Picturing the Mother, Claiming Egypt: My Bondage and My Freedom as Auto(bio)ethnography.

As many scholars of historical anthropology have noted, in taxonomizing difference, "American School" ethnographers (ca. 1820-1870) were drawing and policing the borders of euramerican racial identity and insinuating prescriptive markers for that euramerican self in identifying the markings of the Other. [1] Johannes Fabian summarizes this formation of a unified euramerican identity in the following manner: "When modem anthropology began to construct its Other in terms of topoi implying distance, difference, and opposition, its intent was above all, but at least also, to construct ordered Space and Time--a cosmos--for Western society to inhabit, rather than 'understanding other cultures,' its ostensible vocation" (111-12). What has gone unnoticed is the way in which slave narratives contributed to and problematized the shaping of a homogenized white readership and culture during this period. Frederick Douglass's second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), participates in the same descriptive obser vation of difference as ethnography and thus reveals an epistemological similarity between early nineteenth-century autobiography (slave narratives) and ethnography (American School ethnologues). That is to say, the same evidentiary rhetoric in both discourses supplements and establishes the authority of a central "self" and that self's views of otherness. [2]

Many critics have failed to recognize ethnographic discourses in slave narratives. The false assumption that the slave narrative is rhetorically disconnected from ethnography, which has been implied by literary critics and historians in their silence on this topic, is what I hope to correct in this paper by looking at the way in which Douglass blends contemporaneous socio-political controversy with autobiography and makes the turbulent debate over the ethnology of the "Negro" one of the noticeable differences that distinguishes his second autobiographical project from his first, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written By Himself (1845). Usually, when My Bondage is critically considered, discussion of its rhetorically suave narrator and comparisons between this figure and the ironic reportorial Douglass of the first narrative tend to overlook or undervalue crucial changes affecting Douglass and the nation between the years 1845 and 1855. In particular, the slavocracy's racial ju stification for human enslavement received pseudoscientific credibility with the publication of Josiah Nott's Types of Mankind (1850), further complicating the self-definition of ex-slaves in the North. While many of these former slaves entered the debate over ethnicity and racial origins in established abolitionist or religious platforms, Douglass combatted racist ideologies by returning once again to his autobiography, therein mythologizing for himself a racial origin that debunks both the arguments and methods of American School ethnography. In the manner of a trickster, Douglass conflates and disrupts his autobiographical role as participant and observer of slavery, and as William L. Andrews notes, refuses "to identify himself wholly or finally with either insider or outsider but only with the freedom to move back and forth across the margin" (To Tell 231).

This paper identifies several engagements with ethnographic discourses in My Bondage and My Freedom, all of which are centrally mediated by Douglass's revision of the portrait of his mother in his Narrative. In My Bondage, the picture that Douglass references as reminiscent of his mother as well as his alteration of her heroic importance in his early life comprise both an academic citation and a sentimental revision. As a citation, the picture allows Douglass to compete discursively against established ethnographers such as Josiah Nott, James Prichard, and Richard Knox for the authority to analyze and taxonomize Africanicity, both ancient and diasporic. Moreover, because the picture is of an Egyptian pharaoh, it also announces Douglass's intervention into the debate over Negro ethnology during a period in which Egyptomania was enthralling America's reading public. This paper will also refer to Douglass's ethnological precepts as expounded in his speech "Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered" (1854). I n both his speech and his second autobiography Douglass achieves a form of presentational irony, reversing the usual order of observer/other to become the autoethnographer of a white American other. However, because Douglass's ethnological principles seem to reinforce euramerican cultural dominance, some literary historians (see Martin; Walker; and Moses) have overlooked Douglass's particular triumph in challenging and reversing those modes of specularizing blackness which American School ethnography practiced. Perhaps for the first time in American literature, Douglass reveals the racial subjectivities involved in seeing, or in specularizing, blackness. He avers that blackness, as a category of racialized and cultural otherness, can only be seen by white eyes, using a mode of racializing viewing that I shall describe as the gaze, and acknowledges that the black subject sees blackness differently, in a mode that I shall call the look. [3] In assuming the role of an ethnographer, a role not usually available t o a person of color, Douglass also appropriates the ethnographer's gaze, if only to draw attention to its despicable and sometimes ludicrous tyranny in defining and presuming to see blackness. In so doing, Douglass crosses and re-crosses the color boundaries implicit not only in the nascent science of anthropology, but also in American culture at large.

Like all slave narratives, Douglass's second autobiography combines the ethnographies of both colonizer and colonized to achieve and surpass a form that Mary Louise Pratt defines as autoethnography, which refers to

instances in which colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonizer's own terms. If ethnographic texts are a means by which Europeans represent to themselves their (usually subjugated) others, autoethnographic texts are those the others construct in response to or in dialogue with those metropolitan representations. . . . Autoethnographic texts are not, then, what are usually thought of as "authentic" or autochthonous forms of self-representation... . Rather autoethnography involves partial collaboration with and appropriation of the idiom of the conqueror. (7)

In pursuing autoethnography as a framework through which Douglass's autobiography may be studied, we must look beyond Pratt's definition. If we extrapolate Pratt's definition to slave narratives, it becomes apparent that all slave narratives are forms of autoethnography; they are titularly constructed by slaves (the other) and incorporate the "idiom of the conqueror" (not just the English language but its tropes and rhetorical conventions) with an implicit intent to represent the other to the conqueror (white America, North and South). This last component of Pratt's definition, the implicit intention to represent the other, however, does not obtain in My Bondage, because in addition to the representation of the other, or the self as representative of the other as in the Narrative, there is an added individuation of the self as not representative of the other, along with a final representation of the euramerican as other. To acknowledge these

important differences, I define autobioethnography as autoethnograph ic texts that implement ethnography and autobiography not only to reformulate reigning conceptions of the other, but also to transcend the binary of self-other. Ultimately, the resulting life, or bios, of the author narrated in autobioethnography both is and is not that of the other, and the discursive practices of both autobiography and ethnography are contained, reflected, and refractorily subverted in the process. In the sections that follow, Douglass's autobioethnographic revisions in My Bondage are elucidated in relation to the earlier Narrative and contemporary racialist ideology. This analysis not only affords a clearer understanding of Douglass's second autobiography, but also offers fresh insight into the workings of antebellum America's developing discourses of racism, and how these discourses affected not only Douglass's concept of himself but also his conception of race in general.

