Seeking a Good Place:Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Nineteenth-Century Utopian Discourse

The subtitle of Francis Ellen Watkins Harper’s Iola Leroy, or The Shadows Upliftedimages a change in what the novel elsewhere refers to as “the social atmosphere.” Yet as Harper’s detailed depiction of... [ view full abstract ]

The subtitle of Francis Ellen Watkins Harper’s Iola Leroy, or The Shadows Upliftedimages a change in what the novel elsewhere refers to as “the social atmosphere.” Yet as Harper’s detailed depiction of Reconstruction-era African Americans’ ongoing searches for a “good place”—a space enabling spiritual, economic, intellectual, and relational flourishing—makes clear, that hoped-for change remained illusory, always threatened by entrenched (and dystopian) discourses of nation, gender, and race. Focusing on Iola’s experiences with potentially ideal communities (including academic institutions, Northern boarding houses, and hush harbors), this paper places Iola Leroy within the concurrent utopian discourses of the moment and attending to the novel’s undertheorized representation of a durable, motile, and utopian collective that proffers a mode of sociality that is resistant to dominant culture. Building on the recent work of M. Giulia Fabi, Amber Foster, and Philip Gura, I consider the political and psychological significance of Harper’s literary utopia and, especially, her subversions of contemporary US utopian fiction’s antidemocratic and eugenicist fantasies.