English 2850 Fall 2022: Great Works of World Literature II

“Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me. When I went there, she was a pious, warm, and tender-hearted woman. There was no sorrow or suffering for which she had not a tear. She had bread for the hungry, clothes for the naked, and comfort for every mourner that came within her reach. Slavery soon proved its ability to divest her of these heavenly qualities. Under its influence, the tender heart became stone, and the lamblike disposition gave way to one of tiger-like fierceness.”

This passage emphasizes the emotional and psychological toll slavery has on not just anyone but the most tender person. It is seen that slaves went through physical hardships taking beats straight to the naked body. But, what can never be felt thru a passage is how it impacts their mental health. The feeling of being isolated and not having nobody to help them. Anyone who is forced into slavery does not know anything but constant hardships. As a slave, you must work to live, there is no compassion and tenderness when slavery is the limiting factor.

Douglass attempts to paint a picture that the reader just could never feel. The dark tone throughout the passage help emphasizes the tragedies, making them stand out. The images Douglass helps create spark questions. Is it even possible to go through all those tragedies and still become the person you are meant to be? With a smile, head high, still, looking for the good in everyone? If not, then what would they live like, how would they live a normal life in the world after? It seems to me that it is a change of heart they have to repeatedly go through, from convincing themselves there is no better life than what they are currently doing. By convincing themselves that everyone around them is there to hurt them. By convincing themselves nobody is here to ever look out for them, they say to themselves it’s really me vs. the world. Then in becoming an emancipated slave, they go back on everything that they have believed their entire life. They now have to fight and believe that there is a better life. After accepting that, they have to choose if that is just acceptable or if they are gonna rebel back against all of the years they have lost. In the end, we all are human beings. 

A passage from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass that made a strong impression on my reading, is in chapter 2, last paragraph (page 242). ““I am going away to the Great House Farm! O, yea! O, yea! O!”…This they would sing…”  In this passage, Douglass talks about the song that slaves sings when they were on their way to the Great House Farm. Douglass makes a connection with the slaves since he knows how they felt while they were singing this song. He highlights that for these slaves, singing a song does not mean that they are feeling excited or happy. In this case singing this song reveals the sadness of these slaves. Douglass defines the song as a “deep meaning” that only people who experience slavery would understand. Douglass experienced slavery during his childhood until he escaped and started to educate himself. He got to experience the slavery life and a life from the outside of this criminal world, that’s why Douglass started fighting against slavery. What this passage adds to my understanding of slavery in America is the power that slave owners have towards slaves. This affects their own lives and slave’s lives, because being so cruel to a group of people and treating them bad, would affect your mental health, in some cases, because some owners do not care about slaves, but only their families. Slaves did not have the option to be someone else, but slave. These people do not experience a happy life, but a criminal and fear life. This is when people of color like Frederick Douglass fight for a change in society because he knows the difference of being a young/ adult slave and a person who has rights and the right to choose what they want to be in life.  

In chapter VII paragraph 5 of the narrative, Douglass is voicing how slavery has affected his state of mind while also discovering more about the abolitionist movement. He starts the paragraph by stating “I often found myself regretting my own existence, and wishing myself dead” (254). This shows how slavery not only physically affected slaves but it took a toll on them mentally as well. Douglass mentions how he should have thought about killing himself and indicates how that would have led to freedom. Moreover, while he turned his attention to any conversation of that mentioned slavery he began learning about the world abolition. While I read the steps he took to find out what the word meant I wondered how he was able to get the newspaper that contained abolitionist petitions without getting caught. I think this also demonstrates how determined Douglass was with wanting to be educated. Further into the paragraph, he helps two Irishmen who ask Douglass “Are ye a slave for life?” (254) and who seem to feel sorry for his life as a slave. The Irishmen told him to run away to the north so he could be free but Douglass pretended to not understand what they were talking about. What I found most interesting about this lack of exchange is Douglass’ reaction to it. He didn’t believe that those two men were genuine with their intentions because white men would usually encourage slaves to run away so that they could catch them and get a reward. This demonstrates how slaves couldn’t trust anyone for the fear of being punished and shows another example of how psychologically tormented they were. Douglass did not want to take that risk but he did remember the advice of the two Irishmen as he notes towards the end of the paragraph. Furthermore, Douglass began learning how to write after that encounter which made me think about his diction and literary style in this narrative. His writing style felt very personal since he was retelling his life and was bringing the readers along with him on his journey. Consequently, this is why the story had a natural flow and was easy to understand. 

