Iola Leroy and the Politics of Race in the Sentimental Novel

I’ve been doing a lot of reading this week, and sometimes I have no idea how I’ll process all the information. Basically, I feel like a sponge. As I talk to more people who have gone through the exam process, I am finding that this feeling is common, but I often wonder how I’ll ever retain all the material! Whew. And now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, please bear with me while I work through some of the critical, secondary material I’ve been wresting with over the past week. I’ve been reading Karen Weyler’s Intricate Relations: Sexual and Economic Desire in American Fiction and Caroline Levander’s Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child, and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson to W.E.B. Du Bois. I’d like to condense and discuss the major arguments in each of these texts, and then maybe I’ll even have a little discussion of Iola Leroy.

Weyler’s Intricate Relations was compelling and interesting, merging ideas of sexuality and economics. I found one of the most compelling descriptions of the book (and its title) on the back of the book (I love it when this happens): “In 1799, the novelist Charles Brockden Brown used the evocative phrase ‘intricate relations’ to describe the complex imbrications of sexual and economic relations in the early republic. Exploring these relationships, he argued, is the chief job of the ‘moral historian,’ a label that most novelists of the era embraced.” But Weyler doesn’t relegate her study to novels—she explores a wealth of social documents and narratives, eventually coming back to the novel as a space where, she argues, all these narrative converge to create a sexual and economic narrative of morality. One of the most interesting points, to me at least, was her discussion of a “fall” in early society. A woman “fell” sexually, saved only by a timely marriage. To “fall” as a man, however, was to fall economically, and the salvation for this transgression was a well-calculated marriage. We talked last semester about how, especially in the early parts of the nineteenth century, that marriage was more of an economic relation between men rather than a union between two people in love. As novels worked to revise this dynamic (a process which we addressed in class yesterday), the dynamics of economics and sexuality must also evolve and adapt. We can see this revision in The Lamplighter (and other “women’s fiction”): the heroine supports herself (at least some of the time), the marriage is between two people who love each other (though the man is clearly the primary bread-winner), and “sexual” scenes are played out between platonic characters, placing the agency in an internal, personal, and safe relationship rather than in a potentially “economic” one like marriage.

Changing venues just a bit, I’d like to talk briefly about Caroline Levander’s Cradle of Liberty. Given my recent interest in young girls and Girl’s Studies, I was pleased to find out that Levander’s text is all about literary representations of children in writing of the early national period. She argues that, rather than focusing on adult subjects, beginning an analysis of “a U.S. liberal endeavor with the child . . . provides a unique opportunity to chart liberalism’s inner workings—to see how the child, by simultaneously representing the promise of autonomy and the reality of dependence, both shapes and constantly threatens to disrupt liberalism’s two relational antipodes” (3). She takes this a step further, though, and thinks about how the child works to establish race as a critical element of national formation. She begins buy exploring the ways authors use the child to portray the “self,” a term she reads as an unadulterated, uncorrupted version of identity. Levander then extends this reading to child-centered narratives discussing race, analyzing how these two discourses operate as one: “To the extent that the child represents the liberal-democratic state, it takes on and perpetuates the racial meanings inhering in that social entity. Analysis of the child therefore does not simply index who suffers from racism (and is therefore equated with the child) but, more fundamentally, reveals racial domination to be a system—like patriarchy—that underpins and enabled liberal-democratic societies” (14). She doesn’t look at actual children, but rather at representations of children in American Literature, linking her analysis to contemporary uses of children (in many social texts) to display the natural, intrinsic “self” of a nation.

Ok, and now on to Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy. How’s that for a smooth transition? Let’s see if I can make some connections. One of the first things I’d like to say about this novel is that it is very clearly using the format of a sentimental novel, even sometimes subverting the conventions of the genre for its own rhetorical purposes. As a side note, this process of subverting genres is called “disembedding” a genre (I learned this from Melanie Kill) and is an interesting way into a textual analysis—genre theorists argue that one always “disembeds” for a purpose, usually to question the status quo. Of course, one could argue that authors of sentimental novels are already writing to subvert societal standards, making texts like Iola Leroy especially rich for analysis. In a full-length study, it might be fun to analyze the reasons the novel originally developed as a genre and then trace all subsequent progressions to Iola Leroy, but for today I think I’ll just look at it with other, traditional sentimental novels.

Iola Leroy follows the life of a young woman, Iola, who is the daughter of a wealthy white man and a black woman. At the beginning of the novel, readers find out that Iola’s father loved her mother (who could, and did, pass as white), freed her, married her, and refused to let his children know that they had any black blood. Iola and her brother (Harry) grew up in a slave owning family, thinking they were white. Sadly, Iola’s father dies, the mother’s freedom and marriage are proven false, and Iola and her mother are sold into slavery. It is at this point that the novel takes on the format of a sentimental story. Iola loses everything and is harassed by evil masters, though she never gives into moral or sexual corruption. Thankfully, slavery is abolished and Iola is freed, at which point she sets about gathering her family back together, which is very much a coming of age journey. She is employed as a teacher, able to earn a living helping others. Her moral struggle, however, is the point I find most intriguing.

In The Lamplighter, we watch Gerty learn to harness and control her bad temper. When she does, she becomes an almost angelic representation of the true woman (unless duty calls). Iola Leroy’s struggle, however, is directly impacted by racial politics. As a woman who could, and had for years, passed as white, Iola makes a choice to live as a black woman. She struggles to find work, encounters supreme disrespect, and declines marriage proposals based on race (more on this later). She overcomes these obstacles with the same unflappable dignity that we see in Gerty. Interestingly, Iola is always described as a “true woman,” so much so that white men, even after learning of her black blood, want to marry her. She declines, citing social stereotypes and prejudices as her reasoning. I think, however, that we could also think of her refusal to marry a white man (even though they could both live together as a “white” couple) is another way of revising the power dynamics of marriage in literary texts. Harper uses the unequal power dynamics inherent in racial tensions of the times and applies them to marriage. She makes it very obvious that, despite appearances—even though everything looks good on the surface—that the institution of marriage is inherently flawed. Of course, the novel still ends in marriage, but Harper does extensive work to make it equitable and digestible.

Iola and Dr. Latimer (her soon-to-be husband) were unified in “their desire to help their race”; their “hearts beat in loving unison” for this common cause and “one grand and noble purpose was giving tone and color to their lives and strengthening the bonds of affection between them” (266). Dr. Latimer, we find out, could also pass as white but chose to live as a black man, unwilling to ignore his people and their plight. They were united in a common cause: “Between their lives were no impending barriers, no inclination impelling one way and duty compelling another. Kindred hopes and tastes had knit their hearts; grand and noble purposes were lighting up their lives; and they esteemed it a blessed privilege to stand on the threshold of a new era and labor for those who had passed from the old oligarchy of slavery into the new commonwealth of freedom” (271). Dr. Latimer and Iola are united in a common cause, working to help former slaves transition into a new realm of freedom. There are no “barriers” or “compulsions” to keep them from the “commonwealth of freedom.” Harper’s use of anti-slavery rhetoric in her discussion of marriage is telling, for using a language of freedom to describe an (sometimes) oppressive social institution draws an obvious parallel between the two. But Dr. Latimer and Iola are revising the narrative, united in “one grand and noble purpose,” working to end oppression on a variety of levels.