The Anti-Sentimental Mother

Douglass describes his mother in the Narrative with alarming stolidity. He stresses the infrequency of contact with her without providing much in the way of emotional reaction to this distance, except insofar as this separation exemplifies slavery's denigration of family relationships valorized in sentimentalism. To be sure, the figure of the mother is uniformly romanticized in sentimental literature of the nineteenth century, and the heart-rending absence of the mother in many antebellum slave narratives often serves the abolitionist's objective further to inculpate slavery's vicious defilement of the "Empire of the Mother"-- a paradoxical ideal of limited power and delimiting feminine subjectivity constructed by Northern middle-class writers of conduct manuals, sentimental literature, and popular women's magazines. Although George Fredrickson does not explicitly connect abolitionist contempt for slavery's dehumanization to slavery's obliteration of the Empire of the Mother, he notes that the Christian fervo r of abolitionist propaganda often led to a defense of "human nature as self regenerating" (35) in general and to an indictment of the "peculiar institution," not permanent racial attributes, as the cause for the moral depravity of slaves and freed slaves in the North.

Although ethnographers rarely commented at length on the domestic behaviors of plantation slaves, they often implied that permanent physiological differences precluded slaves from ever fully appropriating European morality. The British physician Robert Knox, for example, delineates morality and sentiment as exclusive characteristics of Saxons, "which distinguish [them] from all other races of men" (15). Like so many Southern planters and slave traders who opposed abolitionist criticisms by staunchly denying the humanity of slaves, Knox straightforwardly denies that the "black races" may ever become civilized. "Their future history," he says, "must resemble the past" (162). In Knox's view, as in Nott's, Morton's, and Gliddon's, the incommensurability of European notions of civilization--such as morality, arts, science, even filial kinship--to uncivilized subjects is only minutely evidenced by skin color; thus, the initiate observer may entertain "wild, visionary, and pitiable theories...respecting the colour o f the black man, as if he differed only in colour from the white races; but he differs in everything as much as in colour....He is no more a white man than an ass is a horse or a zebra" (163). According to antebellum ethnography, access to the culturally white faculties necessary for feeling filial love was biologically impossible for figures like Douglass.

Many ethnographers of this period invoke a specious cause-effect logic to account for observed slave or Native American depravity. In "Claims of the Negro" Douglass critiques this false rationale: "The evils most fostered by slavery and oppression are precisely those which slaveholders and oppressors would transfer from their system to the inherent character of their victims" (295). Post-oppression behaviors are routinely cited as indicative of deep-rooted racial characteristics without considering these behaviors as effects of, instead of causes for, oppression. Expatiating smugly on the demise of Native Americans, Josiah Nott exemplifies the specious causality that haunts so much ethnographic discourse of this period:

It is clear as the sun at noon-day, that in a few generations more the last of these Red men will be numbered with the dead. We constantly read glowing accounts, from interested missionaries, of the civilization of these tribes; but a civilized full-blooded Indian does not exist among them. We see every day, in the suburbs of Mobile, and wandering through our streets, the remnant of the Choctaw race, covered with nothing but blankets, and living in bark tents, scarcely a degree advanced above brutes of the field, quietly abiding their time. (69)

It would not be unreasonable to suggest that Douglass and his abolitionist allies kept such fallacious observations in mind when conceptualizing his first autobiography. In order to correct the errors of racist cause-effect logic, Douglass dramatizes the salient lack of sentimentality in the life of a slave, but justly assigns this to slavery instead of to predetermined attributes in the slave.

Douglass may have been attracted to sentimentalism because of its universalizing of human experience and moral development along an axis of gender rather than race. In identifying the origin of morality in human beings, sentimental discourses stressed feminine agency in modeling children's behavior, regardless of skin color. Though typical stories and poems were almost all related to white mothers and infants, sentimentalism, like abolitionism and religious discourses in general, always implied a universal application. As Mary P. Ryan points out, antebellum constructions of motherhood "conferred upon women the function of transforming infant human animals into adult personalities" (143). Because slavery typically removed slave mothers from impressionable infants, as Douglass's first narrative lamentably attests, the institution could be clearly faulted for the moral condition of so many motherless adults. Read in this way, the representation of the mother in the first autobiography serves a larger abolitionis t objective.

The presentation of the mother in the Narrative is autoethnographic because Douglass's motherless life experience is rendered as typical. At a syntactic level, Douglass's autobiographical impulses of private self-disclosure contend with his narrative's abolitionist autoethnographic agenda. The personal--"My mother and I were separated when I was but an infant"--dissolves to type in the very next sentence: "it is a common custom, in the part of Maryland from which I ran away, to part children from their mothers at a very early age" (13). The narrated "sell" that emerges, therefore, is still shackled to an ethnographic other, an infinite number of muted and otherwise unlettered slaves for whom the narrator must speak.

The mother, too, is reduced to ethnographic type in the Narrative. Although the personality of his mother is hardly adumbrated, Douglass does reveal to the reader a glimpse of her physical appearance. It is significant that what appears to be the most important detail given of her appearance is her skin tone. As if to activate the white antebellum reader's racializing gaze--a kind of specular fascination for blackness that ethnography helped to construct--Douglass reports that his mother was darker than his "quite dark" grandparents:

My mother was named Harriet Bailey. She was the daughter of Isaac and Betsey Bailey, both colored, and quite dark. My mother was of a darker complexion than either my grandmother or grandfather. (12)

That these lines are a single, unified paragraph within the narrative only heightens the effect of this racialist, autoethnographic description. It is as if this revelation of the comparative skin tones of his maternal family were a necessary prelude to disclosing the troublesome fact of his white paternity in the stark first sentence of the following paragraph: "My father was a white man" (12).

