The Hero's Journey (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Part 1)

In Part 1 of our discussion on the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, we welcome editor Joshua Bennett to discuss Douglass's Narrative as a type of hero's journey, Douglass's political project in writing the book, and how Douglass closes the Narrative with a statement on true Christianity.

Joshua Bennett is a professor of literature at MIT. He is the author of five books of poetry, criticism, and narrative non-fiction, including The Sobbing School and Being Property Once Myself.

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Episode transcript at https://seagull.wwnorton.com/NarrativeoftheLifeofaFrederickDouglass/part1/transcript.

Transcript

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[Mark:] You are listening to the Norton Library podcast where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton Library, a new series from W.W. Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I'm your host Mark Cirino with Michael Von Cannon producing. Today we present the first of our two episodes devoted to The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Douglass's 1845 autobiography, as we speak with its editor, Joshua Bennett. In part, one we discuss Douglass, his life, career, and legacy. We discussed the powerful way Douglass tells his own story, the role of literacy and education in the narrative, as well as the way he characterizes the various people he meets along the way. Joshua Bennett is a professor of literature at MIT. He is the author of five books of poetry, criticism, and narrative non-fiction, including The Sobbing School and Being Property Once Myself. Joshua Bennett, welcome to the Norton Library podcast! 

[Joshua:] Mark, thank you so much for having me. 

[Mark:] It's great to have you so we can discuss your edition of Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life and maybe we can start by just considering perhaps readers new to this story, new to this work, what we might want to know about Frederick Douglass the figure. 

[Joshua:] Oh my goodness, so much to say! That he was a prophet, a poet, an artist, a father and husband. He was the most photographed American of the 19th century. He was a master of rhetoric—I mean one of the great joys of revisiting this text was just seeing all the kind of rhetorical devices that he employed. In the appendix there there's a poem  which is also a parody—again that love of rhetorical device. He was a Christian, he was someone who was deeply invested in the future of technology, so I mean one of my favorite pieces of writing from Douglass is actually an 1873 speech he delivers in Nashville called “Agriculture and Black Progress” and there he talks about how the heart of a horse is much like the heart of a man and it made me think, this was one of the first animal rights activists in American history. So Frederick Douglass was something of a Renaissance man; he was all things to all people, and I think his example is a stellar one for us to return to today. 

[Mark:] So how did he become a Renaissance man? How utterly improbable was it that this man could serve in so many various capacities as you've described? 

[Joshua:] Yeah, I mean, he's largely self-taught. I mean, he's a combination of self-taught and someone who was snatching language out of the shadows. So in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass which is published in 1845 by the Anti-Slavery Office in Boston, he tells the story of being a young man trading bread to these small white children who helped teach him how to read, and there there's just this fascinating exchange, a physical bread almost, or this kind of metaphorical bread of life. I think Douglass wants us to understand that as symbolic, we have moments where you know the people who claimed ownership over his flesh, they leave their copy books for him and in the spaces in the margins, he copies their handwriting. This is part of how he teaches himself how to write. Eventually towards the end of the book we also see him teaching a Saturday school which is broken up but it's through also the act of teaching that Douglass comes into a much deeper understanding of not just what literature is for but what it can accomplish in the hearts of others. It's one of the first times in the book we see him establish a deep sense of relation or kinship or friendship with other people. It's through the pedagogical moment; it's through literature. So how did he become who he became? Through other people, but also through a kind of dogged will, I think is the version of the story Douglass would make sure we don't forget, is that this is someone who very much tried to pull himself from the fire. 

[Mark:] So when this book was published, you said that it was published by an anti-slavery press. Was this an unequivocal polemic, like it had one mission statement and that was to illuminate the horrors of slavery? Who was the intended audience when this book was published? 

[Joshua:] Yeah, I mean I think that's part of it. It went through many editions in its first iteration—I believe seven or more sort of editions when it came out in its day—but also what's important to note is that its rooted, and Douglass describes this in the book, in his speeches, in these kind of anti-slavery lectures that he's delivering and the fact that there are dubious audience members; there are people who believe that this is fabricated, that there's no way that this person standing in front of us had ever been enslaved. So, part of writing the book was the idea that he was creating this material object people could refer to; he was creating a kind of historical document, and it's important to remember too Douglass is not the the first black author published—Phillis Wheatley almost a century before. What's interesting to think about with Wheatley as well is that some of the first feedback she gets from the United Kingdom is well, if she can write this way how can she be enslaved? So, in Douglass's narrative itself, the literal book, but also in the story of its publication, we find this central philosophical tension, this entire population group who was said to be chattel, said to be soulless, said to be the equivalent of oxen or tractors. How can they also be producing literature? This is at the very core of what the book sets out to attack. 

