'Iola Leroy': Activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
“Isn’t it funny”, said Robert, “how these white folks look down on colored people, an’then mix up with them?” – Robert Johnson, Iola Leroy p 27
The author: Activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was the only child of free African American parents. During Reconstruction she was an activist for civil rights, women’s rights, and educational opportunities for all .Harper published many collections of poetry and several novels, among which Iola Leroy (1892) is one. Iola Leroy was Harper’s most famous novel and was published when she was 67 years old. Iola Leroy which was written in Philadelphia, was not only a best seller, but is also one of the few books from the Reconstruction period to look at the mid-nineteenth century American landscape through …show more content…
There were, it is true some mulattoes who inherited freedom, a light skin, and property all in the same package. Most, if not all, of the wealthy Negroes in the ante-bellum South-and there were a considerable amount of them-were in this category. These, concentrated largely in New Orleans and Charleston, held themselves quite aloof from the Black Negro. They had their own social organizations, married among themselves, and often sent their children to France or elsewhere abroad to be educated. Besides their own property, most of which came originally from bequests of wealthy white farmers, many of them owned considerable numbers of Negro slaves. They called themselves not Negroes or mulattoes, but persons of color-in Louisiana, gens de couleur. To proud to enter the society of Negroes, unable to enter the society of whites, they lived in a social limbo, a class apart- Wilson, T (1965 p 22)
Harper’s use of the mulatto: The anti-slavery novels of the antebellum period, such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin stereotypically portrayed their mulatto characters as the all but white, tragic offspring of a slave owner and a slave (often of mixed blood, as Marie, Iola’s mother was) with such admirable qualities as intelligence, sensitivity, pride, and nobility (good coming out of bad, perhaps?) yet racked with tragedy and bitterness because society has defined them as Black, therefore sealing their
The author: Activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was the only child of free African American parents. During Reconstruction she was an activist for civil rights, women’s rights, and educational opportunities for all .Harper published many collections of poetry and several novels, among which Iola Leroy (1892) is one. Iola Leroy was Harper’s most famous novel and was published when she was 67 years old. Iola Leroy which was written in Philadelphia, was not only a best seller, but is also one of the few books from the Reconstruction period to look at the mid-nineteenth century American landscape through …show more content…
There were, it is true some mulattoes who inherited freedom, a light skin, and property all in the same package. Most, if not all, of the wealthy Negroes in the ante-bellum South-and there were a considerable amount of them-were in this category. These, concentrated largely in New Orleans and Charleston, held themselves quite aloof from the Black Negro. They had their own social organizations, married among themselves, and often sent their children to France or elsewhere abroad to be educated. Besides their own property, most of which came originally from bequests of wealthy white farmers, many of them owned considerable numbers of Negro slaves. They called themselves not Negroes or mulattoes, but persons of color-in Louisiana, gens de couleur. To proud to enter the society of Negroes, unable to enter the society of whites, they lived in a social limbo, a class apart- Wilson, T (1965 p 22)
Harper’s use of the mulatto: The anti-slavery novels of the antebellum period, such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin stereotypically portrayed their mulatto characters as the all but white, tragic offspring of a slave owner and a slave (often of mixed blood, as Marie, Iola’s mother was) with such admirable qualities as intelligence, sensitivity, pride, and nobility (good coming out of bad, perhaps?) yet racked with tragedy and bitterness because society has defined them as Black, therefore sealing their