A tension of authenticities arises from the chromatic contrast of mother and father. Houston Baker notes that, as a spokesman for abolition, "the slave narrator must accomplish the almost unthinkable ... task of transmuting an authentic, unwritten sell" (103), and that self is expected, of course, to be black. In order to ensure authentication as a black slave, Douglass indulges his reader's scopophilic desire for the spectacle of blackness, particularly the darker than "quite dark" blackness of the forlorn female body, before admitting to a white paternity that carries with it a potential to bedevil his authenticity as a typical black slave. The overly pigmented mother diverts the reader from identifying the unwritten body of Frederick Bailey with the white father, whom the contradictory linguistic polish of the written Frederick Douglass seems to resemble. This nearly Faustian bargain facing all slave narrators--the unthinkable task of voicing blackness in a culturally white language--is also an underlying tension inherent to the "partial collaboration" Pratt detects in autoethnography.

Later, Douglass divulges more about his mother: "I never saw my mother, to know her as such, more than four or five times in my life; and each of these times was very short in duration, and at night" (13). The accretion of embedded qualifiers progressively separates the mother further from memory, beclouding both her maternity ("as such") and her physicality, until she recedes invisibly from the narrative in complete darkness ("at night") and death: "Never having enjoyed, to any considerable extent, her soothing presence, her tender and watchful care, I received the tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger" (13). It is important to note the autoethnographic fusion of black mother and white mother in this cheerless reaction. Here we observe the "idiom of the conqueror" implemented to express the emotional loss of a mother for whose death there was no emotional loss. The death is stated not as his mother's death but as the death of literary sentimen talism's generalized mother, the "soothing... tender... watchful" mother who is metaphorically alloyed to the obfuscated mother. And here again arises the contradiction, the double consciousness endemic to slave narrative and autoethnography. Douglass registers his former lack of desire for the sentimental mother as well as his current desire to have "enjoyed" such a mother, if only to grieve her passing properly. By momentarily casting what may be the antithesis of sentimental motherhood, the apathetic mourning of a mother, in terms contiguous with sentimentalism, Douglass shows autoethnography to be a genre demanding fusion of the colonized experience with the idiom of the colonizer.

The cultural fusion of sentimental tropes with the absence of such constructions in the realities of the slave s experience represents a noticeable device of antithesis throughout the Narrative. In effect, the tension of collaboration is performed in the text. In My Bondage and My Freedom, however, the recognizable tension of partial collaboration seems somehow withdrawn, resolved before the act of writing, as if in the intervening years Frederick Douglass the man has so internalized the cultural capital of white literary America that Douglass the author in 1855 can write about his mother as if she had been a sentimental construction all along. The rift between the biographical facts of his relationship with his mother and the tropological fictions of her image are somehow fused prior to her resurrection in the second autobiography. And yet, Sidonie Smith reminds us that this prior internalization is still an effect of the narrated self: "The interiority or self that is said to be prior to the autobiographica l expression or reflection is an effect of autobiographical story telling" (18). Despite the constructedness of this linguistic interiority, the fact remains that Douglass softens autoethnographic disruptions when presenting his mother a second time. In 1855 she is no longer a sentimental other, a maternal void carved out by the horrors of slavery to be filled in by allusions to sentimental mothers; she no longer references the author's alienation from dominant cultural and linguistic tropes. On the contrary, she signals and in fact "signifies on" the author's mastery of autobioethnography, in which various discourses of the conqueror, instead of the mother, become otherized.

The Mother's Picture as Citation

In My Bondage Douglass resurrects his mother's image vividly, expands the emotional importance of her maternity, and, in a move that has divided scholars and critics ever since, even directs his readers to an exact page in a book in which a replica of her face may be found:

My knowledge of my mother is very scanty, but very distinct. Her personal appearance and bearing are ineffaceably stamped upon my memory. She was tall, and finely proportioned; of deep black, glossy complexion; had regular features and, among the other slaves, was remarkably sedate in her manners. There is in Prichard's Natural History of Man, the head of a figure--on page 157--the features of which so resemble those of my mother, that I often recur to it with something of the feeling which I suppose others experience when looking upon the pictures of dear departed ones. (52)

On page 157 of the 1848 edition of Prichard's Natural History of Man, which according to Peter Walker Douglass first encountered "in England in the midforties" (253), we are presented with an etching of Ramses II copied from statuary (see Fig.1).

The picture that Douglass so strangely deploys approaches what Jennifer Fleischner finds in many slave narratives: "a psychologically coded strategy of remembering and representing" (3). The picture catalyzes ideological, social, political, and historical anxieties that are both internal and external to the autobiography-externalized in the casual way that it is mentioned and yet intrinsic to Douglass's self-constructed relation to the world, by virtue of the fact that this is, after all, a picture of his mother. In other words, the odd introduction of this picture may be a response to a specific site of trauma at which we may glimpse Douglass in the very act of textual self-creation, as he acknowledges, parodies, and perhaps represses anxieties of race, ancestry, and identity through the fictional trope of sentimental nostalgia and the academic device of the citation.

In Prichard's text, the picture is accompanied by an ornate description that aptly typifies the rhetoric of ethnography. The language is especially typical of protoscientific and academic discourses in that Prichard generously borrows much of it from an earlier tome, Martin's Natural History of Mammiferous Animals

In this figure, it is observed that "the general expression is calm and dignified; the forehead is somewhat flat; the eyes are widely separated from each other; the nose is elevated, but with spreading nostrils; the ears are high; the lips large, broad, and turned out, with sharp edges; in which points there is a deviation from the European countenance." (157)

Both the form (citationality) and content (ethnographic description) of this quotation merge with the paratextual framework of Douglass's self-inscription. At the very moment of reference to the Prichard text, Douglass's autobiography enacts a symbolic genealogy that connects it intertextually to a host of other ethnographic texts. William L. Andrews has already noted the heteroglossic novelization in My Bondage arising from the four major self-quotations-or, as he calls them, interpolations-from the first autobiography. But few critics have noted the extraverbal interpolation of Prichard's text, and the way in which Douglass uses the image of his mother to insert himself into an otherwise impermeable conversation among antebellum America's leading ethnographers. Following Andrews' Bakhtinian discussion of Douglass's self-citation, we may better understand how Douglass signifies maternity, while signifyin(g) on ethnography. [4]

