5 - The Critical Response to Douglass’s Autobiographies

Summary

If stowe’s critical reception moves from praise for her genius as a writer of fiction to neglect, and back to praise for her work on a mixture of political and aesthetic grounds, Douglass’s reception moves from personal fame with little regard to the specific qualities of his writing to an increasingly close engagement with Douglass as writer. The heroic figure that Douglass created in his life and writings has been in the eye of historians of slavery and antislavery movements, but the act of creation itself has often been obscured. This chapter and the following two track the ways in which Douglass has become a central figure in American literature and in American history as a writer of autobiography and oratory, and the ways in which other, often less immediately recognizable authors of slave narratives have joined Douglass in the American literary canon over the past few decades. Because of the disjuncture between Douglass as a historical figure and Douglass as a literary figure, a caveat is in order: this study does not attempt to deal with every attempt to contextualize Douglass historically or to narrate his life in the service of understanding nineteenth-century American history or politics. Rather, I narrate, as comprehensively as possible, the reception of Douglass autobiographies as literary texts, and attend to political and historical readings of Douglass insofar as they impinge on the reading of Douglass’s works as narrative. This means that many of the scholarly works discussed below have a strong historical or political orientation, but also that there are scholarly works that I have omitted that seem excessively removed from Douglass’s identity as a writer, as an influence on later African American writers, and as an interlocutor with other writers among his contemporaries.

The analyses on Douglass’s biographies and his one short novel, “The Heroic Slave,” over the past few decades have emphasized the ambiguities and complexities of Douglass’s work, including those that undermine his status as an unequivocally heroic figure. Critics had considered Douglass’s treatment of race as a universalizing humanist rather than a thoroughgoing “race man,” his fraught relationship with femininity and women’s authorship, and his compromised position relative to questions of race and imperialism in the post–Civil War period.