Racial hysteria: female pathology and race politics in France Harper's 'Iola Leroy' and W.D. Howells's 'An Imperative Duty.'

African American Review, Spring, 1999 by Michele Birnbaum

If for white physicians, matrimony attempts to domesticate racial angst in order to foreclose political desire, for the black physician, the idealization of marriage represents what Claudia Tate terms a "domestic allegory of political desire."(21) Tate convincingly argues that intraracial marriage in Harper's novel is reformist in part because it "dramatizes the novelist's refusal to discredit African-American identity, solidarity, and racial equality" (99). And certainly Iola's acceptance of Latimer exposes the impotence of whites like Gresham, who is both dismembered (a war injury leaves him with a "sleeveless arm" [144]) and whose suit is twice rejected. But the historical terms of marriage themselves are also refused. The "peculiar institution" is represented as continuous with the "holiest institution": Eugene's friend Lorraine, for instance, unwittingly indicts both marriage and slavery when he suggest they are redundant arrangements. As he points out, under the law of coverture, women are the legal possession of the white man; thus, according to Lorraine, slavery makes marriage redundant: Marie is already "your property, to have and to hold to all intents and purposes" (65). Gresham's proposal, too, resonates with the language of possession: "Consent to be mine, as nothing on earth is mine" (112, repeated verbatim on 230). And even those women who are willingly a couvert risk becoming mere commodities. Eugene's marriage contract with Marie - and her Pygmalian remaking from ignorant "ward" (73) to educated wife - for instance, does not protect her from reenslavement as chattel. Nor does it prevent Lorraine's insistence that women of color are not the victims but (referring to black mistresses) the "curse of our Southern homes," attributing to them white men's own culpability and destructive agency.

Indeed, the very language of wedlock enables this projection, whereby white men recast themselves as "victims": In An Imperative Duty, for instance, Olney jests that Rhoda will keep him in "hopeless slavery as long as [he] lives" (98). If Olney denies his own power in such relationships, both white doctors also seem oblivious to what, in Iola's words, "might result from such a marriage" (117): Gresham pauses at the mention of children who show "signs of color," and at the end of the novel, Olney and Rhoda are living childless in Italy. Only Dr. Latimer, it is implied, is the "sort of man" (Howells 97) to not only marry a woman of color but also father children by her. Marriage, then, asserts the masculine prerogative of the white doctors even as it marks the absence of paternity, the traditional marker of masculine prerogative. The white doctors' apparent inability to conceive (or conceive of) children is, however, balanced against the implication that offspring represent a sort of "health risk." Since passing is part of the cure, Olney and Gresham agree the mulattas' race should be kept a secret from the public - and children pose the threat of transmission.(22)