Steve McQueen’s 2013 film adaptation of Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (1853) brought Northup’s narrative to new, large audiences and stimulated discussion and research. It is striking that...Show moreSteve McQueen’s 2013 film adaptation of Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (1853) brought Northup’s narrative to new, large audiences and stimulated discussion and research. It is striking that McQueen chose to adapt this particular slave narrative, as Northup was a free-born man and his narrative and agency therefore differs from widely read and taught slave narratives of slave-born narrators. Agency is central in these narratives as the narrators decide to escape the limited conditions of slavery and rebel against their master in order to live a life in which they are free to make their own decisions. The representation of slaves’ agency in their narratives is influenced by the socio-political environment at the time and place of writing and publication of the narrative. The genre of the autobiographical slave narrative has influenced the literature about slavery that has followed it, as can be seen in the autobiographies of former slaves published after the emancipation of all slaves in 1865 and in the genre of the neo-slave narrative that appeared in the 1970s. As the times in which they are made differ, so does their representation of agency, as they are all influenced by the socio-political environment they were published in. Autobiographies of former slaves offer a softened version of slavery and an optimistic view of the future that can be achieved through hard work, neo-slave narratives emphasize the rebellious agency of slaves, and contemporary films dwell on the ways slavery limits slave agency which makes every act of rebellion heroic. This thesis will argue that the forms of agency that are represented in contemporary novels and film dealing with slavery differ from those in the nineteenth-century autobiographical narratives that have influenced them, as all are influenced by the socio-political environment of the narrator and/or author. In order to research the theme of agency, I will look at slave narratives and works from different periods, and show different forms of agency. The works used are Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (1853), Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery (1901), Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986), and Steve McQueen’s film 12 Years a Slave (2013).Show less
