SOURCE: Wohlpart, A. James. “Privatized Sentiment and the Institution of Christianity: Douglass's Ethical Stance in the Narrative.” American Transcendental Quarterly 9, no. 3 (September 1995): 181-94.

In the following essay, Wohlpart suggests that Douglass's relationship to Christianity is more complicated than many critics believe, suggesting that in the Narrative the author operates within accepted religious discourse while at the same time subverting it.

In his “Introduction” to Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass, published in 1991, William L. Andrews rightly concludes in relation to the 1845 version of Douglass's autobiography that the primary critical debate in the 1980s was whether or not the Narrative signifies “Douglass's mastery of literary discourse—or its mastery of him …” (10). Several positions have been staked out in relation to this question, the first of which, exhibited in the readings of Wilson J. Moses, Valerie Smith and Houston A. Baker, Jr., holds that the hegemonic (i.e., white, Protestant, abolitionist...