Transatlantic Literary Exchanges, 1790-1870 by Julia M. Wright Kevin Hutchings

Author:Julia M. Wright, Kevin Hutchings [Julia M. Wright, Kevin Hutchings]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social
ISBN: 9781409478850
Google: CvahAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Published: 2013-05-28T02:52:39+00:00

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Douglass’s theorization of the color line in the 1881 essay drew upon his experience of being a slave in the United States and a fugitive, and then a free man in Europe and the United States. In order to find examples of nationalist and regional prejudice to contextualize the experiences of African Americans, he figuratively crosses the Atlantic. Right at the start of his essay, he shifts the argument about contemporary race issues away from the United States and into a distinctively different context, stating that racial prejudice of some kind has been experienced in ‘all nations’.35 He reflects upon the role of prejudice in the development of national self-consciousness and the construction of nations, using as an example in his second paragraph the Norman conquest of England:

Long after the Norman invasion and the decline of Norman power, long after the sturdy Saxon had shaken off the dust of his humiliation and was grandly asserting his great qualities in all directions, the descendants of the invaders continued to regard their Saxon brothers as made of coarser clay than themselves, and were not well pleased when one of the former subject race came between the sun and their nobility.

Douglass uses alliterative clichés such as ‘sturdy Saxon’ and ‘coarser clay’. This almost distracts from his purpose which is to link Saxons and enslaved African Americans. He continues,

Though eight hundred years have passed away since Norman power entered England, and the Saxon has for centuries been giving his learning, his literature, his language, and his laws to the world more successfully than in any other people on the globe, men in that country still boast their Norman ancestry and Norman perfections.

Douglass’s indebtedness to the work of the Scottish writer Walter Scott helps us to understand the way in which this analogy is situated. Elsewhere he claimed that he had adopted the surname ‘Douglass’ from a character in Scott’s poem, ‘The Lady of the Lake’ (1810).36 The hugely popular writer had a substantial transatlantic following and his novel Ivanhoe (1819) establishes parameters for one influential nineteenth-century version of Norman/Saxon relationships, centring on twelfth-century England and protagonists who include the Saxon Wilfred of Ivanhoe, who is loyal to the Norman King Richard I (despite his own Saxon inheritance and his father’s hostility) and the Norman Brian de Bois-Guilbert, both newly returned from the Crusades. Scott’s novel represents the prejudice and contestations existing between Christians and non-Christians (notably, Jews, but – offstage – Saracens too), and the ancient rights and traditions of the Saxons versus those of the Norman invaders.37 Issues of nation-building combine with questions of ancient rights in many of Scott’s works.

In Douglass’s essay, African Americans and Saxons each experience the prejudice of others, so much so that ethnicity and history are transcended as Saxons and African Americans become effectively identical. Douglass here draws upon what has been called a tradition of ‘black Anglo-Saxonism’ in which England bears associations of cultivation, respectability and liberty, characteristics available to be claimed by all those who aspire to them.

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