Essay - “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” by Frederick Douglass and “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning
Literary Studies 2B:
Question: In what ways and to what ends do course writers examine ideas of liberty in their texts?
In Frederick Douglass’s autobiographical “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” and Robert Browning's dramatic monologue poem “My Last Duchess,” liberty is examined through the concept of narrative sovereignty. Situationally, both pieces are different— Douglass’s memoir was written during the era of slavery in the United States (Jim Crow Museum 2024), and Browning’s poem takes the reader back to the Italian Renaissance by basing the piece on the life of the Duke of Ferrara (Guthrie 2017). However, both work to examine how narrative voice, as being used by oppressors and the oppressed, controls liberty and accumulates textual power. Douglass’s memoir employs educated, emotional language in order to illustrate humanity and intelligence within oppression, and indicate the need for both intellectual and physical means of achieving liberty. By comparison, Browning’s “My Last Duchess” is written in brisk, conversational couplets in order to examine an oppressor’s work to tailor the reader’s understanding, and a darker subtext to hint at physical domination of the poem’s victim. Ultimately, both pieces take on a strong narrative voice to educate readers on liberty and dedicate their time to examining its pursuit as internal and external struggles under the yoke of oppression.
Douglass’s memoir was written in 1845 and is regarded as one of the most powerful slave memoirs of American history (Stone 1973), detailing his torment at the hands of slave owners and under the complex, oppressive system of slavery, as he struggled towards achieving liberty. To examine his liberty as being assisted by the pursuit of knowledge within systemic oppression, Douglass references reading and writing as the things that gave him a view of his “wretched condition, without the remedy” (Douglass 45) but also gave him the “resolution to run away” (Douglass 46). This frames his struggles towards liberty as shaped by intellectual effort. Within his narrative writing itself, stylistically strong words and metaphors like “conjecture” and “bloody transaction” (Douglass 19) help indicate that Douglass’s audience was primarily white Northern abolitionists, and his goal in writing was to educate them on the Black slave experience by wielding language that would indicate his intelligence (Burns 2005). In this sense, education is both a form of narrative control over Douglass’s audience in his memoir and the original means by which he considered liberty possible to achieve. This allows him to make a powerful case for readers to comprehend the cruelty of slavery, and undercuts the importance of sharing knowledge to intellectualise the pursuit of liberty. Occasionally, Douglass wields emotional impact to play into the humanity of his audience, such as his description of his “my poor old grandmother… left all alone” (Douglass 51) to damn the evils of slavery. He further drives reader sympathy by making an emotional speech to God, demanding, “O, why was I born a man, of whom to make a brute?” (Douglass 62) and questioning the Black slave experience as one rooted in tragedy. This, and his considering other slaves his “dearest friends” (Douglass 43), serves to humanise the Black experience to outsiders. The strong narrative voice he utilises in his memoir both details how education has powerfully served him in overcoming oppression (Kang 2022), and strives to help readers comprehend the cruelty of slavery in order to bring it into a broader conversation.
By contrast, Browning’s voice in “My Last Duchess” is more informal, utilizing 10 syllables per line, and couplets in order to “distract us with courtesy” (Guthrie 2017) in an attempt to bely the poem’s darker subtext. This contrast between his and Douglass’s tone indicates how both tackle oppression, but from different narrative points to retain control over readers’ perception of liberty. The line, “Will’t please you sit and look at her?” (Browning 5) addresses the poem’s readers, and demonstrates the Duke’s first attempt to hold jurisdiction over the Duchess’s liberty within her narrative– by requesting that her portrait be looked at he is therefore able to drive perception of her in death (Hochberg 1991), thus reconciling the conveyance of information to command of her liberty. His “A heart—how shall I say?” retains casualness within the piece as a facet of narrative control, and attempts to undercut the eeriness of his following “too soon made glad” (Browning 22), which euphemistically depicts his growing displeasure with his Duchess’s behaviour. The Duke’s casualness further frames the Duchess as a figure of excess that displeases him, with phrases like “too”, “easily” and “everywhere” (Browning 22-24) repeated in order to indicate displeasing friendliness, and attempt to render the reader in agreement with his dissatisfaction. This attempt at narrative control is representative of both the Duke’s ego in that the reader will, too, damn the Duchess for her “looks going everywhere” (Browning 24) and potential infidelity, as well as his belief that by controlling her image, he gets away with rendering her a “relic of murder” (Kumar 2025). But, in order to render obsolete the Duke’s apparent control of the poem’s tone and narration, Browning writes through the perspective of the murderer rather than the murdered woman, to sharpen the reader's insight when faced with an unreliable narrator (Vestzergom 2014) and to comprehend the Duke’s subtextual attempts to excise the portrait’s liberty via narrative control.
