Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, Frederick Douglass - Lucinda H. MacKethan (essay date winter 1986)


Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, Frederick Douglass - Lucinda H. MacKethan (essay date winter 1986)

Lucinda H. MacKethan (essay date winter 1986)

SOURCE: MacKethan, Lucinda H. “From Fugitive Slave to Man of Letters: The Conversion of Frederick Douglass.” Journal of Narrative Technique 16, no. 1 (winter 1986): 55-71.

[In the following essay, MacKethan explores Douglass's struggle to establish mastery over language and literature as a means of achieving full human and civil rights.]

To be an “American slave” was to be a man denied manhood in a country which defined men as beings endowed by their creator with the inalienable right to freedom. To be a “fugitive American slave” was to be a man seeking to claim title to the specifically American definition of man by finding a “territory” where that definition would legally apply. And to be a “fugitive American slave narrator” was to be a man seeking in a written document to prove that the free territory had successfully been appropriated through language, so that the...

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