Abstract
This dissertation explores how Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavas Vassa the African (1789) operates in the registers of the economic, celebrity, and moral simultaneously. I place significant focus on how Equiano accrues money through promoting his autobiography thereby helping him attract the interest of the readers to lobby for the end of slavery and the slave trade. At the same time, I attend to the ways in which Olaudah Equiano’s 1789 slave narrative not only bore witness to his own physical and psychological liberation but serves as a material product that enabled his economic becoming. Equiano’s autobiography deploys promotional techniques that certify it as a textual commodity. That is, it functioned as a good for sale and generated income which in turn helped Equiano achieve class mobility. In my thesis I read Equiano’s text as operating as both part of the abolitionist movement and a commodity that enabled Equiano to aid that movement and his own upward social mobility. That is, his social status shifted from that of being a marginal person occupying the lowest status in society, to assuming a powerful position in society as a celebrity of sorts because of his role as an active abolitionist, travelling throughout Great Britain agitating and lecturing against slavery, and in turn mobilising readers to reckon with the horrors of slavery and the slave trade.
In this study, the three registers within which Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography operates have been examined to identify the ways in which the economic registers enable Equiano to generate financial interest by commodifying his writing of the horrific experiences he endured during slavery. This economic interest enabled him to alter his financial situation and climb the class ladder as he became a widely known and highly ranked and influential figure in the movement to end slavery and the slave trade. I conduct a comparative study of Olaudah Equiano and Frederick Douglass. Although Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative (1789) and Frederick Douglass Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) over a relatively extended period and context, this dissertation will unite them under the umbrella term "autobiography” because of the unique ways in which they operate within the three registers to attain the moral objectives of any autobiography. This dissertation argues that the emphasis in the texts’ simultaneous operation within the economic and celebrity registers under study are the two main features that enables the moral register to materialise because they
provide the necessary financial interest to promote the text and accrue readers’ interest in their authors as ‘celebrities’.