Return to the Great House Farm and Conclusion

Abstract The brief Chapter 15, “Return to the Great House Farm and Conclusion,” completes Part III’s meditations on the contemporary United States by taking us to the actual site of Frederick Douglass’s enslavement, the Wye House Plantation on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, discussed in Chapter 2 as the Great House Farm. There, recent archaeological discoveries identify multiple kinds of human traces in the very structure of the edifice, revealing an unexpectedly layered site, the hybrid legacy of white, Black, and Native Americans. This great house allegory helps this final chapter to cast a brief look back and offer conclusions about the history-and-culture-spanning, continually metamorphosing chronotope of the great house and about this study’s contributions to the emerging field of world literature.