ick Douglass’s personal freedom and, second, a
restriction on the positive freedom for education.
Since freedom must correspond with reason, those
restricted from education have greater susceptibility
to slavery. As the English philosopher Francis Bacon
famously said, “Knowledge is power.” Thus, the
contrary also proves true: Ignorance is slavery. The
two work with each other and against Douglass: His
slavery keeps him from learning, and his ignorance
keeps him a slave. When his mistress, Mrs. Auld,
attempts to teach him to read, Mr. Auld forbids it,
saying, “ ‘Learning would spoil the best nigger in
the world. Now,’ said he, ‘if you teach that nigger
(speaking of [Douglass]) how to read, there would
be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be
a slave’ ” (Douglass 41). Mr. Auld realizes that learn-
ing frees human beings. Overhearing this dialogue,
Douglass, too, understands that knowledge is the
“path from slavery to freedom” (41). Thus, through
education, he overcomes the subordination he has
suffered.
In Kate Chopin’s The awakeninG, her pro-
tagonist. Mrs. Edna Pontellier, overcomes her sub-
ordination as a woman through education as well,
though of a different kind, education of experience.
Similar to Douglass’s transformation, Edna begins
by desiring negative freedom—freedom from the
dominance of her husband. In a moment of self-
awareness, she perceives “that her will had blazed
up, stubborn and resistant” when her husband
Léonce demanded that she come to bed. She won-
ders whether “her husband had ever spoken to her
like that before, and if she had submitted to his
command. Of course she had... But she could not
realize why or how she should have yielded, feeling
as she did then” (37). Edna then begins to seek posi-
tive freedom for individual autonomy—to use her
time as she desires, painting, swimming, and taking
a lover. However, these choices do not accord with
reason but with desire, and thus they are not free.
By the end of the novel, Edna has lost the respect of
society, left her husband and her children, and has
been abandoned by her lover. Realizing her solitude,
she commits suicide, though this ending remains
ambiguous as to its triumph.
The modern interpretation of freedom, which
could be categorized as license, exalts actions such as
Edna’s. In the 19th century, the German philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche declares that modern society
has murdered God. Without a conception of God,
all freedom is dictated by the autonomous indi-
vidual. As the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre writes,
“Man is freedom.” Each person must determine his
or her own freedom by acting as he or she chooses,
apart from the constrictions of family, religion, time,
or even reason. In his article “Existentialism and
Human Freedom,” John Killinger writes, “Man’s
nature is not ‘fixed’ as a stone’s or a tree’s is; he is a
creature with the ability to choose, and decides what
he shall become” (304). Humans have no created
essence, but they must create their existence by free
actions.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky rightly foresaw the prob-
lem with this philosophy, namely that every action
then becomes permissible. In Dostoyevsky’s master-
ful novel criMe^ and punishMent, the main char-
acter Raskolnikov believes that extraordinary human
beings may act not only above the laws of morality
or reason, but also above civil laws. His examples of
extraordinary human beings include Isaac Newton
and Napoleon Bonaparte—men who felt free to
remove any persons who obstructed their noble
purposes. Considering himself such an extraordinary
person, Raskolnikov murders the local pawnshop
owner because she belongs to the lower, ordinary
kind of people. To comfort himself against the
encroaching guilt that follows this act, he exclaims,
“it wasn’t a human being I killed, it was a principle!”
(274). The woman is no more than an object to him.
This subordination and harm imposed on others is
exactly what Locke thinks stems from not subject-
ing freedom to reason, what African Americans and
women overcame in the 20th century, and what still
must be fought against in contemporary societies
around the world.
See also Capote, Truman: in coLd bLood;
Chestnutt, Charles W.: “Goophered Grape-
vine, The”; Equiano, Olaudah: interestinG
narrative oF the LiFe oF oLaudah equiano;
Flaubert, Gustave: MadaMe bovary; Gilman,
Charlotte Perkins: yeLLow waLLpaper, the;
Hughes, Langston: poems; James, Henry: daisy
MiLLer; portrait oF a Lady, the; Kafka, Franz:
MetaMorphosis, the; Kerouac, Jack: on thefreedom 37