[Mark:] And we have Douglass as a writer, you’re saying, employing complex rhetorical devices, quoting Shakespeare, so it would strike an audience as utterly improbable that this man could have produced this brilliant work. 

[Joshua:] Sure, and I mean Douglass is, again, a master orator. In one of his later speeches “Pictures in Progress” he talks a little bit about the distinction, too, between robust philosophical argument and what you're trying to accomplish in a speech. So in Narrative he does tow this line, in a beautiful way, through biblical allusion. One way he does this quite powerfully is through his description of Covey and he talks about him as a thief in the night, as a snake who literally crawls on the ground, and as a deceiver. What readers of the time will notice, and what many of us will notice if you're familiar with the biblical tradition, he's describing the devil, basically, and I think through those allusions he's tapping into a common readership and people who are saying, oh, this is not just morally reprehensible as a practice; there's a kind of a cosmic sense of what Douglass is trying to accomplish. This is an overturning of the natural order, this thing we call slavery. And part of how he's accomplishing that reading for the audience is through allusion and other rhetorical devices. 

[Mark:] Yeah, and Joshua, you're referring to Covey the overseer that he describes. So, if we can think about the various characters that he encounters and the various situations that he's in and sort of his journey towards freedom, I'm wondering if you could comment on the way that Douglass crafts his anti-slavery argument, because it seems like there would be a danger of overplaying or over sentimentalizing his argument. He seems like he has to choose just the right mode when he is writing this book. What do you see when you read this book in terms of how he conveys this argument? 

[Joshua:] Yeah, I mean it's it's largely through metonomy, in a way. Each of these human beings, so whether that's Thomas Auld, whether it's Aaron Anthony, whether it's Sophia Auld—they become symbolic representatives of this much larger problem. So even when he asks Sophia Auld to teach him to read, he describes her as kind-hearted at the outset, and the idea is that she's slowly poisoned over time by slavery. So part of how he constructs the argument are through these characterizations that change over time. Some of it too almost seems like it's embedded in the names, as some of these overseers and other figures, so Mr Gore or Severe, so he really is kind of saying that they're taking off these larger than life moral qualities, the people that he's naming. So at every single step he maps this journey and it almost feels like Dante in a sense, like he's moving deeper and deeper into Hell in a way and then he emerges in these final two chapters as someone who's free. He gets married and he starts on his journey to anti-slavery and he closes with this appendix that is this powerful critique, essentially, of a kind of racist American Christianity which is a kind of crescendo to take us out. So it's the hero's journey. It's a journey from illiteracy to literacy; it's a journey through the the depths of slavery to the the heights of freedom. And that's how he accomplishes it, through this kind of marvelous pacing but also through giving us a deep account of the internal struggles of the enslaved. At so many different points he talks about just the pain he felt, even in learning to read! He says he regretted it at first, that he almost misses not knowing, because literacy gave language to the pain he felt inside. I think that's something too that in that historical moment he's giving the readers something to grab on to, and I think it's simultaneously strategic. It's his personal truth, it's a historical recollection, but I think he's also trying to accomplish an emotional effect in his readership. 

[Mark:] Is it surprising that Douglass spends time commenting not just on slavery's obvious effect on black people, but also its effects on slave owners? Is it unusual that Douglass is considering the ill effects of slavery on everybody, not just those who are enslaved? 

[Joshua:] Sure, no, I think it's absolutely necessary. I mean given who his readership is; his readership is this this largely white, and not just American but hopefully international audience, who's coming to this and saying, oh, this is destructive for all of us. Now I also think this is a philosophical principle that's really important for us to understand. Douglass thinks this is not just bad for white and black human beings. He literally is saying it's destroying the Earth, that slavery almost coerces us into these relationships, too, with plants and animals, plants and animals that are fundamentally destructive. We come to understand the Earth as something that we pillage and destroy and basically transmogrify into market commodities instead of understanding the beauty of the earth and of each other. I mean, this is very much at the core of the speeches Douglass will give throughout the rest of his life. He'll constantly come back to this idea. He has this speech called “The Word White,” which is essentially critique of the Homestead Bill, where he's saying, look, we all come from the earth. That's the fundamental argument he makes. He said these divisions are not just a certain kind of social or political problem—they're a theological problem, they're a philosophical problem, and so part of him showing how slavery poisons white people as well is to pull his readership on board and to say, do you want to be destroyed or do you want to be well? Abolition is also for you. You, too, need to be freed from these fetters that you're placing on yourself in engaging in these acts. 

