English 413 webloggers: thanks to all for an interesting and stimulating discussion this semester.  Have a great summer!

Some critical commentary on Iola Leroy

Ernest, John. "From Mysteries to Histories: Cultural Pedagogy in Frances E. Harper's Iola Leroy." American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography 64.3 (1992): 497-518.

“[T]his novel is primarily a study of discursive systems, one that recognizes the ability of one discursive system to inscribe its impression on another. Certainly this is a novel intended to teach, a novel in which meaning is important, but its meaning cannot be separated from its manner. . . . To fulfill this ideal, Harper uses what Bernard W. Bell has called a combination of ‘he sentimentality and rhetoric of romance with the psychological and sociological truth of mimesis’to locate a specifically African American mode of understanding, one which resists cultural imperialism by claiming authority over white culture’s central ideological icons. This novel about the breakup of African American families and the search for mothers after the war embodies a ‘signifyin(g)’ strategy for re-turning American cultural discourse to a stable conception of justice” (499).

“In this subtle and intricate novel, Harper effectively reverses the terms of education, arguing that it must be a mutual effort, and not just the socialization of one culture according to the terms of another. Like Robert Johnson when he learns to read, Harper herself uses the “machinery” of the dominant culture to overthrow that culture’s own formative, prescriptive ‘institution,’ education” (511).

Berlant, Lauren."The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Harriet Jacobs, Frances Harper, Anita Hill." American Literature 54 (1993): 549-574.

“[S]ince these sexual autobiographies all aim to attain the status of a finding, an official expert narrative about national protocols[,] the authors must make themselves representative and must make the specific sensational details of their violation exemplary of collective life. . . . [T]he minority subject who circulates in a majoritarian public sphere occupies a specific contradiction: insofar as she is exemplary, she has distinguished herself from the collective stereotype; and, and the same time, she is also read as a kind of foreign national, an exotic representative of her alien ‘people’ who reports to the dominant culture about collective life in the crevices of national existence. This warp in the circulation of identity is central to the public history of African American women, for whom coerced sexualization has been a constitutive relay between national experience and particular bodies” (551).

“When, like the Prince in a debauched Sleeping Beauty, the lawyer kisses Iola, he awakens her and all of her sense to a new embodiment. At first Iola dreams of life in the white family, with its regulated sexualities and the pleasure of its physical routine. Feeling her father’s arms, kissing her mother, hearing the servants, snuggling with mammy: these are the idealized domestic sensations of white feminine plantation privilege, which provides a sensual system that is safe and seems natural. This is why Iola does not understand the lawyer’s violation of her body. Since he already sees her as public property, authorized by a national slave system, he feels free to act without her prior knowledge, while she still feels protected by white sexual gentility. Thus the irony of her flashing-eyed, pulsating response: to Iola this is the response of legitimate self-protectiveness, but to the lawyer the passion of her resistance actually increases her value on the slave market” (557).

“More than a critical irritant to the white ‘people,’ the text subverts the racially dominant national polity by rendering it irrelevant to the fulfillment of its own national imaginary. Harper’s civic and Christian black American nationality depends not only on eliding the horizon of white pseudo-democracy; she also imagines that African American nationalism will provide a model of dignity and justice that white American citizens will be obliged to follow” (561).

Final Exam Date

This is off-topic, I know, but the exam date is different from the one posted on your syllabus.  Here is the corrected date:

Monday, May 3, 1-3 p.m.

The schedule is at  http://www.gonzaga.edu/Campus+Resources/Offices+and+Services+A-Z/Registrar/Spring+Final+Examination+Schedule.htm

I'm sorry for the confusion. 

From Mark Twain's Notebooks:

The skin of every human being contains a slave (393).

From Selected Mark Twain-Howells Letters, pp. 249-250.

Clemens to Howells, 21 July 1885

My Dear Howells--

You really are my only author; I am restricted to you; I wouldn't give a damn for the rest. I bored through Middlemarch during the past week, with its labored & tedious analyses of feelings & motives, its paltry & tiresome people, its unexciting & uninteresting story, & its frequent blinding flashes of single-sentence poetry, philosophy, wit, & what-not, & nearly died from the over-work. I wouldn't read another of those books for a farm. I did try to read one other--Daniel Deronda. I dragged through three chapters, losing flesh all the time, & then was honest enough to quit, & confess to myself that I haven't any romance-literature appetite, as far as I can see, except for your books. . . .

Well, you have done it [written Indian Summer] with marvelous facility--& you make all the motives & feelings perfectly clear without analyzing the guts out of them, the way George Eliot does. I can't stand George Eliot, & Hawthorne & those people; I see what they are at, a hundred years before they get to it, & they just tire me to death. And as for the Bostonians [by Henry James], I would rather be damned to John Bunyan's heaven than read that.

Yrs Ever

Mark.

