The Novelization of Voice in Early African American Narrative

Abstract

During the African American literary renaissance of the 1850s, the act of narrating was novelized in many slave narratives. But Frederick Douglass's Hemic Slave (1853) and William Wells Brown's Clotel: Or, The President's Daughter (1853) are particularly noteworthy because they assert the importance of the fictive to the representation of facts in ways that empower these texts as novels, not as autobiographies. Brown and Douglass problematize the relative status of the factual and the fictive in their texts in order to raise questions about the nature and source of authority in narrative. These texts suggest that authority is not an inherent part of narrative discourse (whether factual or fictive) but rather a function of discourses as facilitated by the narrating voice.

Visual Culture and Fictive Technique in Frederick Douglass'sThe Heroic Slave

“…to the shores of fact'. 31 But the paucity of those facts provides the opportunity for fictive disclosure and visual inference. Readers can only imagine the complexity of the experiences occurring between the occasional moments at which Washington's life story traverses Listwell's.…”

“…Fictive displacement that flourished outside the 'self-authentication, that is self-authorizing' of the black narrator, with its intrinsic link to African American interests, Douglass was quick to suggest, was laden with political risk. 21 If the renown of Stowe's work was such that 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' could be locally understood as her New England residential address, then Douglass's response subtly underlined the hazards of such geographical and material displacement. Intimately familiar with the plantation landscape of the slave South, the restrictions it placed on the movement of African Americans and the dangers they faced in any encounter with whites, Douglass's journey across the benign terrain of small-town Massachusetts is marked by the naive misdirection of well-meaning New Englanders, who lead him not to the modest dwelling of a lowly slave, but to 'an edifice .…”

“…18 William Andrews describes The Heroic Slave's introduction of 'the fictive voice into the tradition of African American narrative' as 'the most radical experiment in nineteenth-century black American writing'. 19 That 'radical experiment' was, by definition, a moment of aesthetic invention, creating a composite fiction of the black narrator as visual and verbal artist, and, correspondingly, of the narrated black subject as a heroically conceived art object in a landscape configured by black knowledge. Douglass's newspaper article is key to positioning his visionary narrative of slave heroism as a counterpoint to the topography of southern slavery charted in Uncle Tom's Cabin because it constructs a viewing point from which the comparative penetration of parallel writerly gazes may properly be judged.…”

Revisions, Rememories and Exorcisms: Toni Morrison and the Slave Narrative

“…And finally, the narrating itself, the voice that embodies the " producing narrative action," the storytelling would have to sound truthful or risk suspicion about its sincerity. 14 The slave wanting to tell his story had to follow conventions agreeable to a white audience and shaped by the discourses which defined minority experience within that society. The opportunities for personal empowerment for the slave, and narrative empowerment for the ex-slave telling his own story were therefore limited by the structure and structuring assumptions of the classic narrative.…”