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

Harper's two climaxes could be read as parallel experiences and, in a sense, parallel prophecies. In other words, the church meeting and the conversazi one may model social and cultural interactions that Harper hopes will occur simultaneously in the new century. Certainly the call-and-response structure of the novel suggests this kind of stratified, multivocal strategy for black survival and progress; and, as we have seen, Harper clearly intends her fiction to serve "as an enabling form that would promote the emergence of a black subaltern subjectivity and allow this subaltern finally to speak" (Peterson 104). But while this essentially centrifugal tendency is always operative in Harper's portrayal of black speech and black speech practice, powerful unifying forces suggest that black development and progress mean the ascension of a specific bourgeois class and the recession into the past of the subaltern class and its vernacular culture. The receding of the dialect voice over the course of the novel and its disappearance from the first climax to the second moves the focus of the novel from the subaltern to the bourgeois and from the past to the future, following again the voice-narrative of progress.

Iola contains and dramatizes a pronounced and uneasy tension between two visions, two narrative patterns, and two cultural aesthetics. These divisions are most visible as broad dialectics among speech groups and narrative moments, but they are also evident in the "lifespans" and in the speech of particular characters--whether dialect, standard English, or hybrid. The career of Tom Anderson, one of only two prominent dialect-speaking characters in the novel, addresses these conflicts between univocal and multivocal tendencies in detail. His experience and utterances suggest both that the unrefined folk voice should be recognized and appreciated and that it is essentially a relic by century's end. Certainly noble and heroic, Tom is described by Robert as a trickster who used subterfuge to learn the rudiments of literacy (44-45). This desire for education aligns Tom with the novel's "standard"-speaking, lighter-skinned characters, even as his dialect-speaking, dark-skinned, subaltern status perpetually holds hi m beneath Robert and Iola. Robert, for example, is an officer in the Union army, while Tom joins as a servant. Tom loves Iola, but does not expect his feelings to be reciprocated because he recognizes that he is not of her class or world. As the narrator puts it, Tom loves Iola "as a Pagan might worship a distant star and wish to call it his own" (40).

Evidence that Tom accepts his second-class status abounds. His final statement to the besieged soldiers he proceeds to rescue is: "'If they kill me, it is nuthin'.'" This heroically self-sacrificial statement places him squarely in the redemptive tradition of Uncle Tom, but it also reflects his sad understanding of the ultimate importance of those who look and sound like he does. Tom is a speaking subaltern figure whose voice reveals a relatively positive and complex subjectivity, but his death and silencing, which leave the post-war, post-freedom stage to his bourgeois "betters," seems to signal the obsolescence of his type or class. The narrator's sentimental description of one of Tom's final moments is ironically apt: "He attempted to speak, but the words died upon his lips" (53). Dialect does not exit the novel with Tom, but the tones and content of his speech and the trajectory of his life appear to illuminate one powerful strand of Harper's conception of the subaltern black class.