In Chapter VIII, page 256, second paragraph we have a comparison of animals and slaves during slavery in America, the home of the free, “We were all ranked together at the valuation. Men and women, old and young, married and single, we ranked with horses, sheep, and swine. There were horses and men, cattle and women, pigs and children”. Slaves weren’t seen or treated as humans. The slave owners which were white treated the slaves as objects that can be tossed around and whipped without feeling remorse. Also lowered the status of slaves to be equal to the ones as animals, giving a feeling that the slaves could be replaceable by animals. The slave owners even went ahead and evaluated slaves with animals categorizing them as equal. In addition this quote connects to a quote in the beginning of Chapter I, “by far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant” (Ch I, pg 236). Slavery was inhumane, treating people as animals based on their skin color and Fredrick Douglass knew that they weren’t allowed to gain knowledge because it would bring chaos and the slave owners didn’t want to deal with this since they had slaves working for them and profited from their labor. So, the slave owners knew it was better to keep them frightened to prevent them from rebelling. Soon, after Douglas gained the knowledge he understood why the master wanted him to remain “ignorant” and Douglas himself also damned having the knowledge to read. All of this reveals that in Douglas point of view, all slaves were treated as equal to animals and they were evaluated without regarding their emotions or say.

The passage I chose to analyze is the very last paragraph of chapter II in page 242, The passage starts with a part of a song slaves would sing when they were leaving to work at the Great House Farm. Douglass tells us how slaves used music as a sort of copying mechanism to deal with the lost of their freedom, or for some slaves like him that never had freedom to begin with and were born into the system of slavery. Often we connect music and songs with happiness and joy, but Douglass says that every time he heard the slaves sing about going to the Great Farm House it just made him depressed and sadden, and there where times where he even cried hearing the “wild notes” the slaves would sing. He talks about how those songs dehuminized slaves even more than they already were, and that it followed him throughout all of his life and made his hatred slavery grow even more. Douglass speaks of how people, and slaves themselves, would say the slaves were “happy” and that the singing was evidence of that, but Douglass states that slaves used to sing when they were the most unhappy, and how those songs represented the sorrow and sadness they were feeling. He makes a comment that said “The song of the slave represents the sorrow of their heart; and he is releaved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by tears.” which to me seems to mean that singing for slaves singing was their way of letting their sadness, anger and sorrows out for the world to see when they werent able to say their feeling out loud. Douglass even goes on to say how he himself has done the same thing, utilizing songs to represent his feeling towards slavery. 

In chapter VII of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, we get an insight of what it is like for a slave to has begun to learn and yearn for knowledge. As Douglass starts learning about his current situation, he sees his masters in a much darker way. “The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers” (253). He mentions that they were robbed from their homes and were diminished to mere slaves. In the chapter Douglass also mentions that the warning that Mr. Auld said was starting to become true. “As I writhed under it, I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing.” (254) He was found out that he was being taught how to spell by the mistress and was forbidden from continuing his education because once you teach a slave how to read, they would become “unmanageable and be of no value to his master” (250). This is important because it shows that slave owners want to keep the slaves oblivious to the outside world, and their goal is to keep slaves dumb because once you start education slaves, they might start thinking that they are more than just then and try to start revoting. Therefore, Douglass starts to mention this is a curse because he knows what is being done to them, but he cannot do anything about it. It another way of saying that ignorance is bliss if they don’t know what is being done to them then it won’t hurt them.  In a previous chapter Douglass mentioned the memory of Mr. Gore and Demby, I think this was important because Mr. Gore mentioned that he shot Demby because he was setting a bad example for other slaves. If one slaves start reading and start thinking the same way Douglass is thinking, then they would all start revolting and fighting against their Master.