As noted above, Prichard's importation of Martin's language establishes a lineage of rhetoric is in which authority is mutually constitutive. The image of the Egyptian Pharaoh and its accompanying description perform scholarly rhetoric: Both image and words have been passed along a chain of texts, transferring knowledge between texts. In general, citation evacuates the presence of the primary writer through the device of quotation marks, signaling the interruption or overlaying of another voice, usually an established authority, onto the primary writer's language. In this way, citation acknowledges epistemological ancestry. In "The Problem of Speech Genres" Bakhtin theorizes the function of citation more specifically, noting that quotation marks internalize "the change of speaking subjects [and that the] boundaries created by this change are weakened.... The speaker's expression penetrates through these boundaries and spreads to the other's speech, which is transmitted in ironic, indignant, or reverential ton es" (93). In traditional scholarship, therefore, the citation is a mechanism of border control, policing boundaries of shared knowledge and speech. Prichard's use of Martin's voice announces his permission to do so; the self-other boundaries between the two men are dissolved, and both are constituted as members of a scholarly community that shares a common voice, perhaps even a common mouth.

Douglass's reference penetrates the boundaries of this community of exclusive knowledge and reshapes its ways of knowing, transmitting, and patrolling information. Ben Slote, in his discussion of Douglass's interpolations from the Narrative, notes Douglass's penchant for exerting ownership of words and contexts: "The prior intention, the prior context, even the prior 'mouth' are all Douglass's" (24). In one sense, we may interpret the citation to the picture as a similar move to "own" or claim special kinship with a key piece of ethnography's primary evidence. Whereas Prichard's borrowed rhetoric of description distances him from the scrutinized image, Douglass's claim of maternal kinship with this image brackets the ethnographer's discursive authority of objectification and emphasizes the equally constructed authority of sentimentalism and autobiography as more viable ways of knowing. This picture of Ramses, which for Prichard is a prompt for a proliferation of racialist discourse, showing how un-European ce rtain facial angles are, becomes in the hands of Douglass an image of a very European-that is, sentimental-vision of cherished maternity. But this is not to say that this sentimental image no longer represents a darker than "quite dark" slave woman. On the contrary, the fact that this sentimentalized image of motherhood is set forth by a member of the very community of "savages" and "brutes" that ethnography claimed felt no civilized feelings of domesticity further challenges the authority of ethnographic discourses.

Sentimentalism versus Ethnography

To appreciate the complexity of Douglass's interrogation of ethnography fully, we must recall the peculiar textual circumstances of the picture's reference. As mentioned, in the Narrative it is Douglass's mother who recedes behind a shroud of darkness, in contrast to the definitive whiteness of the problematic master/father. In My Bondage the balance of parental certainty shifts. The whiteness of the father is qualified: "My father was a white man, or nearly white" (52). And he is now "shrouded in a mystery that [Douglass] has never been able to penetrate" (51), while the mother's "personal appearance and bearing are ineffaceably stamped upon [Douglass's] memory" (52). But the permanence of this stamp's impression is only possible through Prichard's text. In effect, Douglass reverses racist stereotypes of black intelligence by acknowledging his mother as the benefactress of his literary acumen. In "Claims of the Negro," Douglass characteristically deracializes this point by drawing an analogy between intellig ent Irishmen and mulattos: "An educated man in Ireland ceases to be an Irishman; and an intelligent black man is always supposed to have derived his intelligence from his connection with the white race. To be intelligent is to have one's Negro blood ignored" (298). And just as Douglass demarcates literacy as the pathway to freedom in the Narrative, so too does he evidence his continuing love of letters by tracing his mother, the giver of literacy, back to a book, Prichard's Natural History, which Douglass thereafter "takes" as his text by identifying his mother in an illustration of an Egyptian.

But we must not be lured too far into speculating over the literal implications of this masculine, and (as will be shown) nearly European, image standing in for Douglass's mother, especially considering Douglass's public commitment to colorless and genderless reform politics--in 1847 Douglass's paper The North Star had a masthead claiming "right is of no sex--truth is no color...." Peter Walker, on the other hand, interprets this substitution of male for female as an indication of Douglass's repression of his own blackness. Walker anachronistically ascribes to Douglass a mulatto subjectivity that induces Douglass to think of himself as half-white, which brings Walker to the facile conclusion that "two cultures, and the claims of each, as well as two persons lived inside Douglass" (254). It is much more illuminating to focus on the figurative and contextual, as opposed to the literal, implications of the picture at this point, especially since a literal reading ignores the possibility that Douglass is being fa cetious.

Discussing similar perplexities in the writings of William Wells Brown and Alexander Crummell, Wilson Moses elucidates the importance of recognizing patterns of sportive indirection: "Often one will encounter even a spirit of playfulness, a dark sense of humor, and a capacity for self-satire among those nineteenth-century Afrocentrists" (15). In "The Blackness of Blackness," Gates locates a similar sportiveness in the intertextual construction of signifyin(g): "This parody of forms, or pastiche, is in evidence when one writer repeats another's structure by one of several means, including a fairly exact repetition of a given narrative or rhetorical structure, filled incongruously with a ludicrous or incongruent one" (291). It is clear that the other text implicated in the use of the picture is Douglass's Narrative and that, out of the interplay of maternal differences between the first and second autobiographies, Frederick Douglass fashions for himself a rhetorical self-definition that destroys the logic of et hnography through the sentimental revisioning of his mother.

In attributing his literariness to his mother, Douglass makes an overt reference to racialist notions expounded by ethnographers, and challenges their assumptions:

I am quite willing, and even happy, to attribute any love of letters I possess, and for which I have got--despite of prejudices--only too much credit, not to my admitted Anglo-Saxon paternity, but to the native genius of my sable, unprotected, and uncultivated mother--a woman, who belonged to a race whose mental endowments it is, at present, fashionable to hold in disparagement and contempt. (58)

We may be tempted to read Douglass's list of adjectives--"sable, unprotected, and uncultivated"--as autoethnographic; that is, as a partial collaboration with the dominant discourse that always reduces the black mother to a skin color of difference and thereby "epidermalizing" otherness. But Douglass reverses gendered and racialized polarities by suggesting that the nationless color of sable maternity, "the native genius of my sable... mother," is more culturally potent than the colorless nationhood of Anglo-Saxon paternity. Such an asseveration sharply contrasts with the "fashionable" belief espoused by Josiah Nott that, "in the broad field and long duration of Negro life, not a single civilization, spontaneous or borrowed, has existed, to adorn its gloomy past" (52). And a kind of "spontaneous" literacy is exactly what Douglass ascribes to his mother. In mid-sentence, Douglass abandons the typicality expected of the native informant of autoethnography--"That a 'field' hand should learn to read, in any slave state, is remarkable"--to proclaim the uniqueness of his mother, which can only be described in miraculous terms: "but the achievement of my mother, considering the place, was extraordinary" (58; emphasis mine).

