, the presence of these family members-whom he obviously knew rather well-raises the question of how far Douglass was nonrepresentational in his self-references in the Narrative in order to represent the general system of slavery. See also page 45, where Douglass mentions a brother and two sisters but says his relationship to them was not important. Too old to work, she is forced to live in the woods and fend for herself, since she is no longer economically profitable to keep as a slave. His grandmother also appears outside the system of slavery, in a sense, on page 62, where she is the example of the slaveholder's perverse idea of a free laborer.

Apparently he knew her well, and this was Douglass's own loophole (and perceived as such) in the system he describes. My discussion excludes his grandmother because Douglass does not mention her until the last sentence of the chapter, where he acknowledges that in his early years he was raised by her. … Languages, like other cultural traits, will be found to vary in the degree and nature of their integration into the societies and cultures in which they occur.” Douglass was acutely sensitive to the linguistic system of slave society, of the ways in which language was used-and withheld-by one human being to enslave another.ħ. Douglass's perspective is an important one, for as sociolinguists have discovered, “peoples do not all everywhere use language to the same degree, in the same situations, or for the same things. He charts his own relentless progress to freedom as the acquisition of an ever deeper understanding of language use in a slave economy, and the realization of his own freedom at the Nantucket antislavery convention is preeminently a linguistic event. Unlike Northup, Douglass focuses on the linguistic significance of bondage: He tersely portrays masters and slaves almost solely in terms of their linguistic acts because, for him, the reality of slavery is a profoundly rhetorical one. To read the Narrative from this point of view, however, is to misapprehend how Douglass's text treats slavery and to be needlessly disappointed. Beside Solomon Northup's detailed account of living quarters, diet, work life, holidays, and family relations, Douglass's Narrative must seem spare, incomplete, even misleading in its portrayal of the slave experience-an incendiary polemic written more to fuel the abolitionist cause than to convey the nature of the slave experience. For historians who use slave narratives to document the immediate physical and social facts of slave life, Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself offers a frustratingly low yield.

Life of an american slave