Comparison of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Up From Slavery, and The Interesting Narrative by Olaudah Equiano : Literacy, Freedom, and Slavery

 

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In The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, it is clear that education and literacy for Frederick Douglass are ultimately the keys to the freedom (intellectually and physically) that Douglass eventually gains. However, becoming literate and educated is not enough alone to make him free as he must learn to make his education useful and overcome the many ways in which it is burdensome. Like Equiano’s narrative and Booker T. Washington in Up From Slavery, education and literacy are the paths to freedom but being an educated and literate slave is a dangerous thing to be in a society that wishes to keep slaves ignorant. On a larger level, what all three of these texts share in common is a understanding of the connection between literacy and freedom from slavery and more importantly, they all make use of reading and writing to share their stories and try to promote freedom and equality for all, thus literacy functions on an individual and grand scale.

 

In his Narrative, Frederick Douglass frequently makes the reader aware how important education and literacy are to his freedom. He sees reading as a means of escape and knows that through the power of words he can find a way out of the dreadful condition of slavery. Although he always appears to think deeply about the situation around him, his understanding of how to escape forever comes when he first begins to establish some level of literacy. When Sophia Auld first teaches him to read, he delights in the basics and wishes to learn more. Hugh Auld, however, admonishes his wife about teaching Douglass to read, saying in one of the important quotes from The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, “Learning would forever spoil the best slave in the world…it would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become manageable and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy” (Narrative 36). While on the one hand Douglass, especially because of this reaction his ability to read elicits, says, “from that moment on, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom (Narrative 37) it became clear rather quickly that Hugh Auld was right about how his newfound literacy might impact his wellbeing.

 

At one point, after Douglass began to read more complex materials, especially in terms of orations related to slavery and abolitionism, he began to feel that his literacy became a burden, saying, “I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy. It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but offered me no ladder upon which to get out” (Narrative 61). When Douglass says this, he means that education and the ability to read and understand new ideas that would have otherwise been forbidden to him as a slave to hear is something that has made him understand too much. The “horrible pit” he speaks of is his true understanding of the horrors and vast inequalities of slavery but he has no way to forget the things he knows and be content. While Hugh Auld’s attitude is something to be condemned, for a literate slave like Douglass, life would never be easy after the doors opened by literacy were opened. While education and literacy in The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass opened the author's eyes and mind to new ideas that were exciting and offered him intellectual freedom, under the system of slavery, even this intellectual freedom was not enough to truly free him; in fact, it made him feel less free at times.

 

The attitude expressed by Hugh Auld is similar to many other figures represented in slave narratives. Slaveholders knew that education and literacy would make slaves more inclined to revolt and thus, in order to keep them complacent, they discouraged reading and anything that might encourage independent thought. While Hugh Auld expressed his anger that a slave should read, this same event occurred during the narrative of Equiano. At one point, while trying to reason with a white man, he is told that he is not supposed to be educated or even speak good English.  “Captain Doran said I talked too much English; and if I did not behave myself well, and be quiet, he had a method on board to make me” (Equiano 77).While Equiano eventually bought his own freedom with money, this is something he could not have done without an educational basis. Like Douglass, he found many people who were willing to help him become educated and gain literacy and while his story is different than that of Frederick Douglass, the two men are similar because they both eventually used their newfound literacy for individual freedom and then went on to write autobiographies that attempted to promote freedom for all. As this thesis statement for The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and other authors suggests, the power of words and literacy in the lives of both of these former slaves proves cannot be underestimated because without the ability to read and write, neither would have been able to progress to the level of freedom they both enjoyed later in life.

 

Being educated within the institution of slavery was difficult for Douglass to cope with. After being under the “care” of the cruel master Covey, Douglass begins to regret his education and feel that it is all worthless and wasted. At one point he says, “My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died: the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute” (Narrative 48). Since during his stay with Covey he was separated from educated and the environment that allowed him to have more intellectual freedom and time to think, he was being transformed into a mere beat of burden. In other words, without his education and ability to use his literacy, he is a beast rather than a man.

 

 

 

Works Cited

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Yale UP, 2004.

Equiano, Olaudah, and Vincent Carretta Ed. Interesting Narrative and Other Writings. New York: Penguin Classics, 1998.

Washington, Booker T. Up From Slavery Penguin, New York, 1992.

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