Literary Celebrity and Public Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States by Bonnie O'Neill

Author:Bonnie O'Neill [O'Neill, Bonnie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Popular Culture, Literary Criticism, American, General, History, United States, 19th Century
ISBN: 9780820351575
Google: nSg6DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2017-10-15T04:12:09+00:00

CHAPTER 4

FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Celebrity, Privacy, and the Embodied Self

ON AUGUST 11, 1841, FREDERICK DOUGLASS SPOKE BEFORE THE CONvention of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society at Nantucket, Massachusetts. The occasion was not Douglass’s debut as a public speaker; his remarks at an antislavery meeting in New Bedford just two days before had earned him an invitation to Nantucket, and, indeed, Douglass had been honing his oratorical skills since his years in slavery.1 Douglass’s Nantucket appearance nevertheless takes on symbolic importance in his story as the moment at which he became a public figure. It was the first time that William Lloyd Garrison heard Douglass speak, as he reflects in his introduction to Douglass’s Narrative: “I shall never forget his first speech at the convention—the extraordinary emotion it excited in my own mind—the powerful impression it created upon a crowded auditory, completely taken by surprise—the applause which followed from the beginning to the end of his felicitous remarks.”2 This notion of surprise is fundamental to Douglass’s career as a public lecturer and antislavery activist: everything about his public performances was at variance with the social expectations and racial presumptions of his audiences. For his part, Douglass played on the rhetorical uses of his surprising publicity in various ways, presenting himself as an eloquent former slave, a mocking critic of slavery’s logical inconsistencies, and a defiant outsider to the cultural privileges associated with white nationalism.

Douglass’s Nantucket speech initiated his new career as a lecturer, first for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and then, from 1842, for the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS). Throughout the 1840s, Douglass rose from obscurity to local notice, then, with the publication of his Narrative in 1845, he became a celebrity of the first order. Significantly, Douglass’s emergence on the national stage coincides with Emerson’s growing celebrity. I have argued that Emerson’s message as a public speaker was complicated by audiences’ responses to his physical presence on the lecture platform. For Douglass, the significance of his physical presence is shaped by his specific experience in ways that did not affect Emerson or, indeed, most popular lecturers of the moment. Emerson exemplifies a privileged form of public participation made possible in part by an intensely felt and carefully guarded privacy. The case is far different for Douglass, for whom attaining personhood is impossible. Karen Sanchez-Eppler has argued that “for both women and blacks” in the public spheres of abolition and women’s rights, “their physical difference from the cultural norms of white masculinity obstructs their claim to personhood.” For black public speakers, the physical self can never be forgotten or ignored: “the body of the slave attains the status of a text” by virtue of both the scars of slavery and, according to medical pseudoscience, through anatomical structures that supposedly suit the black body to socially inferior labor and status.3 Audiences’ responses to black public speakers inevitably conform to prejudgments based on their racialized expectations, which rule out the black speakers’ authority to participate in the debates of the public sphere, let alone to possess the “genius” commonly ascribed to Emerson.

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