[Mark:] I was really interested that you were referring to Douglass's structure as the hero's journey because as we read The Narrative and you get to the end, you're waiting for some sort of climax or payoff or the means that Douglass escaped slavery, and it kind of reminds you of the stakes of the book itself and the historical context in which the book was published. So, can you talk a little bit about the choices Douglass makes as a storyteller at that time? 

[Joshua:] Sure, and thank you for this Mark, this is really kind of the meat of potatoes of what I wanted to get into. So, I'm teaching a class at MIT in the fall called “Pretending” and part of what I want us to think about there are the kind of multiple layers of shadowing that are happening in this book. So as we will later learn, in The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, which is his third and final autobiography, Douglass escapes from slavery essentially by dressing in costume and by borrowing a sailor's pass from someone he knows. He basically dresses up as a sailor and gets on a boat, which once you know that, you see all the boats in this book differently, all the kind of maritime metaphors that appear and reappear. But he explicitly says in the text that he will not reveal his means of escape because it closes a door, is a kind of metaphor uses, that other people will not be able to escape by similar means if he reveals that this kind of elaborate act of what JL Austin, the philosopher, would call disguising reality. That this act of masquerade, if he reveals it, it'll close the door for others. This is his critique, too, of a certain vision of the Underground Railroad. He says, well, actually, by advertising it this way we're foreclosing a certain set of fugitive possibilities. Lastly, real quick on this, this is also his critique of other freed men later, other kind of abolitionist writers like Henry Box Brown, who in Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown details the way he escaped and Douglass's issue is that it's like well, dude, other people were going to mail themselves to freedom! You've now foreclosed that for so many of our brothers and sisters who are still in chains. So very much Douglass is thinking, at the moment of writing, up to and through its moment of publication, even into his next autobiography My Bondage and My Freedom, he's thinking, how can this text be solely an instrument of liberation and not in any way complicate my fellow kinship network members, my fellow kinsmen? How can I make sure this doesn't interrupt their opportunities to also get free? 

[Mark:] That's fascinating and, Joshua, I don't know if you have the same reaction, but when I get to that part in The Narrative it doesn't seem like a void in the storytelling—it actually heightens the intensity by this information being so valuable that he can't convey it, it really makes it in fact even more dramatic. 

[Joshua:] Yeah, and it gets you this sense that you're dealing with a deeply ethical person. It almost takes you out of the book as a kind of commodified object. You're like, look man, I'm trying to tell a story that has implications for millions of people. So no, what matters to me most is not just to give you the most kind of compelling, juicy story possible. I actually have a certain kind of political project that I've set out to achieve in this book and it depends upon moments of opacity. I am giving you as much as I can of my internal state and of what I saw as I can best remember it. But he actually starts the book ,if you remember, with absence, that slaves by and large know about as much of their history as horses know of theirs. He starts with absence, he starts with not really being sure who his father is. He starts with not knowing his birthday. He starts us there and he says, but I'm giving you all I can. But in that moment, it's an agentive absence, he's withholding, and I think that's part of what really makes it click for us as readers. It's a beautiful literary moment as well. 

[Mark:] There are times when there are people who help him and he says, I would love to give them a shout out here but I'm not going to because it would get them into trouble, and you realize the conditions of readership at that time. Joshua, you mentioned some of the maritime moments and I think one of the most unforgettable scenes is on the bay when Douglass looks out at the boats. I'm wondering if you could describe that for us.  

[Joshua:] Yeah, I mean it's kind of an astonishing moment because it reminds him of the freedom that's been foreclosed for him. But it also seems like it's a moment of him just relishing that astonishing beauty. The ocean represents not just the condition of possibility of his enslavement, which is interesting, looking out at the water is not necessarily a moment to think about the Middle Passage or how millions of Africans arrived here; it's to think about his own freedom, his own life as a vessel, and this book is one of many ways he'll be able to explore the world as someone who's free. I mean, lest we forget proximity to the ocean in other ways, even in the text itself, was such a site of physical trauma. I'm thinking about when Douglass was hired out and was working on the docks and was beaten until his eyes were swollen. There's so much that proximity to water is doing in this text that I think is really rich for us to explore. 

[Mark:] There's also another indelible moment for me and that is Douglass's reaction when he sees what happens to his friend Demby. Can you talk a little bit about that for us, Joshua?  