From Selected Mark Twain-Howells Letters:

Clemens to Howells, 4 October 1907

To the Editor

Sir to you, I would like to know what kind of a goddam govment this is that discriminates between two common carriers &makes a goddam railroad charge everybody equal & lets a goddam man charge any goddam price he wants to for his goddam opera box

W. D. Howels [sic]

Howells, it is an outrage the way the govment is acting so I sent this complaint to the N. Y. Times with your name signed because it would have more weight. --Mark

The institution of Royalty in any form is an insult to the human race (202).

Some of the German words are so long that they have a perspective. When one casts his glance along down one of these it gradually tapers to a point, like the receding lines of a railway track (137).

From Mark Twain's Notebooks:

It is more trouble to make a maxim than it is to do right.

Of all God's creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash.  That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat (236-37)       

"Put all your eggs in one basket--and watch that basket" Andrew Carnegie (231)

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  .

There are those who scoff at the schoolboy, calling him frivolous and shallow.  Yet it was a schoolboy who said: "Faith is believing what you know ain't so." (237)

Truth is stranger than fiction--to some people,but I am measurably familiar with it (240).

It takes me a long time to lose my temper, but once lost I could not find it with a dog (240).            

We easily perceive that the people furtherest from civilization are the ones where equality of man and woman are furtherest apart--and we consider this one of the signs of savagery.  But we are so stupid that we can't see that we thus plainly admit that no civilization can be perfect until exact equality between man and woman is included (256).                                                

We are nothing but echoes.  We have no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own, we are but a compost heap made up of the decayed heredities, moral and physical (312).

If Christ were here now, there is one thing he would not be--a Christian (328).

Contemporary Views of Howells and James

This comparison of Howells and James, and especially the comments on James's method, give some insight into what their contemporaries thought of them. The Rise of Silas Lapham was still two years in the future. Do you think that Morse gives an accurate picture of James's method?

From James Herbert Morse's "The Native Element in American Fiction: Since the War" (Century Magazine, July 1883: 363-75):

Howells and James are alike in one respect.  They both feel the effect of the scientific critical spirit.  Both seem inclined to deny the existence of what cannot meet the five senses.  They are capable of passions, only in a restricted way--grown-up passions, modified by culture, or business, or the club gossip--not the romantic passion of youth . . . . In intensity, James, perhaps, has the advantage of Howells.  He can conceive a deeper character, and grasp its stronger individuality.  Isabel Osmond, Madame Merle, have more of the grit of strong natures than any of Mr. Howells's persons.  Ralph Touchett shows more of the best quality of pathetic humor. It is a pathos that is manly, sweet, and strong, and essentially American.  . . . With James, humor is closely allied to wit, and wit grew up among the acids; but with Howells, humor is evidently innate and good-natured, though not well connected.  James is, in this respect, half a foreigner. . . . Yet James is the most capable of projecting a sentiment, or the most willing to do it.  When he has projected it, however, he seems to shrink from his work, and to pare it down so carefully that we recognize it, at last, only as an intellectual, not a heart passion; that is, it ceases to be another person's passion, and is one modified by the author's own feelings.  . . . James is not, to my thinking, objective; he is essentially subjective; that is, he imparts to every person a portion of himself and his own caution and causticity.  The strongest evidence of this I find in the dialogue in "The Portrait of a Lady," a novel which I choose as his culminating work, representing the outcome thus far of all his tendencies. . . . It is not wit and repartee, but a sub-acid quality which sets the persons to criticising each other.  One does not like to call it snarling. . . . and yet every leading person in the book does, in a polite way, enter frequently into a form of personal criticism of somebody else.  The poor heroine gets criticised--mildly and politely, but none the less surely, by every one: by Ralph Touchett, by Caspar Goodwood, by Lord Warburton, as well as by her husband, Osmond, and her friend Henrietta Stackpole.  The minute analysis for which Mr. James is famous enters also into the dialogue, which, indeed, is invented apparently only to give variety to the form of analysis.  The speakers are too obviously engaged in the business of helping the author develop his characters. 

Shades of Isabel? From Joel Porte's introduction to New Essays on Portrait of a Lady:

But James, as we have already noted, was probably already familiar with Madame de Stael's Corinne; ou l'Italie, a popular novel published in1807 that largely set the terms for nineteenth-century treatments of the theme. Mme. De Stael's eponymous heroine, offspring of an Italian mother and a Scottish lord named Edgarmond, is an intense, raven-haired, sensuous improvisatrice who embodies the antinomies of light and dark that constitute the essence of the Romantic artist's interior struggle. ("You know me not," she tells her English suitor Oswald, Lord Nevil: "Of all my faculties, the most powerful is that of suffering. I was formed for happiness; my nature is confiding and animated; but sorrow excites me to a degree that threatens my reason, nay my life. Be careful of me! My gay versatility serves me but in appearance: within my soul is an abyss of despair.")