Comparatively, Douglass utilises a narrative memoir in order to keep his experiences deeply personal and honest, while the Duke’s dramatic monologue form indicates performativeness and dishonesty in his depiction of the Duchess. Both forms of prose are wielded as a type of control— while Douglass’s narrative piece indicates writing more like a “white slaveowner[s]” (Burns 2005) than a Black slave, this is a tool he wields to make his narrative more poignant for a well-read audience and to command how his story is analysed. In order to indicate trustworthiness from him to his audience, the Duke’s casual, colloquial “I call” and “I said” (Browning 2-5) indicate informality whilst undercutting the Duchess’s importance to him, and attempt to stop the reader from looking deeper into his descriptions of her. His effort to control narrative voice thus allows him to deprive the Duchess’s painting of her autonomous liberty. In addition, liberty as a site of violence and a thing which provokes violence in its reclamation are depicted by both texts to make the struggle for liberty physical and connect it to a fixed human right. Here, although both Douglass and Browning utilise voice in order to command authority in their pieces, physical confrontation further depicts how their efforts at achieving and controlling liberty are displayed.
In Douglass’s memoir, a brutal fight between himself and Mr Covey, a white slaveowner, marks “the achievement of a prior, inner freedom” (Stone 1973) and indicates the importance of physicality in the struggle for liberty. Douglass himself describes the fight as a “turning-point” that “rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom” he had thought were beaten out of him (Douglass 68). This indicates a sensation of liberty within Douglass achieved by physical dominion of his autonomy (Kang 2022). Douglass finishes his narrative by detailing his escape from slavery. In a move that combines both the transference of information and the physicality of liberty as both necessary for escaping oppression, Douglass refuses to inform the readers how he escaped slavery, although he notes he was lucky to do so (Douglass 92). By withholding information, Douglass steps outside his narrative and indicates his purpose in writing: to centre the Black slave experience around turmoil and the ultimate goal of freedom for his race, stating that he would “not hold the light by which he [slaveowners] can trace the footprints of our flying brother” (Douglass 87). By holding sway over his narration’s voice and rendering it a thoughtful discussion of slavery’s evils, Douglass confronts the reader and makes a case for the liberation of his race as a whole. In this, his purpose becomes clear and his manipulation of the reader subtly dismantled as one who strives to achieve a broader goal.
While Douglass’s work depicts the physicality of liberty as definite and all-consuming, it is subtext rather than direct description in Browning’s poem that brings to light the abusive dynamic between the Duke and his wife, and allows the reader to understand how he removed from her her physical liberty (Kumar 2025). The Duke fixates on the Duchess’s blushing “spot of joy” (Browning 14-15) but reconciles a blush that should stem from happiness to be an indication of infidelity, stating that she was “too soon made glad [by others]” (Browning 22) and her “looks went everywhere” (Browning 24). This allows the reader to attribute his lack of control over her interest in others as a motive for his murdering her. In addition, his fixation on her blush can be seen as the means through which he achieved her murder by referencing her blush as a “half-flush that dies along her throat” (Browning 19). The physicality of this description in a vulnerable place like the neck deepens the poem’s eerie tone, while the line describing her “smiles stopped” can be perceived as both the growth towards her fear of the Duke, and the moment itself when her “smile” (Browning 46) was thus stopped forever by death (Guthrie 2017). The poem’s subtext powerfully brings to light his violent nature and further suggests that by killing her himself, the Duke felt as though he had gained control over her liberty (Ibrahim 2021). His line about the “curtain I have drawn for you [over her portrait],” which, “none puts by… but I)” (Browning 9-10) is an unsettling depiction of how deciding whether or not she is viewed by other people furthers his sway over her liberty, a sense of freedom unachieved even in her death (Vestzergom 2014). By doing so, he retains control over the piece’s narration and tone, transforming a person into a static image that he can close off from the world at will. The finalisation of Browning’s poem creates a rather bleak image of the Duchess, stripped of her liberty and doomed to remain voiceless. Briskly to the envoy, after having finished his description of his wife, the Duke asks after the “fair daughter” (Browning 52) of a Count he wishes to marry. This strengthens the argument that the Duke has a capacity for abuse by setting up a bout of victim-hunting, as it were, in his cyclical propensity for violence (Vestzergom 2014), but it is also seen that the Duchess’s portrait carries a haunting effect for the Duke. While the Duke obsesses over his wife’s portrait as something he ‘claimed’, his fixation helps suggest that the Duke, too, is trapped by his own vile actions (Ibrahim 2021), indicating the toll cruelty and oppression take.
In both pieces, physical domination is wielded to frame liberty within oppression. In Douglass’s memoir, confrontation serves to depict a positive turning point in his achievement of liberty, while Browning’s Duke utilises physicality to extinguish liberty entirely. Browning’s examination of the Duke’s physicality towards the Duchess furthers insight into the cruelty of the Duke’s character and makes him a match for Douglass’s Mr Covey, who additionally relied on brute force “breaking young slaves” (Douglass 50) in order to retain control of Black individuals’ liberty. But Mr Covey, unlike the Duke, ‘loses’ his fight against Douglass, who thus represents triumph in the Black slave experience by allowing this to fuel his “renewed determination to be a free man” and notes that he “was a man now” after winning the battle for his sovereignty (Kang 2022). Douglass’s memoir is written from the perspective of a Black man struggling to escape the complex entrappings of slavery, while the Duchess in Browning’s poem has passed on, and it is now her portrait and memory that struggle with liberty and voice. Both face domineering oppressors in different time periods. The work of Douglass and the Duke to command narrative voice and physicality within their texts serves to indicate the lengths they will go to keep control of liberty, and brings to the reader awareness of the discussion of liberty as a powerful tool.