Douglas vs Stowe

Experience Prevail Over Fiction Before the Civil War, America was plagued with a complicated social quandary that incorporated individual, societal, political, economic, and religious principles. Its authorship includes Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe who dually challenges the legitimacy of slavery in their literature. While both Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and Frederick Douglas’s “Narrative of the Life of an American Slave,” offer impelling accounts, regarding the historical slavery era throughout the 1800s, the two authors write from distinctive experiences. Stowe’s Uncle Tom, a fictional character, attracts his audience through his profound Christian faith, which gives him an unbreakable spirit that enables him to see both the hand of God in all that happens and, in the critical moment, to stand up for what he believes is morally conscientious. Douglas, on the other hand, attracts his audience through his short but extremely powerful autobiography, which the great abolitionist brilliantly brings out slavery’s corrupting influence on society. Although both literary works have won over the hearts of numerous audiences during the time of its public release, Douglas, as his own character, presents a more imperative perception of his identity as a slave than Stowe’s Uncle Tom through his strategy of writing, his audiences, and initiative for freedom. Frederick Douglass’s strategy as a writer proves to be effectively powerful in terms of his narrative describing his life as a former slave. As the character, whose name is Proximo of the movie film, “Gladiator,” says to Maximus; “Win the crowd and you will win your freedom,” Douglas must strive to do the same to his primary audiences in the North. In his narrative, Douglas offers a calm, concise, yet compelling account of his experience as a slave. He describes heart-wrenching scenes of beatings and whippings and of the most basic failures in decency, like the one in which the small