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

This narrative arc, with its suggestion that voice predicts black progress and uplift, is even more pronounced in Robert Johnson's case. When the novel begins, Robert is still a slave, and his speech shows signs of dialect when he addresses his fellows: "'I ain't got nothing 'gainst my ole Miss,'" he tells other slaves, "'except she sold my mother from me. And a boy ain't nothin' without his mother'" (17). [13] Robert's dialect inflection is less apparent than other slaves' (presumably because he, like Iola, is a literate mulatto), but it remains perceptible until he escapes slavery and becomes an officer in the Union army. By the time he takes his commission, a white captain wonders why Robert insists on leading black troops, especially since he does not "'look like them [or] talk like them'" (44).

It is conceivable that Harper means for Robert to represent one of the many African Americans who are bidialectical--speaking folk dialect with his peers and shifting to standard English with whites and bourgeois blacks. Robert is never, however, represented as speaking dialect once he leaves slavery, no matter with whom he speaks. And whether Harper intended Robert to be bidialectical does not alter the voice-narrative that she constructs through him and through Iola: As black characters put slavery further behind them and as they rise socially and economically into the middle class, their voices become more powerful, more "refined," and less identifiably "black." Broader features of the plot parallel these characterological transformations. While, as I noted above, dialect speech reappears at the novel's conclusion, the general movement of the text is from domination by dialect speakers to domination by "standard" speakers. By the novel's conclusion, several years after emancipation, only older characters like Aunt Linda speak dialect. Harper represents the younger characters, who presumably constitute the future of the race, as uniformly speaking standard English. Thus the voice-narrative of progress, like call-and-response, represents not simply a rhetorical and political tool, but also an aesthetic principle. It gives Iola shape as well as meaning.

The novel's second climax highlights the speech/class progression that Iola and Robert establish. The discussions and debates at the conversazi one bear some resemblance to the call-and-response verbal performances of the church meeting, except here the speech is essentially univocal. Its uninflected sounds and its content reflect the concerns and experiences of a particular socio-historic world view--that of the forward-looking black bourgeoisie. Rather than focusing, as the church-meeting speakers do, on lost families and black suffering under and after slavery, the conversazione attendees present and discuss in abstract terms pressing issues of the day and of the future: "Negro Emigration," "Patriotism," "Education of Mothers," and "Moral Progress of the Race" (246). Indeed we should, as Barbara Christian advises, "note that the tone [of the discussions] is one of uplifting the race, of rescuing it from its own culture, of molding black women and men superior to white people according to their own Christi an mores" (28; emphasis added). [14]