[Joshua:] Yeah, so Demby's death actually happens in a chapter that, I mark this in the book, it's almost thematized by murder and thematized by this kind of wanton brutality that's visited upon the enslaved. And so when I've when I've returned to that passage, I've just been thinking a lot about how Douglass thematizes each chapter seemingly that way. I mean, that entire section of the book is really about the way that Demby and other enslaved people are brutalized through brute force. In other parts of the The Narrative it's about starvation, maybe especially of younger women, it seems like. We open with Aunt Hester being brutally beaten. But with Demby, he's shot, he's just brutally murdered out in the open, out in the grass and in the fields. There he really is trying to paint a picture I think of the brutality of chattel slavery, but also, I think the everydayness of it, that it wasn't just for people who were trying to run free or teaching each other to read. There really was almost a casualness with which black people were killed in this setting that he doesn't want us to forget. He makes it unforgettable for us and I think that's really important for Douglass, too, that he lingers on the sorrow songs, he lingers on the moments of brutality, and also the moments of great beauty and resistance and resilience. 

[Mark:] Is it important to the text that it is set in Maryland which might not be a state that we immediately associate with slavery? 

[Joshua:] Yeah, because it becomes a kind of an in-between space. There's a proximity to freedom that I think is really important for Douglass there and I think for us as readers and readers will pick up on that. Also early in the text you know there are these threats that he'll be sent away, sent to Alabama. So there's this idea, and again this is kind of the Dante's Inferno thing, like there are depths, there's a threat, like well you're up here with us in Maryland. If you go down to Louisiana, and he says this to these free black workers in 1873, he's like, no, Tennessee is a particular kind of place. We have all this natural beauty but also when we think about the kinds of slavery that happened here, there were marked differences. So I think the readers are picking up on that, but I also think it serves a kind of narrative import for Douglass as well. There's a proximity to the North and the possibility of freedom, but also this sense that it's a kind of midpoint. 

[Mark:] Like the prefaces to your edition say, this is slavery in its fairest form. You can't look at the events of The Narrative and say, well that's Alabama or that's Georgia, it's like, no, it's Maryland! If this stuff is happening in Maryland, you'd have to use your imagination to hear— 

[Joshua:] What's happening elsewhere. 

[Mark:] Exactly. 

[Joshua:] Yeah, and even if I wouldn't use the language of fairness, he gives us these pockets of opportunity that he's able to seek out. He's hired out, for instance, he can kind of make money on his own labor. At least at the beginning, Sophia offers to teach him to read. He's saying there were these moments of possibility where I saw what could be and what could have been, and which were almost certainly foreclosed elsewhere. So if the brutality of this is something while you're seeing me go through, like you're saying, just imagine what it's like elsewhere. It really does, I think, operate as this useful lens for him as an author and I think for for the readership. 

[Mark:] So you were mentioning how The Narrative starts with sort of an absence of Douglass's family, but later in The Narrative there is an incident, a passage devoted to his grandmother. 

[Joshua:] Oh my gosh. 

[Mark:] Why did you react that way? It seems like lots of readers react, recoil, when we think of that moment, but how would you describe what Douglass does there? 

[Joshua:] Well, one, it's the moment of dashed hope and expectation, because you could say Douglass is a kind of optimist, right, but really in that moment his sense is, well, look, she's nursed everyone here from the time they were born, including the man who claims ownership over our flesh. Certainly they will free her, like there's really no argument against her having a better life. And instead she’s sent to live in the woods and what he basically describes is this kind of ramshackle box and she's alone, which I just find fascinating in that passage. So it's not just the disrespect of her not being manumitted, of her not being set free, but the idea that now she has to be lonely as well, she has to be away from her grandchildren, and all of these human beings that come from her right and were raised by her and are alive because of her. And the fact that he names that is one of the kind of primary moral failures, the fact that they set her out to be alone, I just found astonishing. And it's such an interesting counter image to something like Tony Morrison's vision of the clearing in Beloved where actually the woods are this site of gathering, almost worship. It's a place where her character Baby Suggs delivers a sermon on loving your flesh. And instead what we have here is this kind of shadow of that moment, where it's this moment of ultimate disrespect and she's essentially left out to die in the woods. So that that's part of why I recoiled. I was talking to my wife Pam about this and just how heartbreaking it was that that really is—and I appreciate you pointing it out, too, because kinship is one of these major elements I highlight in my introduction to the book, and it's a no small part because it's a big deal that he doesn't know when he was born, he doesn't know who his father is, that he's alienated from his mother from the time he's small, and that really the only way he's able to foster something like friendship is through literacy, in the act of passing on education. So there's something there that's quite powerful about Douglass as, yes, this kind of heroic figure who stands alone, almost, by necessity, but also as someone who is who's alienated materially from people who could hold him up and say well, actually, no, you're part of us, you're part of this group and not just in an abstract sense. 

