![]() ![]() Anna did not always take kindly to Assing’s presence, as her relationship with Douglass was likely intimate as well as intellectual.Īssing’s biographer suggests that eventually, the two women reached some form of truce, but always held each other in contempt. During these visits, she consistently attempted to reshape Douglass’s thoughts on specific issues, helped with his newspaper, and worked on her own writing. For many Summers between the late 1850s and 1872, Ottilie became a frequent visitor to the Douglass household, serving as both Douglass’s intellectual and emotional companion. To expand the historical narrative beyond Douglass’s personal accounts, Blight decided to pull back the curtains, and his alternative narrative includes the experiences of Anna and Ottilie during the Civil War, which counters Douglass’s presentation as a self-made man.īlight’s alternative depiction of the event is as follows. He is a self-made hero who leaves a great deal unsaid, hidden from his readers and his biographers… it is as if he slips in and out of the room right when we so wish to know more – anything more about his private thoughts, motivations, and memories of conflicts within his personal life. In writing Douglass’s biography, Blight notes that all Douglass scholars are heavily reliant on these three autobiographies in which: His excitement for the Emancipation Proclamation, calling it “the greatest event of the century.” 2 However, there was a lot going on in Douglass’s personal life, which he hid from the public realm and omitted from his autobiographies. 1 During this period, Douglass spoke proudly and publicly of his childrens’ military service and Two of the Douglass children enlisted to fight for the Union, another left home for Mississippi to be a recruiter of black troops, and Frederick himself became a prominent leader in the war effort. In 1863, the Douglass family became increasingly involved with the Civil War. This paper will focus on a specific point in the novel where Blight highlights the experiences of Anna Douglass and Ottilie Assing, and will evaluate how his decision to include their experiences breaks down Douglass’s publicly projected image as a self-made man. Because of this unification, Blight is able to shed light on the experiences of these forgotten individuals and reassign their agency. However, Blight synthesizes the information in Douglass’s three autobiographies and merges these narratives with primary documents from Douglass’s peers and fellow historians’ work to produce an alternative narrative. The absence of information regarding Douglass’s private life in his three autobiographies, countless publications, and speeches, causes the impacts of many key actors within Douglass’s life, such as his wife, Anna, and rumored mistress, Ottilie Assing, to be forgotten. Two significant themes throughout Blight’s novel are the disparities between Douglass’s private and public life due to the lack of information he publicly disclosed about his personal affairs, and his public portrayal as a self-made man. ![]() Frederick Douglass : David Blight’s Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom recounts the life of Frederick Douglass, a black American who escaped slavery to become one of the most prominent abolitionist figures in American History. ![]()
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