Instead of using the discourse of ethnography to report to and evoke pity from a readership comprised of dominant euramericans, the autoethnographic enterprise, Douglass makes his own life (i.e., his autobiography and his mother) the primary evidence for an interrogation of dominant discourses--using one, sentimentalism, to discredit another, ethnography.

That Douglass's mother could have achieved spontaneous literacy may partly be explained by sentimentalism. As stated earlier, a widely held sentimental belief of this period underscored the agency of the mother in instilling the child with morality. More importantly, the mother was often metaphorized in these discussions as a book that the child reads. An anonymous writer, in Woman's Influence and Woman's Mission, emphasized that the child's first impressions came from its mother in a process of affective reading: "She is its first book, and from her comes all which is to elevate or degrade" (qtd. in Theriot 23). The mother was also shown to be directly responsible for the political identity of sons. Mrs. A. J. Graves wrote of the influential political power of the mother: "In every son she is entrusted with a being who ... will exercise a voice in the promotion of measures to operate either for his country's weal or woe" (qtd. in Theriot 24). In taking his mother as a text decontextualized from Prichard's te xt, Douglass seems to be deracializing her, transforming her from the quintessence of slave mothers to the epitome of the culturally white sentimental mother. However, it is not that she is no longer black, as Peter Walker would argue, but that her role as the giver of literacy overrides her role as the giver of pigmentation.

Another reason for the colorless, masculine image is perhaps the most obvious yet least mentioned in criticism. Masculinization of the mother's image forecloses the possibility of an erotic gaze, seeking pleasure analogous to the sexual defilement perpetrated by slavery. The specularization of female blackness as ocular proof of racial lasciviousness had already been popularized by descriptions of the Hottentot Venus. [5] But, while linking the mother to Ramses II seems to release her from being the feminized object of white masculine authority, there is some indication that Douglass's notion of Ramses II may well have been connotative of femininity. Douglass may have read Bayard Taylor's 1854 account of the actual statue of Ramses II lying "on its face with its face in a hole filled with water" though its "countenance [was] said to be very beautiful" (70). Like a Muslim woman in the American traveler's imagination, the statue's face is beautiful but hidden. Nevertheless, Taylor goes on to say that the statue marks the spot of the lost civilization of Memphis, which again points to Ramses II's symbolic connection to ancient culture in addition to genderless beauty. Thus, paradoxically, the picture may be Douglass's attempt to figuralize his mother's mental endowments rather than her physical appearance, since, as Douglass notes in "Claims of the Negro," the instantaneous spectacle of blackness had already been institutionalized by ethnography: "I think I have never seen a single picture in an American work, designed to give an idea of the mental endowments of the Negro, which did any thing like justice to the. subject" (299). And yet the question of race is not circumvented by this attempt to picture black mental endowment in terms of a white image.

Is She Whitewashed, Mulatto, or Egyptian?

If we return to James M'Cune Smith's preface to My Bondage we witness an undeniable paling of the mother, whose chromatic trajectory begins in the text as "a deep black, glossy complexion" (52) that softens to "sable" (58), and by implication in the preface is referred to as European:

The authors of the "Types of Mankind" give a side view of the same [picture of Ramses] on page 148 [see Fig. ... The nearness of its resemblance to Mr. Douglass' mother rests upon the evidence of his memory, and judging from his almost marvelous feats of recollection of forms and outlines recorded in this book, this testimony may be admitted. ... If the friends of "Caucasus" choose to claim, for that region, what remains after this analysis--to wit: combination--they are welcome to it. They will forgive me for reminding them that the term "Caucasian" is dropped by recent writers on Ethnology.... The great "white race" now seeks paternity ... in Arabia.... Keep on gentlemen; you will find yourselves in Africa, by-and-by. The Egyptians, like the Americans, were a mixed race, with some Negro blood circling around the throne, as well as in the mud hovels. (xxx-xxxi)

Literary historians Peter Walker and Waldo Martin, Jr., have registered the difficulties arising from what appears to be Douglass's racial prestidigitation--the perplexing transformation of his father from white to near white, and his mother from quite dark to a mulatto image of Egyptian antiquity. Though Waldo Martin seems to find fault with the surety of Walker's psychoanalytical approach to Douglass, Martin's interpretation of Douglass's racial sell-conception is less a refutation of Walker than it is a hesitant corroboration of his conclusions. Like Walker, Martin sees the Ramses picture as a testament to Douglass's continued desire to escape the legal bonds of maternal slavery as well as the ancestral marks of blackness: "Perhaps because Frederick later identified so closely with Egypt, he fancied his mother as akin to Egyptian royalty." Martin goes on to speculate that the selection of a masculine, light-complexioned picture suggests, "on one level, the subconscious power of [Douglass's] racial ambivale nce [and] on another ... the genderless dimension of his catholic vision of a common humanity transcending sex as well as race" (5). Quoting James M'Cune Smith, Martin shows that modern critics are not the first to be flustered by the "intricate racial world view" (3) of Douglass: "James M'Cune Smith, speaking of Douglass, stated in an 1848 letter to Gerrit Smith 'that only since his Editorial career has he seen to become a colored man!'" (58). Cued by M'Cune Smith, Martin qualifies Douglass's alleged racial ambivalence to account for Douglass's increased prominence as a race leader in the 1850s. Martin suggests that, because Douglass sought to portray himself as more representatively black at this time, his second autobiography "obscured his white patrimony and enhanced his black identity at the crucial juncture where he was fast becoming the representative Negro American and the preeminent race leader" (97). Thus, the earlier point made about Douglass's racial ambivalence in selecting the Ramses picture is contradicted: How can Douglass be seen as both ambivalent about his blackness and eager to present himself as more black in the same autobiography?

