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

Given its criminal status since the early seventeenth century, interracial marriage has often been considered a progressive solution to racial strife.(23) But, like William Byrd's comment in 1728 that a "sprightly Lover is the most prevailing Missionary" since "a Moor may be washt white in 3 Generations" and "an Indian . . . blancht in two" (4),(24) Dr. Gresham's belief that "the final solution of this question will be the absorption of the negro into our race" (228) and Dr. Olney's argument that "sooner or later our race must absorb the colored race" (27) make clear that the conjugal bed simply offers a more intimate form of colonization. The fact that both Drs. Gresham and Olney advance this theory without elaborating their own role as progenitors of a "washt white" generation presumes that the "final solution" is cultural as well as physical, that even a childless marriage is an act of "absorption."

By moving the question of social protest to the bedroom, the white doctors also reflect the political shift in Jim Crow legislation from public concerns about states' rights to those concerning private rights of association. Ironically, when Gresham argues that "no one has the right to interfere with our marriage if we do not infringe on the rights of others" (234), he is invoking the legal prerogatives of personal contact (to be - or not to be - with whomever one chooses) undergirding the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling on separate-but-equal public accommodations.(25) Both he and Olney believe that mutual silence - a "don't ask, don't tell" policy - ensures that miscegenation will "not infringe on the rights of others" potentially offended by interracial coupling. Olney actually argues that private contracts fulfill public responsibility, that their marriage is racial uplift. In response to Rhoda's "imperative duty" to help her race, he insists that "the way to elevate them is to elevate us. . . . Begin with me" (96). The talismanic appeal of the couple crossing the color-line derives in part, as Albert Memmi suggests, from the naive hope that the interracial pair exists as an "isolated entity, a forgotten oasis of light in the middle of the world" (vii). Both Gresham and Olney offer as political solution the mythic inviolability of interpersonal relations, of bonds which would precede and transcend culture.

The Romance of Race

This "halo of romance" (Harper 110) and the "occult lovableness" (Howells 89) surrounding the novels' mulattas seem to remove An Imperative Duty and Iola Leroy from "the light of common day" - and thus from most critical accounts of literary realism.(26) Rather than the "matter-of-fact noonday" light that Dr. Olney calls upon, Howells, argues Anna Julia Cooper, "attempts merely a sidelight in half-tones" (201). If Howells was criticized for painting with insufficient light, Harper's novel, until most recently, has been neglected in part because her characters seemed too brilliantly lit, too idealized in the name of racial service.(27) Yet just as romantic idealization, as Claudia Tate suggests, lays claim to reality, realist literature in turn makes, in Howells's terms, "Reality its Romance" (qtd. in Sundquist, "Country" 9). The medicalization of the mulatta and of her sentimental plot in both these novels puts the lie to any easy generic distinctions among realism, romance, and racial uplift fiction.