ENG 201: Southern Literature

 

ENG 201: Southern Literature

Lesson 5: Slave Narrative
Dates: September 22 and 26, 2003

Objectives

By the end of this lesson, you should be able to do the following:

  • Describe the life and literary contributions of Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass.
  • Interpret themes and other literary features of A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
  • Define or identify relevant terms, names, dates, and quotations.

Assignment

Read “Harriet Jacobs,” and an excerpt from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (127-140), “Frederick Douglass,” and an excerpt from A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (171-211).

Activities            

Think Fast: Respond to the questions I assign you in classes.  These questions generally will cover objective information, such as names, dates, and terms.

 

Presentation: Slave Narrative  (Professor Canada)

 

Cooperative Learning:  Discuss one of the “Questions for Discussion” with the other members of your group.

 

Discussion: During this time, we will discuss the insights and questions that have emerged during our “Think Fast” exercise, my presentation, and cooperative learning.

 

Conferences: During these one-on-one conferences, I will review some of your writing, orally quiz you on lesson objectives, and field your questions.

 

Think Again: Write your own response to one of the “Questions for Discussion.”

Identifications

Make sure you know the meaning and significance of each of the following:

  • abolitionism
  • autobiography
  • biography
  • Linda Brent
  • Civil War (1861-1865)
  • Confederate States of America
  • Jefferson Davis
  • Frederick Douglass
  • Ulysses S. Grant
  • Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
  • Harriet Jacobs
  • Robert E. Lee
  • Abraham Lincoln
  • Maryland
  • A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
  • North Carolina
  • pseudonym
  • slave narrative
  • slavery (1619-1865)

Resource

 

Updated September 14, 2003
© Mark Canada, 2003
mark.canada@uncp.edu
 

Introduction

Last week we had some fun with Captain Simon Suggs on the Southern frontier.  Things will turn dark again this week as we visit two slaves, Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass, and read excerpts from their autobiographical narratives. 

Notes

Background

American slavery is nearly as old as America itself.  The first slaves were brought to Virginia in 1619, only a dozen years after John Smith and his fellow English settlers founded Jamestown.  By this time, the slave trade had already begun in other parts of the Americas, having escalated in South America in the previous century.  Between 1550 and 1750, ships transported millions of Africans to the Americas, where they provided slave labor on plantations and in other capacities.  Although slavery existed in the north for a time, as well, the importance of agriculture and the need for labor made slavery more central in the southern United States.  By the early 1800s, the issue had begun seriously dividing the nation.  Although Congress tried to resolve the differences or at least ease the tension with the Missouri Compromise in 1820 and the Compromise of 1850, it seems that the conflict over slavery could not be resolved peacefully.  Eventually, 11 Southern states—Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, and Florida—seceded from the Union, forming the Confederate States of America.  Jefferson Davis became their president.  Meanwhile, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln stood on the other side of the conflict, committed to preserve the Union.  On April 12, 1861, Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter, a federal garrison outside Charleston, South Carolina, launching what has come to be called the American Civil War, or the War Between the States.  Over the next four years, the Northern and Southern armies—eventually led respectively by General Ulysses S. Grant and General Robert E. Lee—fought numerous bloody battles at sites such as Antietam, Maryland, and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.  More than 600,000 American soldiers lost their lives before the war officially ended in 1865, leaving the South defeated and badly damaged.

Before the first shot was fired, the war over slavery was fought primarily with words.  In the North, abolitionists, activists fighting to abolish slavery, published various kinds of propaganda, a kind of tool designed to sway readers’ opinions.  William Lloyd Garrison, for example, published a newspaper called The Liberator, in which he printed slave narratives.  Because these slave narratives were nonfiction accounts of real slaves’ lives, they belong to a genre of life-writing called biography; those written by the slaves themselves about their own lives belong to subclass of biography called autobiography, which is a writer’s account of his or her own life.  Slave narratives typically feature graphic descriptions of the physical punishments inflicted on slaves, as well as the mental anguish associated with the dividing of families. 

The most famous slave narrative was written by a man named Frederick Douglass (c. 1818-1895).  Born into slavery in Maryland, Douglass was among the Americans least likely to become a great writer.  Indeed, as he explains in his most famous work, A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), his owner discouraged his mistress from teaching him even to read.  Nevertheless, Douglass did learn to read while he was still a boy and, partly through a clever tactic he used on white boys, eventually learned to write.  It would be years before he would put his writing skills to work on his life story, however.  He remained a slave until 1838, when he managed to escape to the North, taking a train from Baltimore to Philadelphia and then on to New York.  In the North, he changed his name from Frederick Bailey to Frederick Douglass and became interested in abolitionism.  After drawing the attention of William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass spoke out against slavery in a speech at a meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in 1841.  Four years later he published A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, the story of his life as a slave.  Douglass continued to write during the remaining 50 years of his life, publishing My Bondage and My Freedom in 1855 and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass in 1881.  He also edited a newspaper called the New Era, later renamed the New National Era.  Another important slave narrative was written by a woman named Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897).  A slave living in Edenton, North Carolina, Jacobs resisted repeated sexual advances by her owner’s father before escaping to New York in 1842.  In 1853, she began composing her story, finishing it in 1858.  Edited by Lydia Maria Child, one of the leading literary figures of the time, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was published under the pseudonym, a false name sometimes used by writers, of “Linda Brent” in 1861.

Questions for Discussion

1.      Genre: Using Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass as models, identify the distinctive features of a slave narrative.

2.      Propaganda: Explain how Douglass and Jacobs use their own stories to make arguments against slavery.

3.      Identity: What do Douglass’s and Jacobs’s slave narratives say about their own identities and development as individual human beings?  What difference does it make that Douglass was a man and Jacobs was a woman?

4.      Selection: Choose an event or a description that Harriet Jacobs included in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and explain how it helps her to achieve her ends in writing her story.

5.      Selection: Choose an event or a description that Frederick Douglass included in A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and explain how it helps her to achieve his ends in writing his story.

Conclusion

In our next lesson, you will work on your poetry explication project.