The Columbia History of the American Novel

1775 when the country was at war. His greatest fame came to him as a member of the Second Continental Congress and as America's minister to France. He was involved in working out the peace this country made with England after the war, and he signed the Treaty of Paris in 1782. Returning to America in 1785, as an elder statesman, he was a representative to the Constitutional Convention. By the time of his death in 1790, having transcended poverty, low birth, and limited education, he had become to many the embodiment of the dream that in America hard work, virtue, and respect for conventions were the keys to prosperity, independence, and happiness.

The Autobiography is Benjamin Franklin's most important written work. Notably, it was the first major text in American autobiography to break with the (Puritan) tradition of the spiritual narrative, and many claim it as the first truly American self-in-writing. Franklin wrote the first part (which, in his treatment of his Boston, early Philadelphia, and London life, resembles a picaresque novel) while in England in 1771; the second part (accounts of his library project and -35- his efforts at moral perfection) in France in 1784, after the Revolution; the third (a record of the 1730s through the 1750s) in America in 1788. The brief and incomplete fourth section (a memoir of London) was also written in America shortly before his death in 1790. This text was Franklin's interpretation of his life as the self-made man, the Franklin he constructed for the world to see. The writing of it was the making of that self in which the 'I' took full control of its own destiny. Primarily, Franklin uses his autobiography to promote the classic tale of the poor but talented boy who, through hard work, ability, and learning from his mistakes, makes a success of his life. Addressing his son in the first section, in a voice wise, humorous, and tolerant, the older man juxtaposes age and youth, and provides advice for the younger.

But Franklin's autobiography, the exemplary American text, is not the true life story of Benjamin Franklin. As G. Thomas Couser notes, from the beginning Franklin describes his text as the second corrected 'edition' of his life, suggesting that the 'life' itself was the first edition, and a text at that. Under these circumstances, his writing of his life was equivalent to editing a book, and the 'relation between narative and life, or history, is not between 'language' and the 'reality' to which it refers, but between one text and another that it revises.' As such, Couser points out that it is impossible to look through the autobiography for the life and the self behind the text. All the reader has for certain is the character with which he begins the narrative: a literal man of letters invented by the autobiographer. For, as Robert F. Sayre concludes, Franklin was writing to and about himself, developing a correspondence between his past and his present. Through his rich imagination he was able to create roles for himself (such as the waif who arrives in Philadelphia) that turned the narrative into an adventure permitting him to live out a variety of identities.

Ironically, within the decade following his death, several inaccurate partial versions of The Autobiography appeared. The first full edition, edited by his grandson Temple Franklin, was published in 1818, but critics remain divided on its accuracy of representation. As some experts conclude, even now Franklin's narrative resists publication in a 'truly authoritative text.' Still, few would deny its -36- achievement: the art of its autobiographical impulse and Franklin's historical place as a master craftsman in the writing of public prose.

While seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European settlers in America created autobiographical narratives by way of the explorer, Indian captivity, travel, and spiritual narratives, and finally through Benjamin Franklin's secular model American life, little or nothing was made of the presence and conditions of Africans or African slaves in their roles in the nation's beginnings. Slave status was equivalent to nonpersonhood and placed its victims outside the boundaries of the rights and privileges expected and enjoyed by the white population. By 1760, however, black autobiography was born, launching the slave narrative as America's second unique form of self- writing. White collaborations with Native Americans in the as-told-to life stories were preempted by more than seventy years when, in 1762, the first black document in this genre appeared, the product of a white amanuensis and a black subject. Between 1760 and 1798, the Revolutionary era, the partial experiences of fifteen African Americans appeared in print, five of them (of which four were self-written) by former slaves seeking to establish identities separate from their earlier slave status, while the remainder were criminal confessions written down by interested whites shortly before the execution of these men. In many cases, editions of the stories of those attempting to create 'other' than slave selves appeared in Ireland, England, and on the European continent, sometimes before their American publications. In To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro- American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (1986), William L. Andrews establishes the relationship between early slave narratives and American autobiography of that time.

In surveying this relationship, scholarship shows that at the beginning of the nineteenth century the former American colonies were settling into new nationhood as the Republic of the United States. The democratic state was grounded on the Declaration of Independence, which reinforced a national sense of individual rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Here was the ideal impetus toward autobiography. Few, if any, among those who found themselves leading the destiny of the new nation, or those enabled by its -37- new Constitution to participate in its progress, questioned the legitimacy of who automatically shared those rights and privileges, and who were excluded from that largesse and why. But if the country ignored the human dimensions of African American life, individually and collectively, African Americans, including slaves, did not internalize concepts of inferior human status to whites. From its eighteenth-century beginnings, the first one hundred years of African American autobiography is the story of women and men struggling to claim, in writing, for white readers, that they were human beings capable of telling the 'truth' of their experiences. In this context, the black 'I' and the white reader, with separate racial identities within the same culture, were forced toward a common reading of experience.

Slave narratives, the predominant genre in early African American writing, were the personal accounts of former slaves telling their own stories, first, in search of the psychological freedom that the bonds of physical slavery denied them prior to their escape from its shackles; and second, as propaganda weapons in the struggle for the abolition of that slavery. Information and reformation were the root motives driving their production. African Americans felt that moral and just whites, especially those in the North, needed to know, firsthand, the conditions of slavery, and to rise up to purge the country of its scourge. What the nation needed most, they would have said, was a mighty contingent of John Browns — white men and women willing to give their all for the honor of the democratic promises of the Constitution. While the most complex and personally interesting narratives in this tradition were written by their subjects, dozens of narratives were as-told-to life stories, generally mediated through the offices of white male amanuenses. Much scholarly debate on slave narratives focuses on the authenticity or lack of it of these latter, primarily on the editorial authority of the transcriber to compose, shape, and interpret the textual lives of the former slaves.

In addition to the slave narratives, spiritual autobiographies emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While escaped slaves condemned the 'peculiar' institution by indicting its atrocities, spiritual narrators claimed selfhood by way of equal access to the love and forgiveness of a black-appropriated Christian God, which therefore negated any notions that they were nonpersons as -38- whites would have them believe. Like the slave narratives, the spiritual narratives compelled a revisionary reading of the collective American experience. Thus, the slave and spiritual narratives, secular and religious self-stories intended largely for white audiences, offered profound second readings of the American and African American experiences against prevailing white American racial perspectives. These personal accounts, dozens in number, recount, expose, appeal, and remember the ordeals of blackness in white America.

The most well known slave stories are Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845), and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself (1861), by Harriet Jacobs, and published originally under the name of Linda Brent. Both Douglass and Jacobs determined at an early age that the most important goal of their lives was to gain their freedom. To this end, both, overt rebels against the system, devoted their best efforts and eventually succeeded in liberating themselves from their much hated shackles.

Born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey on a Maryland plantation in 1818, as a slave, Douglass experienced both the harshness of the system and its most benevolent face. However, under all circumstances he refused to compromise his belief that the only acceptable condition of life was in securing his right as an autonomous human being. In 1838, while living in Baltimore, he escaped the South and changed his name. A few days later, in New York City, Douglass married Anna Murray, the free African American woman who had helped him to engineer his escape. The Douglasses lived together for almost four decades. They had two sons and two daughters. Anna was vital to his career but remained in his shadow for all their years together. She died in Washington, D.C., in 1882.