Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- In Respect to Egotism
- Introduction: Writing, Reading, Romanticism
- 1 “Where … Is This Singular Career to Terminate?”: Bewildered Pilgrims in Early American Fiction
- 2 “Where There Is No Vision, the People Perish.…”: Prophets and Pariahs in the Forest of the New World
- 3 Poe: Romantic Center, Critical Margin
- 4 Emerson: Experiments in Self-Creation
- 5 Hawthorne: “The Obscurest Man of Letters in America”
- 6 Thoreau's Self-Perpetuating Artifacts
- 7 Melville: Romantic Cock-and-Bull; or, The Great Art of Telling the Truth
- 8 Douglass and Stowe: Scriptures of the Redeemed Self
- 9 Whitman: “Take Me as I Am or Not at All.…”
- Interchapter: Walt and Emily
- 10 Dickinson's “Celestial Vail”: Snowbound in Self-Consciousness
- Notes
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
8 - Douglass and Stowe: Scriptures of the Redeemed Self
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- In Respect to Egotism
- Introduction: Writing, Reading, Romanticism
- 1 “Where … Is This Singular Career to Terminate?”: Bewildered Pilgrims in Early American Fiction
- 2 “Where There Is No Vision, the People Perish.…”: Prophets and Pariahs in the Forest of the New World
- 3 Poe: Romantic Center, Critical Margin
- 4 Emerson: Experiments in Self-Creation
- 5 Hawthorne: “The Obscurest Man of Letters in America”
- 6 Thoreau's Self-Perpetuating Artifacts
- 7 Melville: Romantic Cock-and-Bull; or, The Great Art of Telling the Truth
- 8 Douglass and Stowe: Scriptures of the Redeemed Self
- 9 Whitman: “Take Me as I Am or Not at All.…”
- Interchapter: Walt and Emily
- 10 Dickinson's “Celestial Vail”: Snowbound in Self-Consciousness
- Notes
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Summary
In the last chapter of his Narrative, Frederick Douglass relates how surprised he was to find a thriving black community in New Bedford, Massachusetts, when he arrived there in 1838:
The most astonishing as well as the most interesting thing to me was the condition of the colored people, a great many of whom, like myself, had escaped thither as a refuge from the hunters of men. I found many, who had not been seven years out of their chains, living in finer houses, and evidently enjoying more of the comforts of life, than the average of slaveholders in Maryland.
So much, Douglass seems to suggest, for the vaunted economic advantages of the slaveholding system! Douglass also believed the former slaves were more alive morally than their erstwhile masters. The black community, he notes, was remarkably “spirited.”
Perhaps this characterization helps to explain an incident in Chapter 2 of Moby-Dick when Ishmael, just arrived in New Bedford at a time, presumably, when he might have rubbed shoulders with Douglass, wanders into a prayer meeting:
It seemed the great Black Parliament sitting in Tophet. A hundred black faces turned round in their rows to peer; and beyond, a black Angel of Doom was beating a book in a pulpit. It was a negro church; and the preacher's text was about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing there.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- In Respect to EgotismStudies in American Romantic Writing, pp. 213 - 228Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991