While acknowledging Douglass's enhanced black identity in the 1850s, Martin, like Walker, goes on to make a conclusive case for Douglass's overriding mulatto subjectivity: "Douglass's racial vision reflected his fundamental belief in a composite or mixed American race, which he, as a mulatto, personified" (95). Frances Smith Foster avers that, for mulatto slave narrators, revealing a mixed parentage "offer[ed] an especially strong potential for the antislavery cause ... to emphasize the immorality of a system which not only allowed white men to father children by their slaves, but then to own, sell, and often abuse their own children" (78). If mulattoness can only help Douglass's antislavery cause, as it certainly did in the first narrative, as Foster attests, and if mulattoness is central to Douglass's racial vision, as Martin suggests, then why does Douglass obscure his mulattoness in My Bondage? All of these commentators seem to read Douglass as a racial performer in a world inhabited by genuine "Negroes" and genuine whites. But in his racial performance, Douglass seems aware of the performativity of all races in general.

Let us re-theorize the Ramses picture. To borrow Andrews' terminology from "Toward a Poetics of Afro-American Autobiography," the picture is "constative--i.e., [it] refers to something extrinsic--and performative--i.e., [it] enacts something by its very existence as a text" (81). Martin and Walker belabor the picture's constative implications without seriously considering its performative function as a conduit into elitist ethnographic discourses, and as a symbol of Douglass's special kind of highly emotional reading of texts usually conceived of in impersonal, objectively distanced ways. The picture also signals a diasporic gap or a rupture in black ancestry, and as such it rejects the historical fixity ethnography assigns to ancient Egypt. It suggests Douglass to be a living incarnation of ancient Egypt while pointing to the ongoing presence of ancient Egypt as a "mulattoness" in contemporary America perpetuated by slavery. In this way, the picture is akin to what Sidonie Smith refers to as dis/identificati on: "Through tactical dis/identifications, the autobiographical subject adjusts, redeploys, resists, transforms discourses of autobiographical identity" (21). This disidentification agrees with Russ Castronovo's assessment of Douglass's diasporic subjectivity, which causes Douglass "to preserve in the midst of America a set of attitudes and counter-memories garnered, not from a single monolithic culture, but from the spaces between cultures" (258).

That the picture represents a rupture in identity is perhaps also a result of the urge to present an illustration of a face at all. Peter Dorsey has already noted the apparent shift in color tone between the frontispiece pictures of Douglass accompanying the first two autobiographies: "In the earlier version [there is] a pallid ... Douglass.... The later work shows a darker, more physically powerful Douglass" (445). And although Dorsey comments that the stronger image connotes Douglass's "growing awareness of the performativity of his self[-]representations and maps his bolder claim to conventional sources of authority" (445), he does not speculate how the "darker" self-representation also achieves this pragmatic shift. I would argue that, in Douglass's prosopopoeia of himself and his mother, the face presented implies a cultural identity that offsets, reverses, and ironizes the implied cultural identity of Douglass's belletristic rhetoric; i.e., the culturally Anglofied rhetoric in My Bondage that so many cr itics have noted. [6] How ironic, then, that the face advertised to be writing these "white" words is darker and more directly engaging than the first, paler face, whose wistful eyes seem to look beyond the gaze of the viewer and whose body disappears into a white void. Compare also the ornate, but merely contoured and thus lifeless, illustration of Ramses to the muteness Douglass ascribes to his mother: "... but the image [of her remembered side view] is mute, and I have no striking words of hers treasured up" (57). The wordless mother of the second autobiography therefore is less changed from her mysterious representation in the first than one might realize. The mother is still a mystery, and her image does not bespeak her face, since there are no words to attach to the face. Instead, her image speaks to and against the ethnographers who have captured her in their pages.

Otherizing White Faces and Picturing Mother Egypt

It is most striking that Douglass alludes to a picture of a drawing that is essentially colorless, passing over a few illustrations in Prichard's text that emphasize skin tones that might have been analogous to his mother's. By citing a picture that figuralizes his mother's "side view," her profile and the form of her face, rather than one that illustrates the verbalized shade of her skin, Douglass reconfigures the order of specular gazing practiced by ethnography, which, as Prichard points out, begins with skin color and hair textures and then moves on to form: "We must, in the first instance, consider accurately the intimate nature of those organic peculiarities [such as] the variety of complexion ... and of the hair.... We shall afterwards advert to the varieties of form" (71). Significantly, the Ramses picture allows for no elaborate scrutiny of the hair, to which Prichard devotes entire chapters. [7] Knox obeys the same specular order of observation practiced by Prichard: "Let it be remembered ... it is to the exterior we must look for the more remarkable characteristics of animals" (152).

By focusing on the exterior, ethnographers inculcated in readers the practice of racial, colonizing, and consumerist gazing that had long been performed at slave auctions--the instantaneous specularization of black body parts that reduces whole people to anatomized images of mute primitiveness, salable powerlessness, and brute animality. Throughout ethnographic texts, readers are enjoined to picture black faces, as when Knox asks, "Look at the Negro, so well known to you.... Is he shaped like any white person?" (161). And as Douglass argues in "Claims of the Negro," the features most often presented as typically "Negroid" are "distorted, lips exaggerated, forehead depressed--and the whole expression of the countenance made to harmonize with the popular idea of Negro imbecility and degradation" (298). The "whiteness" reciprocally constructed by these writings identified and created a group for whom such spectatorship was a biological right of superiority. Nott describes whites as having "the largest brains.... theirs is the mission of extending perfect civilization--they are by nature ambitious, daring, domineering, and reckless of danger--impelled by an irresistible instinct, they visit all climes regardless of difficulties" (67). Along with this biological right, therefore, comes a duty of imperialism.

