Mixed Race Studies

On Reading Dialect in Harper’s ‘Iola Leroy’

The Dickens Project
2021-12-08

A roundtable conversation with Brigitte Fielder (University of Wisconsin, Madison), Eric Gardner (Saginaw Valley State University), Jennifer James (George Washington University), Derrick R. Spires (Cornell University), and Richard Yarborough (University of California, Los Angeles).

We staged this conversation with expert scholars in nineteenth-century African American literary studies in order to give viewers a glimpse into the ongoing conversations about Black dialect in US literature, African American literature, and [Frances E. W.] Harper’s novel. This glimpse appears in the form of a roundtable discussion with teacher-scholars who have written about Harper, taught her work, and engaged deeply in conversations on this complex topic with students, colleagues, and the broader public.

Watch the discussion (01:06:07) here.

Iola Leroy or, Shadows Uplifted

Broadview Press
2018-02-28
352 pages
5½” x 8½”
Hardcover ISBN: 9781554813858 / 1554813859
(Originally published in 1892)

Frances E. W. Harper (1825-1911)

Edited by:

Koritha Mitchell, Associate Professor of English
Ohio State University

Frances Harper’s fourth novel follows the life of the beautiful, light-skinned Iola Leroy to tell the story of black families in slavery, during the Civil War, and after Emancipation. Iola Leroy adopts and adapts three genres that commanded significant audiences in the nineteenth century: the sentimental romance, the slave narrative, and plantation fiction. Written by the foremost black woman activist of the nineteenth century, the novel sheds light on the movements for abolition, public education, and voting rights through a compelling narrative.

This edition engages the latest research on Harper’s life and work and offers ways to teach these major moments in United States history by centering the experiences of African Americans. The appendices provide primary documents that help readers do what they are seldom encouraged to do: consider the experiences and perspectives of people who are not white. The Introduction traces Harper’s biography and the changing critical perspectives on the novel.

Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: A Brief Chronology
• A Note on the Text
• Iola Leroy; Or, Shadows Uplifted
• Appendix A: Slavery, Civil War and Emancipation, Reconstruction and Its Demise
  1. From the Fugitive Slave Act (1850)
  2. United States Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney, the Dred Scott Decision (1857)
  3. From the First Confiscation Act (1861)
  4. From the Second Confiscation Act (1862)
  5. The Emancipation Proclamation (1863)
  6. From the Freedmen’s Bureau Act (1865)
  7. The Thirteenth Amendment (1865)
  8. From the Fourteenth Amendment (1868)
  9. The Fifteenth Amendment (1870)
  10. The Compromise of 1877
  11. From United States Supreme Court Justice Billings Brown, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)
• Appendix B: Not White? Then You Can’t Be Equal
  1. From Abraham Lincoln, Address on Colonization to a Deputation of Negroes (1862)
  2. From Frances Harper, “Mrs. Frances E. Watkins Harper on the War and the President’s Colonization Scheme,” Christian Recorder (27 September 1862)
  3. From Michigan Supreme Court Justice James Campbell, The People v. Dean (1866)
• Appendix C: Black Families in Slavery and Freedom
  1. From Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)
  2. Dictated letters between enslaved husbands and wives while separated by their owners
  3. From “Arrest of Fugitive Slaves,” Cincinnati Gazette (29 January 1856)
  4. Frances Harper, “The Slave Mother: A Tale of Ohio” 1857)
  5. Testimony about enslaved men and women who fled slavery to join the Union effort and often planned to return to help family members escape (1863)
  6. Letter from a black soldier to his children (1864)
  7. Letter from a black soldier to the owner of one of his daughters (1864)
  8. Newspaper Notices in Hopes of Finding Lost Loved Ones after Emancipation (1866–93)
• Appendix D: Education in Slavery and Freedom
  1. From the South Carolina Negro Act (1740)
  2. Account about an enslaved woman who ran a midnight school (1881)
  3. Account of teaching/learning in secret during slavery (1902)
  4. An account of finding the spark for learning while enslaved (1885)
  5. Accounts of the consequences of learning to read and write
  6. Account of black soldiers wanting education
  7. Account of recently emancipated people’s eagerness to learn
  8. Testimony on Ku Klux Klan preventing school attendance after Emancipation (1872)
• Appendix E: Preventing Freedom Even after Emancipation
  1. Laws constraining black girls and boys via apprenticeship and African Americans of every age via vagrancy statutes (1865)
  2. Testimony about Ku Klux Klan raping black women whose husbands/fathers voted (1871)
  3. From Henry W. Grady, “The Race Problem in the South” (1889)
  4. From Ida B. Wells, The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States (1895)
• Appendix F: Black Women’s Activism
  1. From Frances Harper, “We Are All Bound Up Together” (1866)
  2. Frances Harper, “Aunt Chloe’s Politics” (1872)
  3. From Frances Harper, “Colored Women of America,” Englishwoman’s Review (15 January 1878)
  4. From Frances Harper, “The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the ColoredWoman,” African Methodist Episcopal Church Review (1888)
  5. From Frances Harper, “Enlightened Motherhood: An Address … Before the Brooklyn Literary Society” (15 November 1892)
  6. From Fannie Barrier Williams, “The Intellectual Progress of The Colored Women of the United States Since the Emancipation Proclamation” (1893)
• Appendix G: Being Black and a Woman: Aesthetics and Reception
  1. William J. Watkins, “The Reformer,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper (7 April 1854)
  2. Grace Greenwood, Impressions of Harper as a Speaker (1866)
  3. From Anna Julia Cooper, “The Status of Woman in America” (1892)
  4. Reviews of Iola Leroy
     1. “Publications Reviewed,” Christian Recorder (12 January 1893)
     2. From “Review 1,” Independent (5 January 1893)
     3. Richmond Planet (21 January 1893)
     4. From “Recent Fiction,” The Nation (23 February 1893)
     5. From “Our Book List,” A.M.E. Church Review (April 1893)
     6. “Book Review,” Friends’ Review; a Religious, Literary and Miscellaneous Journal (22 June 1893)
     7. Review of Reviews (January 1895)
     8. From “Recent Fiction,” Independent (29 October 1896)
     9. From Edward Elmore Brock, “Brock’s Literary Leaves,” Freeman (Indianapolis) (14 August 1897)
     10. [W.E.B. Du Bois,] “Writers,” Crisis (April 1911)
• Works Cited and Select Bibliography

Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature

Princeton University Press
November 2016
304 pages
6 x 9
12 line illus.
Hardcover ISBN: 9780691169453
eBook ISBN: 9781400883745

Daniel Hack, Associate Professor of English
University of Michigan

Tackling fraught but fascinating issues of cultural borrowing and appropriation, this groundbreaking book reveals that Victorian literature was put to use in African American literature and print culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in much more intricate, sustained, and imaginative ways than previously suspected. From reprinting and reframing “The Charge of the Light Brigade” in an antislavery newspaper to reimagining David Copperfield and Jane Eyre as mixed-race youths in the antebellum South, writers and editors transposed and transformed works by the leading British writers of the day to depict the lives of African Americans and advance their causes. Central figures in African American literary and intellectual history—including Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and W.E.B. Du Bois—leveraged Victorian literature and this history of engagement itself to claim a distinctive voice and construct their own literary tradition.

In bringing these transatlantic transfigurations to light, this book also provides strikingly new perspectives on both canonical and little-read works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and other Victorian authors. The recovery of these works’ African American afterlives illuminates their formal practices and ideological commitments, and forces a reassessment of their cultural impact and political potential. Bridging the gap between African American and Victorian literary studies, Reaping Something New changes our understanding of both fields and rewrites an important chapter of literary history.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The African Americanization of Victorian Literature
• 1. Close Reading Bleak House at a Distance
• 2. (Re-) Racializing “The Charge of the Light Brigade”
• 3. Affiliating with George Eliot
• 4. Racial Mixing and Textual Remixing: Charles Chesnutt
• 5. Cultural Transmission and Transgression: Pauline Hopkins
• 6. The Citational Soul of Black Folk: W.E.B. Du Bois
• Afterword After Du Bois
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Slippery Language and False Dilemmas: The Passing Novels of Child, Howells, and Harper

American Literature
Volume 75, Number 4, December 2003
pages 813-841

Julie Cary Nerad, Associate Professor of English
Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland

Conceived in slavery, gestated in racialist science, and bred in Jim Crow segregation, the U.S. race system calcified into a visual epistemology of racial difference based largely on skin color. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this visual schema of biological difference, despite fluctuation within racial categories—even within whiteness itself—was generally reduced to just white and nonwhite. This illusion of racial dichotomy sometimes allowed very light-skinned African Americans to choose between a black or a white identity. “The position of the pale [black] individual,” wrote African American psychiatrist Charles Gibson in 1931, “is analogous to that of a traveler who has come to a forked road. One branch of the fork is remaining Negro; the other is ‘passing for white.'” In Gibson’s schema, light-skinned African Americans could choose to retain their black identity and risk reverse discrimination within the darker-skinned community, or they could pass as white through an identity of deception, trading the ties of their African American family and friends for economic opportunity, a choice often conceptualized as crass materialism. Recent scholarship on passing for white has complicated Gibson’s simple binary of individual choice by recognizing racial passing as an aggressive political challenge to the ideological construct of race. As a form of performative trespass, many have argued, passing exposes race as a performative identity category, like gender and class. Recognizing this dimension of racial identity does not reduce the cultural and psychological significance of race; rather, it attempts to separate race from biology and the fallacious hierarchy of innate difference that has been used historically to justify systemic inequity and violence.

Despite its impetus, however, recent critical work on race often illustrates the degree to which the one-drop rule still has a toehold on American racial consciousness. “One drop” of “black blood” continues to imply a responsibility to blackness that academic deconstructions of race have not significantly altered. One goal of my essay is to investigate how continuing misconceptions about race as a biological imperative influence our readings of novels about racial passing, despite our acknowledgment that race is performative. The cause I identify here is twofold. First, the ideology of racial uplift and the tenacious persistence of the one-drop rule converge to influence our perceptions of race and our reading of passing novels. Racial uplift, with its debt of responsibility, has become a significant part of our racial ideology: if one’s family is African American, if one has any “drop” of black blood, then one has a responsibility to the race and should proclaim oneself black. That is, no matter how “white” one’s skin, we assume that passers are black and censure their attempts to live outside the bounds of that identity. This assumption evinces the tenacity of—and simultaneously reinforces—the one-drop rule.

Second, in focusing almost exclusively on passing as an intentional act of racial identification, scholars have regarded it as primarily a political challenge to the racial status quo. In many novels of passing, however, the characters’ sense of racial identity develops less consciously, in conjunction with (not simply in conscious opposition to) the racially marked socioeconomic and cultural spaces they inhabit. Legally black but corporeally white, these passers are initially unaware that their genetic heritage includes a “drop” of black blood. I call these critically neglected characters unintentional passers. They do not know that in the eyes of the law they are passing. Texts of unintentional passing, and there are many, destabilize notions of biologically constructed racial identity precisely because the passers are unaware that they are transgressing legal boundaries. The discrepancy between legal race categories and racial self-perceptions reveals how race functions in the United States to maintain socioeconomic inequalities by controlling an individual’s sense of identity and her place within family, community, and nation. Our own tendency to conceptualize these fictional characters as…

Iola Leroy or Shadows Uplifted

1893
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

The Project Gutenberg EBook
2004-05-14
#12352

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911)

Read the entire book here.

The White Blackbird: Miscegenation, Genre, and the Tragic Mulatta in Howells, Harper, and the “Babes of Romance”

Nineteenth-Century Literature
Volume 56, Number 4 (March 2002)
Pages 495–517
DOI 10.1525/ncl.2002.56.4.495

Debra J. Rosenthal, Associate Professor of English
John Carroll University

In this essay I construct a literary genealogy that situates William Dean Howells in the middle of a call-and-response literary conversation with popular women writers about race, gender, and genre. Since Howells correlated racial questions with realism, his only novel that treats intermarriage, An Imperative Duty (1891), offered Howells an opportunity to deploy his presumably objective, scientific, realist knowledge about race in order to challenge women’s romantic miscegenation plots found in Margret Holmes Bates’s The Chamber over the Gate (1886) and Alice Morris Buckner’s Towards the Gulf (1887), two novels that he had recently read and reviewed. Yet the tragic mulatta stereotype, a stock figure of romanticism and sentimentality that was resistant to scientific discourse, ruptures Howells’s goal of representing the figure according to the tenets of realism. In Iola Leroy (1892), Frances Ellen Watkins Harper cunningly recasts the tragic mulatta stereotype both to critique Howells’s project and to represent the potential of black womanhood. Knowledge of Bates and Buckner can change critical conversation about the influence of women writers on Howells, the understanding of the role of the racialized woman in his fiction, and his conception of the link between the romantic mulatta and realist representation. Likewise, Harper takes issue with Howells’s supposed ironic sophistication about race, and in Iola Leroy she rewrites many of his views in order to show the ways that miscegenation is at once a novelistic and a national problem.