Baptista 1

Michael Baptista

Dr. Coykendale

LITR 315

31 October 2013

Response to Equiano and Lady Montagu

One of the most striking things a reading of The Interesting Narrative

of the Life of Oluadah Equiano presents is found in the way Equiano has

crafted a potent treatise on the nature of slavery in Africa and Europe and

how it manifests itself in very different ways due to two strikingly different

cultural contexts. In the second chapter of his autobiography, Equiano con-

tinues an argument he proffers throughout the text—that the European slave

trade is reflective of a barbarous immorality implicit in “civilized” European

culture and contrast this brutishness with the relatively pure and innocent

state of African culture before contact with the white world. Equiano uses

the literary and social conventions of his time in order to do this, and as a re-

sult, has left us a thoroughly engaging and poignant rejoinder to the slave

trade.

Equiano’s narrative echoes four key stages of the African slave trade,

following his removal from an idyllic life in his home of Eboe by a rival tribe

and subsequent harrowing journey to the coast, then a Middle Passage in

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which he is carried across the Atlantic amidst hellish conditions that leave a

deep impression on his psyche, an introduction to life as a slave in the West

Indes where he is finally auctioned and shipped off to the Americas. As we

follow Equiano through this journey, we experience it first hand—the terror of

being kidnapped from your home, the grief of losing all family ties, the terror

of passage across the ocean in a disease-ridden ship, the experience of

forced labor in a diseased environment—all terrors with which his reader can

empathize. This seems to continue Equiano’s argument for the humanization

of the African in his readers minds. He is constantly concerned with helping

his reader to not only understand the ills of the slave trade empirically, but

emotionally as well.

Another interesting prong of Equiano’s argument is the way he con-

nects his tribe—and Africa as a whole by extension—to the Hebrew patri-

archs. By using familiar cultural allusions, he is able to farme his argument

in both a recognizable and persuasive way. Here, we see a somewhat trou-

bling deference to European culture as he seems to be drawing an analogy

between the Hebrews and the Africans. Like the pre-cursors to the Is-

raelites, the Africans have not been exposed to God’s revelation and holy

land, and like them, they are nonetheless as holy as Abraham and Jacob

were. This is one example of the way Equiano frames his argument in Chris-

tian terms easily recognizable to his audience. He is not only using the expe-

rience of himself and other Africans as persuasion to convince whites for the
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moral superiority for abolition, he uses quite effectively by throwing the reli-

gious conventions of the time back at the proponents of the slave trade or

those more on the fence. He writes, “O, ye, nominal Christians! might not an

African ask you, learned you this from your God, who says unto you, Do unto

all men as you would men should do unto you?” (Equiano Loc 655).

I see a similar tactic in Lady Monatgu’s letters. She expresses some

rather liberal views of femininity for her time, through a traditional literary

form, the epistolary genre. Like Equiano’s use of the travel narrative,

Monatagu uses a popular form in order to frame sensitive issues through a

tempered yet recognizable frame. While Monatgu doesn’t address slavery in

her letters, she does touch on a type of cultural submission—women’s roles

in European society. While all of her letters were not necessarily intended

for public consumption, some certainly were, and many eventually circulated

within the literary world. In her Letter to Wortley, Lady Monatgu dispels may

popular options of femininity, such as their dependence on “charms of show”

(BA 613), and ends with a shocking statement of her independence, “I take

more pains to approve my conduct to myself than to the world” (BA 613).

This letter breaks a cultural taboo in being written by a woman to a man, but

does so in a methodical way following the conventions of the epistolary

genre. In doing so, Lady Monatgu, like Equiano, is able to bring poignant so-

cial issues into discussion in a tempered way.

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In conclusion, I believe Equiano and Lady Montagu deftly criticized cul-

tural norms of their times by shrouding their discourse in popular literary

forms, exposing their arguments to the widest possible audience, and fram-

ing them in reason. By appealing to many post-Enlightenment sentiments,

the two authors are able to craft narratives that remain today as shining ex-

amples of subversive thought in the 18th Century.