Our Nig and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Essay 1 Our Nig and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Our Nig and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass are both works of black authors whose intentions were clearly to promote some sort of social change in the very inequal societies at that time. They are based on personal experiences of Harriet Wilson and Frederick Douglass. However, their texts were created in very different environments and their initial goals could vary too. They both chosen different style and rhetoric in their writings, but at the same time they were driven by the same interest to remain at most reliable.

When comparing these works it is important to be aware that there is not much in common between Douglass's text and that of Wilson. Whereas Douglass describes his own experience as a slave, Wilson uses her character Frado who is forced to work as a servant. Douglass's work is a first-person narrative unlike Wilson's third person narrative novel. Moreover, they were from the antagonistic environments, Wilson lived in the industrial and liberal North compare to Douglass, who was born as a slave in the agricultural and conservative South. Finally, what is crucial and what is reflected in their texts is the fact that Wilson is a woman whereas Douglass is a man. This undoubtedly plays a high role in their composition and approach to readers due to their different points of view. They lived in the 19th century, at a time of huge inequality not only between whites and blacks, but also between males and females. This was visible even in the different treating with female slaves, "The secret of master’s cruelty toward “Henny” is found in the fact of her being almost helpless." (Douglass 49) The same evidence we can find in Our Nig, Frado is constant target of violence because of her defenceless, because she is a girl. Only when she dared to oppose and abandoned her submissive role, she escaped the beatings, "By this unexpected demonstration, her mistress, in amazement, dropped her weapon, desisting from her purpose of chastisement." (Wilson 66)

After all, it is not surprising that Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Our Nig have completely different composition and style. Douglass's tone through his work is emotional, but reserved and cool altogether. We can see he is compassionate with the other slaves and sensitive when he sees them suffer. But at the same time there is unquestionable reserved tone in his description, it is clear that it is caused by his intention to persuade the readers and look maximum trustworthy. Being overly emotional would make his narration undoubtedly less reliable and would undermine the purpose of his work. Due to his personal experience with horrors of slavery, it is evident that he tries to hide his anger on slavery and instead of it shows injustice, sadness and misfortune it brings. Douglass's language may sound a little stilted, but due to the fact he wrote it in 1841 it is unbeliavably readible. His style is very straightforward and quite simple, again is visible his intention to be as much understandable as possible. Trying to catch attention and keeping it, Douglass does not use complicating or long sentences. On the contrary, his language is informal as if it were only him and you. In overall, his text is coherent and catchy, it is astounding that it was written by a former slave whose path to education was full of difficulties. One of the most important point Douglass makes in his narrative is decision to mark slavery as the absolute evil, not the people who implemented it or supported it. For instance, "Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me. Under its influence, the tender heart became stone, and the lamblike disposition gave way to one of tiger-like fierceness." (Douglass 32) Of course he described many slaveholders as extremely cruel and spiteful, but at the same time he still tries to stay a little bit reserved and attributes it to their religious zeal or establishment of slavery that corrupted them. For example, "Mr. Hopkins could always find something of this sort to justify the use of the lash...And yet there was not a man any where round, who made higher professions of religion, or was more active in revivals,—more attentive to the class, love-feast, prayer and preaching meetings, or more devotional in his family." (Douglass 68) This attitude when Douglass prefers to attack mainly the system shows that he had political motivation, because it is easier to get people on your side when you say they are victims instead of victimizers. Furthermore, he tries to challenge the idea that blacks are more stupid compare to whites by admitting that black slaves are often more narrow-minded, but