I chose to analyze the following passage from Chapter 1 of the narrative in which Frederick Douglass talks about his relationship with his mother, “Never having enjoyed, to any considerable extent, her soothing presence, her tender and watchful care, I received the tidings of [my mother’s] death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger” (237). Douglass explains how he was separated from his mother a few months after his birth. This separation clearly distorted his chance of ever forming familial bonds with his mother and he never truly knew what it’s like to feel his mother’s love, “her soothing presence, her tender and watchful care” (237). This practice was commonly performed because the slaveowners viewed the babies of the enslaved as new property which they intended to sell off to other slaveowners. He goes on to explain how African American people were born as slaves and raised with this mentality from infancy. This passage helped open my eyes to, yet another horror of slavery and the unspeakable cruelty enslaved humans faced at the time. As I read the narrative, I noticed that Douglass writes in an informal storytelling style which made it easy to comprehend every little detail. He didn’t overcomplicate his writing with complex diction and syntax in the way that most writers tend to do to seem more formal. I felt as though he was directly speaking to me and telling me all about his life. It was completely unfiltered and adding in all the detailed accounts of his life made it feel more personal. After learning about what Frederick Douglass went through, I came to the realization that he was an extremely strong-headed person. Regardless of what situation he found himself in, he always managed to overcome everything that life threw at him.

Frederick Douglass

In chapter # Frederick Douglass describes his life in the “Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass” after he was enslaved; he was wondering if his father was his master or not. He didn’t spend so much time with his mother. His grandmother raised him. Before his father died, his mother usually came to see him after her fieldwork. At sunset, she came and spent that time with his son. By sunrise, his mother would go until evening. By his description, he didn’t spend much time with his mother. His mother died when he was seven years old. Even though people were in slavery, at least, when a woman gave birth to a child, they could spend time together as mother and son or daughter so they could have that strong relationship with their moms. Later, we can see how the enslaved people were treated poorly by their masters. The enslaved person was whipped until they were bleeding. When they tried to run away after their master caught them, they got beaten up by their master, and the enslaved person was not allowed to run away from their enslaver. From chapter # IV, From chapter # V to # VI, after Frederick went to Baltimore, throughout his slavery time, he started to learn how to read and write. His time in Baltimore was a rough thought because he was going back and forth between his old places and Baltimore. Because his master died, he should live based on the evaluation that the enslaver agreed to. As a result, he went back to Baltimore after the evaluation. By the time he spent his life in Baltimore, he had become an abolitionist who could fight for the end of slavery because people suffered from slavery. The question is, like slavery abolitionists in the same situation as Frederick Douglass?

In this little passage Douglass talks about how Mrs.Auld was taught to stop helping slaves have an education and how he no longer had assistance from her. Mrs.Auld would teach Douglass the ABC’s and how to spell. This is interesting because Mrs.Auld was probably the only slave owner that felt the need to education the slaves which was something that was considered unlawful at the time. The need to teach shows the special connection that Douglas and Mrs.Auld had. In addition it shows how cruel slavery was (slavery will always be cruel, but it just adds on to it) because the masters didn’t let the slaves have any sort of education because they taught that the slaves could retaliate if they did gain any sort of knowledge. When Douglass says he was saddened by losing the aid from his mistress, it shows how slavery doesn’t just take freedom away from the slaves but also from the masters that want to be able to treat each other equally, such as Mrs.Auld who was forced to be like any other slave owner. However even though he lost Mrs.Auld he says that it was a learning moment for him. For example when he says “by the merest accident, I had gained from my master”, he talks about how Mr.Auld said that education would make a slave unmanageable and how he would later on learn how to read and write. He understands how education is the key to freedom for all slaves as they can get guidance and new ideas that would make them unmanageable leading them to eventually to be free. Douglass learns two key points in this part of his life which is that slavery took freedom away from both sides ( the slaves and slave owners) and that education is a key concept on how slavery can be beat.