Sophia Auld is one of the few characters, apart from Douglass himself, who changes throughout the course of the Narrative. Specifically, Sophia is transformed from a kind, caring woman who owns no slaves to an excessively cruel slave owner. On the one hand, she appears more realistic and humane than other characters because we see her character in process. On the other hand, Sophia comes to resemble less a character than a symbol. Douglass uses Sophia’s transformation from kind to cruel as a message about the negative effects of slavery on slaveholders' morality. To drive this point home, Douglass's descriptions of her are rhetorically dramatic; his initial description of Sophia idealizes her kind features, and his description of her character post-transformation equally dramatizes her demonic qualities.

Sophia’s gender affects her characterization in the Narrative. To nineteenth-century readers, it would have seemed natural for Sophia, as a woman, to be sympathetic and loving. Consequently, it would have appeared all the more unnatural and undesirable for her to be transformed into an evil slave owner. Because many nineteenth-century readers thought of maternal figures as the symbol of their society’s moral righteousness, corruption of a maternal figure—or disruption of her family structure—would point directly to moral problems in the society at large. In this regard, Sophia appears in the Narrative as a symbolic character as well as a realistic character. Her symbolism of a culture’s corruption is an important emotional component of Douglass’s larger argument against slavery.