The Changes Of Cultural Identities-An Interpretation Of Frederick Douglass' Three Autobiographies

Frederick Douglass (1818?—1892) is a talented black orator, editor, abolitionist, and one of the most powerful voices emerging from the American civil rights movement—whose experiences are complex and eventful. His social status is improving all his life during which he completed three autobiographies: Narrative of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself, My Bondage and My Freedom, and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself. Most critics at home and abroad starting from the perspective of slave narrative have attained thoughtful insights by interpreting his autobiographies due to its huge amount of slave narratives.In this thesis different cultural identities of Douglass presented in three autobiographies, published in different times, will be discussed. The first cultural identity Douglass establishes in the first autobiography is a black slave—a member of the trampled marginal cultural group, a man not belonging to himself, a man who has seen and heard many bloody deeds towards slaves. But he chooses a different road of his slave brothers. He escapes. In the second Douglass shows himself a free (from his cultural perspective) man with more rationality. He could get what he earned by his hand and live on it. He has independent thinking at the free time. He got to the point that the devil was slavery which also exerted damaging effects on slaveholders. He writes with reason and his thinking wavers out of his former purely marginal cultural identity. After the deconstruction of his marginal cultural identity, Douglass constructs his hybrid cultural identities by his accepting of both the mainstream culture and the marginal culture and being accepted by both cultures. Douglass presents himself before us is a political celebrity with relatively reconciling political view. Slavery has been abolished for about thirty years and slaves have begun their freedom, at least legally. The intensified situation is relaxed to some degree.Douglass presents himself with different cultural identities with different events he experiences. The three autobiographies can be read as a processing history of Douglass with the different cultural identities as he struggles on.