Frederick Douglass Figurative Language

For my proposal, I will focus on the theme of Freedom in the United States and what exactly it connotes. More specifically, I will be focusing on the period of slavery seen in the United States most prominently during the 1800’s. For my speech, I have chosen to take on Frederick Douglass’s, “The Hypocrisy of American Slavery”. This speech was delivered on July 4th, 1852 to the citizens of Rochester, New York as a part of their Fourth of July celebrations. With Douglass himself is an abolitionist as well as most of his audience members being abolitionists, his speech was very well received as most everyone had the same perspective on slavery. This speech is very significant to American history because Douglass had the opportunity of pointing …show more content…
His use of figurative language in this speech helps aid his argument of freedom. He uses “Freedom” most often and it is used as an ideograph. According to Palczewski, Ice and Fritch, “An ideograph is an ordinary language term found in political discourse and it is an high order abstraction representing commitment to a goal” (42). Freedom being used as an ideograph in this speech plays a huge role in this speech because it is directly tied to the idea of slavery. He strategically uses it by concluding that it is a contradiction to have “freedom” in a country where slaves are present. In modern culture, we now know that “freedom” in this country was not actually free. It was simply subjective to whose who fit the category of White men only. Douglass also uses the word “freedom” as a temporary resignification. According to Burke, “a resignification is a change in the connotation of a symbol. In this case, the connotation of what it means to be free has change over time” (49). During the time of this speech, “freedom” was spoken about the orotundity given to people who live in this country but only really applied to those who were White men and not currently in chains while being in a “free”