Nott's writing often constructs a colonizing gaze so powerful that it easily travels into the heart of "dark" lands and enacts a panoptic dissection and ownership of entire nations:

Reader! Let us imagine ourselves standing upon the highest peak in Abyssinia; and that our vision could extend over the whole continent.... we should descry at least 50,000,000 of Nigritians, steeped in irredeemable ignorance and savagism; inhabiting the very countries where history first finds them.... Do we not behold, on every side, human characteristics so completely segregated from ours? ... Upon the moral and intellectual traits of such abject types no impression has been made within 5000 years: none can be made. (191)

Even when considering the place of "Negroes" in antiquity, Nott provides ambiguous illustrations of Egyptian slaves and coaches his readers to imagine a past in terms of slavocratic America. No antebellum reader could possibly miss the connection made between the plantation father/master and Egyptian slaveholders in Nott's description of a train of slaves--"among which are some red children, whose fathers were Egyptians" (262)-- nor the disturbing point about the jollity of ancient slaves-- "even in Ancient Egypt, African slavery was not... always inseparable from the lash and the hand-cuff.... 'de same ole Nigger' of our Southern plantations could spend his Nilotic sabbaths in salutary recreations" (263). The colonial gazing modeled by ethnographers therefore sought to quell anxieties of the immorality of slavery by historicizing blackness (and even mulattoness), while providing a palliative shared identity for white Americans.

In "Claims of the Negro" Douglass attacks the unified whiteness constructed in ethnological writings. Casting himself in the role of the black ethnographer, Douglass argues for essential differences between the white gaze and the black. That blackness is perceived by white ethnographers to indicate savagery is his overriding critique: "The importance of this criticism may not be apparent to all;--to the black man it is very apparent" (299). This is an astounding point to make. Consider how shocking it must have sounded to his audience in Hudson, Ohio, that a black man sees blackness differently than whites do, that the eye, which the history of Western philosophy and science had purported to be a universal agent of reporting truth, was indeed biased. Almost like one pondering that timeless conundrum, "is the same color blue that I see, the blue that you see," Douglass forces his audience to consider the epistemological crisis ensuing his rejection of the universal, truthtelling eye. Extrapolating from Douglas s's statement, I argue that Douglass may have chosen a picture so unlike a nineteenth-century reader's image of a black slave woman in order to critique white preconceptions of blackness, to alter and destroy the colonial gaze, to register his refusal to internalize racializing depictions of blackness, and to supplant the colonizing gaze which sees only blackness with his own alternative of seeing, a form of black looking that sees mental endowment, nobility, and heritage without the stigma of color.

In his speech, Douglass goes on to shift his own anxieties of mulattoness onto white America as a whole, pinpointing differences between American and European morphologies: "The lean, slender American, pale and swarthy, if exposed to the sun, wears a different appearance to the full, round Englishman, of clear, blonde complexion." In his construction, pure European racial identities are diluted over time, as "Englishmen, Germans, Irishmen, and Frenchmen [are converted into Americans." More effective than this, Douglass subjects the "common portraits of American Presidents" to the same particularizing specular gazing practiced in ethnography to conclude that the "increasing bony and wiry appearance" of later portraits proves "the greater remove from that serene amplitude which characterizes the countenances of the earlier Presidents" (299). More important than the validity of his proof that faces and people change over time, which rejects the permanent attributes championed by Nott, Douglass demonstrates the a bsurdity of searching for anything like racial purity in an increasingly heterogeneous nineteenth-century America, while grandly subjecting these august American faces to his own form of specular dissection.

But the need for a shared identity was not limited to a heterogeneous population of white Americans split by geography and mixed European backgrounds; ex-slaves and freed blacks also felt the need to proclaim a shared cultural identity. Douglass was not the first race leader to turn to Egypt for an ancestral homeland whose universally recognized civilization would disprove ethnological claims of African backwardness. In the 1820s David Walker made a similar connection between contemporary mulatto America and ancient Egypt:

Some of my brethren do not know who Pharaoh and the Egyptians were. ...For the information of such, I would only mention that the Egyptians, were Africans or coloured people ... a mixture of Ethiopians and the natives of Egypt--about the same as you see the coloured people of the United States at the present day. (qtd. in Hinks 182)

In 1841 James W. C. Pennington, who witnessed Douglass's first marriage, [8] continued Walker's plea and foreshadowed Douglass's methods in the slim, but grandiosely titled, A Text Book of the Origin and History of the Colored People. Although Pennington relies upon a shrewd exegesis of the Bible to substantiate his "true history of the human family" (6), he intimates that he should be believed because of the rhetorical and moral prowess evidenced in his text. Of course this rhetoric-as-evidence formula underlies all ethnography of this period, as George Stocking notes: "Parties to the midcentury dispute based themselves for the most part on anecdotal evidence" (49). In spite of Samuel Morton's anthropometric (measuring skulls) advances to the discourse of ethnography, Morton, as William Stanton rightly points out, "was still typical [in that] he was not averse to drawing cultural and aesthetic judgements" (33-34). What distinguishes Pennington from these protoscientists is his finessing of Biblical history; hermeneutic acumen becomes his primary evidence for establishing a black Egypt, in the same way that autobiographical testimony would later serve as Douglass's proof.

Despite their noble attempt to assert a racial origin for American slaves, Douglass, Walker, and Pennington were also offering a dangerous, paradoxical heritage: Egyptians were a slavocratic society. This tendency to argue for African contributions to the progress of civilization based on an inherently European hegemonic conception of civilization, which ignored links to existing Africans in favor of a lost race of dynastic Egyptians more akin to Europeans, implies the need for nineteenth-century blacks to assimilate European models of identity even in their search for African ancestry. Wilson Moses has pointed out the obvious paradox in such a self-conception since many slaves already identified with the enslaved Hebrews in their songs, "away down in Egypt's land" (44). Moses suggests that this paradox of wanting "to be children of Pharaoh as well as children of Israel" (47) resolves itself in the nature of folk mythology: "It is in the nature of mythologies to reconcile contradictions, for mythologies must accommodate the diverse spiritual goals of complex aggregations of people--not to mention the paradoxes within individual psyches" (44). But to identify this paradox as myth does not render it any more comprehensible. There is still more research and theorizing to be done in the field of ex-slave mythologies of their African origins.