[Mark:] Yeah, and this actually goes back to what you were saying at the beginning of our conversation, how Douglass structures his argument metonymically, where he's not going to try to gobble up the millions of horror stories; he's just going to use one old lady that's his grandmother or Demby, just one incident with Demby, to reveal the depths of the horror and there's got to be some brilliant strategy behind that. 

[Joshua:] Yeah, I think that's right. Again, even in the selection of the scenes, you mentioned Demby and he's killed by Mr. Gore. The idea is that he's selecting these scenes that have this unique symbolic power. He's organizing the chapters in that they almost each seem to have a kind of argument or image system to them, and it's masterful. We haven't talked at all about duration—maybe we will the next time we have a conversation—but I think it's part of why the book has really lasted. It's a structural thing, too. 

[Mark:] Tell me about duration. What's your observation along those lines? 

[Joshua:] The book has a sense of permanence to it, even at the level of reading. You get the sense that this is someone who believed that he was creating a document that would stand the test of time, and he wanted to organize it that way. I think the use of biblical allusion—we talked about the kind of audience purposes of that—but I think it also was to ground its footing in something ancient, and say that, look, we are trying to create a new moment, a new vista with this book. This book is meant to break something open and I think part of why it's lasted is that he really does balance the kind of depravity, the gratuitous evil, the bloodbath of slavery. He balances that with the remarkable meditative tenacity, the persistence, the eloquence, the resilience of the enslaved. He does his best to balance those things. And in the middle of it, he presents himself as this figure that emerges at the intersection of those two streams, who is ingenious, who is self-fashioned. There is clearly some Emersonian elements to this—not just in the book but in his later speeches—but also could not have made it without the people who loved him. And I think there's something to that. I think students in high school, younger students—I first encountered this book as a high school junior, and I think that's part of what made it stick for me. How could he possibly have survived all of this? And at the end of it said, but there are still more, there are still more people in chains, and so I must stand and give an account. I mean he's embodying the best of what we can accomplish in this country. 

[Mark:] Maybe the last thing I'd like to ask you about for this episode is something you alluded to earlier, and that is the note that Douglass ends his Narrative on, which is the appendix, or an afterthought, where he talks about religion. It's almost like he reread his narrative and said, wait, I really want to make sure I'm being clear about this. What is his stance about religion and why do you think he put that appendix in there? 

[Joshua:] Yeah, so he opens it essentially by saying, given the kind of strength of my critique of Christianity in this book, there were people who would doubt whether I was a Christian at all, and actually the thing I'm articulating is that I'm interested in a true, robust Christianity, and not the hypocritical Christianity of the slaver. And then he just outlines this beautiful dialectical process where he's like, look, how can you publicly proclaim mercy and grace and chastity, and then, in these spaces where you're enslaving people, you are brutal and unforgiving and rapists! You've created this kind of ultimately evil enterprise founded in greed while publicly proclaiming this kind of Christian identity that would absolve you of not just the guilt but almost seems to be a kind of transportive force, like it's almost hallucinatory. I think Douglass seems to help us think about like, yeah, dude, you're trying to pretend you're someone else through this Christian identity, when in actuality, you're like Covey, you're devilish. This is demonic, this is an evil thing that destroys the Earth, it destroys human life, and it's destroying you. And so he puts it almost this postlude in a way that I really appreciate it. Like, that's the final note, not just my freedom, which is great, that's a beautiful way to end the story, he's free, he gets married, there's a marriage plot, but he comes back and says, oh, actually, and one more thing. You people who think you're good Christians out there, you're not. You're not even really practicing Christianity—you're practicing something evil and God doesn't love that.  It's so prophetic, even in this biblical tradition he's the prophet, he's trying to come down like Elijah, like Amos. He's saying you don't love justice, you don't love mercy, you don't walk humbly with your God, and you must repent. You must change your mind. 

[Mark:] Joshua Bennett, thank you so much for joining us on the Norton Library podcast. 

[Joshua:] Mark, thanks a ton. This was great. 

[Mark:] The Norton Library edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, edited by Joshua Bennett is available now in paperback and ebook. Check out the links in the description to this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library including the full catalog of titles. 

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