Arthur agreed to let me share his Essay 5, a remarkably thoughtful investigation into Douglass’s use of rhetoric. The key to Arthur’s success is that he always explains why Douglass uses the rhetorical ornaments he chooses: every ornament connects back to one of Douglass’s goals for the text. Look, for example, at his discussion of chiasmus in paragraph 3: he connects the moral inversion Douglass describes to the rhetorical inversion of his language.
Defining Slavery
In the last paragraph on page 10 in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, we see how Douglass is able to use mechanical ornaments to divulge a greater purpose. His use of these rhetorical tools, along with contrasting as well as emotionally sensitive imagery, is a call to the morality and sensibility of man.
One of Douglass’s main goals in the book is to show case the barbarity of slavery, and he accomplishes that in several different ways. In his first example, he shows his readers the lack of significance of the slave, in regard to the master. To emphasize the situation, he starts off with an inversion of the sentence, their sole work was to attend to this establishment; in Douglass’s version “to attend to this establishment” precedes the subject, highlighting the value of the work over the slave. Douglass inserts this sentence as an assessment, but the master himself has his own metric of relevance. By Colonel Lloyd’s measure, his horse is several times more important than a slave. The image of the horse produces the same effect as Douglass’s sentence inversion, by showing the extent at which the slave master will go to punish the old and young Barney on the horse’s behalf.
Douglass’s next step in making his case is an appeal to his own trustworthiness. He lets the intended audience, Caucasians, know that he isn’t just going to give some false account. He acknowledges the fact that sometimes the Barneys deserved to be whipped but got away with their misdeeds. This is paradoxical to Douglass’s epiphany that no man should have such power over another; that’s why we find the sentence in a chiasmus, “they were frequently whipped when least deserving and escaped whipping when most deserving it.” Douglass gives the sense that his testimony is not going to leave out any important aspects even the ones that don’t favor his own people; however by putting the barbarous part first it serves the dual role of introducing the lose-lose situation that a slave constantly finds himself in.
To describe this perplexing state of affairs, Douglass uses a hypotactic sentence with conduplicatio followed by an isocolon. He repeats the phrase “too…or too,” for instance “his food was too wet or too dry,” to illustrate how the slave is in no position to actually do what has master wants him to do; it is completely left to chance. Douglas drives the point home with the isocolon before ending the sentence. He says, “…he had too much hay, and not enough of grain; or he had too much grain and not enough of hay”; by using this along with the conduplicatio he stresses the slave’s struggle to do anything right in the eyes of his master. He concludes the thought with yet another inversion, “the slave must answer never a word,” symbolizing the hopeless condition of the slave.
Douglass knows that the power of his prose is nothing without an appeal to the emotions of the human spirit. He relies a lot more on imagery for this portion of his argument. In this paragraph Douglas refers to the old and the young Barney in the beginning, but then he focuses only on the senior. Sadly, the feelings that the image of an elderly man provokes, is more powerful than the image of some young adult. The effictio of old Barney’s “bald head” and “toil-worn shoulders,” followed by the number of lashes Douglass tells us old Barney has received up to at a time, is heart wrenching; we see the same kind of attempt when Douglass talks about his grandmother. If we link this image to the image of how well the horse is treated, we see the brunt of Douglass’s claim that slavery is savagely crude.
The effictio of Barney plays a key role in the ethopoeia of Colonel Lloyd who in this passage personifies slavery. By describing Colonel Lloyd’s treatment of the old and young Barney, Douglass is directly attacking his ex-master’s character; at the same time Douglass is attacking the institution as a whole. At the end of the passage Douglass informs us that it’s not just Colonel Lloyd but it’s his sons and sons-in-laws too; it’s not just the Barneys being dehumanized either, but the coach driver William Wilkes as well. In essence the passage is an ethopoeia of slavery itself.
In conclusion, the rhetorical elements in the passage allow Douglass to characterize slavery in an educated but plain way. The barrage of mechanical ornaments in some ways represents the numerous methods in which people like Douglass had to combat slavery. This paragraph’s use of the imagery to pounce on the book’s loudest theme, that slavery is out right wrong, is a goal that Douglass not only accomplishes here, but in the novel as a whole.
Thank you, Arthur!
