Pande 1
Viraj Pande
Christopher Roberts
Self-Fashioning and World-Creation
14 November 2014
Woolf and Douglass: Education and Oppression
Our western civilization is assumed to be the peak of human advancement, containing
government structures that, in their foundation, hold the most important human values- equality,
liberty, and justice as proof that its overarching system is benevolent. Despite the attempt to
maintain this facade, there is evidence from those who have seen and experienced brutal truths
living within these supposedly benevolent systems to suggest the contrary. Two such people,
Frederick Douglass and Virginia Woolf, both authored books in an effort to comment on the
hideous flaws they perceived within their worlds. Though the authors, their lives, and their
influence seem different, they share a very deep-rooted similarity. In both worlds, the power of
education and literacy is unquestionably dominant. For Douglass, literacy was the promise of
individual liberty and freedom and for Woolf, attaining the same level of education as men was
imperative in the path to gender equality. Here are two representatives of oppressed peoples,
sharing the desire for a common means to a similar end. Even today, bold traces of the injustice
that haunted them remain. The system in place today silently claims to be the product of
progressive thinking and reform, yet the truth still remains. This system has always chosen in a
methodical, purposeful manner to elevate certain groups of people and to oppress certain groups
of people, no matter how subtle the oppression is.
Pande 2
In his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
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Douglass explains how he discovered a crucial turning point in his life when he arrived in
Baltimore and started to learn how to read and write from Mrs. Auld. Mr. Auld however, stopped
the lessons claiming that a slave that could read “would at once become unmanageable, and of
no value to his master”. In observing this obstacle, Douglass developed a new, “fixed purpose, at
whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read” because this experience taught him that literacy
was “the pathway from slavery to freedom” (Douglass 42). This revelation that Douglass has is
of utmost importance in his development as an activist and his overall progress to personal
freedom. Education is not something that Douglass fully understood as a means by which he
could achieve freedom until this point, but what he realizes about how it plays into the control of
