Description

In The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Douglass recounts an event pivotal to his transformation from a slave to a freeman: the moment of liberation comes with literacy. While slavery in the United States was typically considered to be a legal regime, the primacy Douglass places upon his liberation through literacy reveals his conception of enslavement as a more complex status than that defined by law. Douglass, writing extensively of his own freedom years before he travels north, clearly defines freedom neither by the absence of external constraint nor by the ability to do what one pleases. In the process of defining slavery and freedom and in recounting his transformation from slave to freeman, Douglass thrusts himself into the public sphere and invites his readers to join him—to hear his claims to the virtues of justice and toleration and to make judgments about the authenticity of those claims, guided by the capacity for perception and judgment, and with a nod to common values, that the text itself seeks to unearth and shape.