The Illusory Legal Agency of the Last Will and Testament in Frances Harper's Iola Leroy

Valerie SirenkoThe University of Texas at Austin"The Illusory Legal Agency of the Last Will and Testament in Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy"In Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), the white plantation owner Eugene Leroy... [ view full abstract ]

Valerie Sirenko

The University of Texas at Austin

"The Illusory Legal Agency of the Last Will and Testament in Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy"

In Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), the white plantation owner Eugene Leroy attempts to protect his black wife and children in his last will and testament, but Marie and Iola are disinherited and sold into slavery despite the will’s legal protection. The estate’s legal executor undermines Eugene’s will with the argument that any man who would leave his fortune to a slave must have been insane and thus incompetent to write a will. A judge rules that upholding such a will would be against the best interests of society. In this twist of logic, contract ideology’s claim to uphold and defend the contracting parties’ free will is used to undermine one’s ability to exercise this will when it crosses racial boundaries. In this paper, I argue that Harper’s novel dramatizes the tension between contract law’s guarantee of individual agency and white legal authorities’ investment in maintaining racial boundaries amidst the post-Reconstruction legal climate of denying blacks the protection of law. My method reads the last will and testament as figuring contests over agency and reveals the legal rhetoric that reproduced and maintained black vulnerability at law during a legal climate exemplified by Plessy v. Ferguson’s claim that law is powerless to prevent racial discrimination. While law creates the illusion that the last will and testament provides its writer with posthumous agency, Harper’s fiction redirects attention back to the embodied persons who carry out law and who undermine this posthumous agency when a will challenges white social dominance. By depicting law as a racially encoded practice enacted by specific persons, rather than an abstract text, Harper makes visible the mechanisms by which the protections supposedly secured by legal documents fail to protect black persons.