Slave Narratives and the Rhetoric of Author Portraiture

Abstract

“Slave Narratives and the Rhetoric of Author Portraiture” places the author portraits of slave narratives within the historical contexts of illustrated texts generally, and the genre of slave narratives specifically. The essay begins with an examination of author portraiture from its earliest use in print publication, where the author portrait was an often ironic "zone of transaction" between the reader and the text's narrator. With the emergence of slave narratives, however, the essay argues that slave narratives’ author portraits were serious evidence to prove the authenticity of slave narratives as autobiographies. Further, slave narratives' author portraits sought to evidence the irrational relationship of apparent skin color to race categories during the era of American slavery. The essay finds that the frontispiece author portraits were both proof of authorship/authenticity, and critical evidence of miscegenation's dire consequences. Yet the current editions of slave narratives often manipulate and, in many cases omit these portraits and thereby create a subtle but important crisis of authority in the slave narrative genre.

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