Los relatos de esclavos fugitivos y la representación de sí: los casos de Frederick Douglass y William Welles Brown

Abstract

By focusing on a selection of Frederick Douglass’s and William Wells Brown’s antebellum works, this article examines how representations of slavery evolved through time. It shows how the historical and material conditions in which slave autobiographies were produced influenced their content. By analyzing the narrative sequencing and thematic choices made in Douglass’s and Brown’s seminal accounts, this article demonstrates that slave authors had little leeway for freedom of expression as they were merely representatives of an ideological cause. Abolitionists instrumentalized slave authors’ lives in an effort to make slave narratives encompassing and representative of slaves’ experiences under slavery - albeit at the expense of absolute veracity. An examination of these authors’ later works assesses to what extent their growing literary and editorial freedom modified their representation of slavery. Interestingly enough, the latter reveals that Douglass and Brown chose to fictionalize other people’s lives while rewriting themselves in the process.