Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Two-Body Problem

Elissa Zellinger examines Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s poems about slave mothers, which insisted on the fundamental equality of the enslaved. In her poetry, the traumatic sale of the slave mother’s body has been... [ view full abstract ]

Elissa Zellinger examines Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s poems about slave mothers, which insisted on the fundamental equality of the enslaved. In her poetry, the traumatic sale of the slave mother’s body has been understood to create a counterintuitive effect: namely, a form of textual possession whose aim is to transform the enslaved person into a sovereign individual. Zellinger will concentrate on two problems that trouble this assertion, and that speak to how violent forces dismantle or differently assemble the individual. First, slaves were considered private possessions, not people; and, second, extended by their children’s bodies, mothers were forbidden the self-circumscription that constituted selfhood. By reflecting how mothers’ bodies and the children attached to them were broken down into publicly saleable parts, Harper’s poetry contravenes liberalism’s notions of singular self-possession. This paper will dwell with Harper on how the connection between disembodiment and motherhood results in multi-bodied mothers who exceed the boundaries of a singular subject.