Conclusion

In order to make his point about the difference between sympathetic looking and clinical gazing, Douglass mimics the very same sort of ethnographic gaze that he presumably seeks to debunk. There remains evidence that Douglass was not motivated by a disdain for all ethnography, only American School ethnographers. His continued respect for Prichard marks much of the rhetoric in his 1854 speech. Douglass's toleration for Prichard may have stemmed from the latter's performance of scientific disinterestedness. Even in his corroboration of others' testimony, Prichard exudes a scientific disinterest that borders on suspicion of bias. For Prichard, the authority of the ethnographer and the veracity of his observations lie in his lack of theoretical motivation. Raw observation, according to Prichard, is what gives credence to Ledyard's comparison between Egyptians and mulattos: "Mr. Ledyard, whose testimony is of more value as he had no theory to support it, Says..." (143). It is highly probable that Douglass read the se passages so near to the cherished picture with interest and probably noted the way Prichard accedes and exercises ethnographic authority as a correlative of rhetorical control and perspicacious skill. Like Ledyard, Douglass presents his antebellum readers with a picture of an Egyptian as a stand-in for his mother, and the reasons that such a picture should be accepted as true to her likeness are precisely those that empower Ledyard and Prichard: rhetoric, observation, and, if we recall M'Cune Smith, memory.

And memory, of course, is the primary mode of referentiality by which any autobiographer gives shape to life experiences. For the slave, however, memory takes on a special importance, as Gates argues:

...deprivation of time... signaled [the slave's] status as a piece of property. Slavery's time was delineated by memory and memory alone. One's sense of one's existence, therefore, depended upon memory.... A slave stood outside of time. (Figures 101)

As an extension of individual memory, history is that mode of reference by which a culture, a group of people, or a nation gives shape to the past. In Douglass's autobiographies, the individuation of his life experiences indicates both a turning away from the autoethnographic enterprise--of relating the self as a typical mouthpiece for an otherized community--and a turn toward elaborating that community's cultural history in relation to particularized life experiences. Instead of avoiding a direct confrontation with those who took it upon themselves to taxonomize and specularize blackness, as did Pennington, Douglass engaged ethnographic discourse openly throughout the 1850s, and although his multiple, sometimes contradictory, points of view seem strategically to normalize miscegenation, his insistence that the black look conceives of blackness differently than the colonial gaze practiced by white ethnographers marks a fundamental break from autoethnography and antebellum slave narratives. Douglass might have seen himself as a mulatto, as Martin and Walker would have it, but his use of the Ramses pictures and his arguments in "Claims of the Negro" testify that he saw with the eyes of a black man.

Michael A. Chaney is completing his Ph.D. at Indiana University, Bloomington. His dissertation explores issues of representation, spectacle, and multiracial subjectivity in the antebellum slave narrative.

Notes

(1.) I would like to thank Paul John Eakin and my fellow graduates of his seminar in nineteenth-century autobiography, in which an earlier version of this research was first presented; special thanks also to Fred McElroy for pushing my work to express more fully the historical and cultural field of African American intellectual traditions. Samuel Morton, George Gliddon, Josiah Nett, and James Van Evrie are among the most notable American School ethnographers.

(2.) In the autobiography and ethnography of this period, the first is always predicated on the latter and vice versa; to say then that there is an ethnographic impulse in all autobiography is tantamount to saying that there is a reciprocal autobiographical anxiety in all ethnography. According to M. Neumann, a modern anthropologist, the ethnographic impulse has been characterized by "the gaze outward ... at worlds beyond [our] own, as a means of marking the social coordinates of a self." On the other hand, Neumann notes that the autobiographical impulse "gazes inward for a story of self, but ultimately retrieves a vantage point for interpreting culture" (173). Even today, the two modes collide.

(3.) Kaja Silverman, drawing from the work of Laura Mulvey, Lacan, Foucault, and others, discusses the difference between look and gaze in a critique of masculine subjectivities in film (130). The gaze is far more Draconian than the look, and often takes the form of surveillance. The gaze is clinical, objectifying, voyeuristic, and sadistic. It often feminizes (or "de-phallusizes") its optic subject, placing specularized (gazed at) bodies within a narrative of punishment. As in Foucault's critique of Bentham's Panopticon, the gaze is beyond subjectivity, working without agency. In other words, the black body in antebellum American would construct a colonizing gaze even if there were no whites present; the colonizing gaze is such an intrinsic component of an imperialist culture that it operates without particular individuals appropriating it. But this paper will not need to venture into such ontological perplexities since I will be working only with gazes that are appropriated by particular agents. The look, o n the other hand, emanates from a particular subjectivity, from a desiring subjectivity. Desire in this sense alludes to Lacan's meaning, which always intimates a lack. Instead of constructing an object, the look constructs a focal point that directs desire. Unlike the gaze, the look can be turned back, the look-ee can return the same look to the look-er, so the power dynamic of looking is far more protean than that of the gaze. What is most important in the difference between the look and the gaze in this paper is that the look can pretend to be a gaze; it can, in effect, pass itself off as a gaze, which is precisely what Douglass does in his use of the picture.

(4.) The term signifyin(g), usually spoken in the vernacular without the final "g," is a mode of parody or repetition, what Gates calls the "trope of tropes" in African American literature, and in this context it refers to Douglass's punning, mimicking, appropriating, and calling attention to the modes of authority and citation practiced in ethnographic discourse.

(5.) Saartje Baartman, known as the "Hottentot Venus," was put on display for European audiences who were voyeuristically fascinated by Baartman's buttocks, bell hocks quotes Sander Gilman's conclusion that, "by the eighteenth century[,]...the black female body [became] an icon for black sexuality in general" (62).

(6.) See Leverenz; Sundquist; Dorsey; Baker; and Andrews.

(7.) Douglass comments sarcastically on ethnography's failure to find European hair textures in Egyptian images in "Claims of the Negro": "Their hair was far from being of that graceful lankness, which adorns the fair Anglo-Saxon head. But the next best thing, after these defects, is a positive unlikeness to the Negro" (296).

(8.) Stuckey notes that the Reverend J. W. Pennington is listed as a witness in the marriage between "Frederick Johnson [Douglass] and Anna Murray" (223).

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