Raising Voices, Lifting Shadows: Competing Voice-Paradigms in Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy - Critical Essay

African American Review, Spring, 2000 by James Christmann

The Voice-Narrative of Progress

While Harper represents a world in which dialect and uninflected black voices speak together and inform one another, her efforts in this vein are always compromised by her construction of a black present that privileges "standard" speakers--the upper class, the talented tenth, the New Negroes. Her framing of a call-and-response narrative, with its inclusive vision, is always countered by her plot's movement into a future dominated by uninflected speech. Iola's and Dr. Gresham's concern with the speech of a particular ex-slave is representative of the "standard" privilege and the progressivist condemnation of dialect that operate in the novel. Dr. Gresham laments that "'some of these poor fellows who came into [the Union] army camp did not know their right hands from their left.[ldots] It took me some time, in a number of cases, to understand their language. It saddened my heart to see such ignorance. One day I asked one a question, and he answered, "I no shum."'" Gresham's bewilderment emphasizes the distance between black dialect and the bourgeois respectability that he, as a white physician, embodies. The distance is redoubled when Iola, the titular heroine of the novel and, as we shall see, an avatar of black progress, relies on the white doctor to translate the dialect utterance. "'What did he mean?'" Iola asks. "'That he did not see it,'" Gresham replies. Iola's inability to understand this dialect, subaltern speech confirms her solid bourgeois standing and contributes to a devaluing of folk speech, especially as her broader conversation with Gresham centers around the need for black educators to help ameliorate the "'duncery of slavery,'" a process that Gresham expects "'will take generations'" (145). This conversation contributes a line of thought in Iola and in the culture at large that suggests that, to the extent that bourgeois standards are cultural ideals for the black community, "standard" black speech marks the potential, at least, for black "progress." The sounds and cadences of bourgeois speech (a nd the bourgeois values associated with that speech) might enable black people to move from the social, economic, and political subjugation that is the traditional lot of the subaltern class to some degree of freedom, education, power, and participation. And if this is so, then, logically, black dialect marks the subaltern spot from which progress was made. In Iola, it often appears that uplifting the shadows entails eliminating dialect otherness and the cultural and class differences it marks.

These parallel movements--toward "standard" speech and toward an idealized bourgeois future--conjoin to form what I call the voice-narrative of progress, which operated in a wide variety of black and white texts in the nineteenth century. So powerful was this voice-narrative that writers--even those most interested in and most sympathetic toward the black folk--found it difficult to resist constructing narratives that privilege a univocal, standard-speaking element of the black community. [10] It was particularly difficult for educated, late-century blacks living in a white-dominated society to conceive of African-American progress as anything other than a movement away from the folk "past" and toward white bourgeois ideals of education, deportment, and appearance.