"Climates of Escape in Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Moses"

Julia HansenUniversity of Michigan"Climates of Escapes in Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Moses"Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s call at the end of Iola Leroy (1892) for more African American writers to contribute to “the... [ view full abstract ]

Julia Hansen

University of Michigan

"Climates of Escapes in Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Moses"

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s call at the end of Iola Leroy (1892) for more African American writers to contribute to “the literature of the country, glowing with the fervor of the tropics and enriched by the luxuriance of the Orient” is well known. Less frequently discussed is the question: why does Harper imagine “the literature of the country” in terms of the climates of the tropics and “Orient”? By using this heightened language to describe “exotic” or geographically distant places, Harper draws on a nineteenth-century aesthetic tradition strongly associated with long poems, a tradition she had previously experimented with in Moses: A Story of the Nile (1869). This paper looks closely at Harper’s descriptions of place and climate in Moses. Doing so helps us see that Harper critiques the escapist appeal of nineteenth-century poems set in geographically distant places while at the same time repurposing these poems’ style to retell the Exodus, a story of politically necessary escape in the early years of Reconstruction. I argue that in her descriptions of Pharaoh’s court, the Promised Land, and Heaven, Harper draws nuanced distinctions between a luxurious escapism available to oppressors and purposeful escape, carving out a social purpose — hope for the oppressed — for the overtly aesthetic.