"Time is a healer": Iola Leroy and Historical Temporalities

I just finished Frances Harper's Iola Leroy and I must say that I enjoyed its sentimentality. Many critics have discounted the novel on the grounds that it seems to be detached from the political sphere, basking, instead, in the pleasures of sentimental identification. Yes, the marriage plots are pretty disturbing, rife with all sorts of heterosexism and patriarchial assumptions, but considering its temporal frame, one cannot ask for too much. Instead, I'd like to think about the novel as a response to competing configurations of temporality in an age where the politics of memory were all but central to the struggle for African American equality. Where some critics see a hermetic refusal to engage with the ongoing atrocities of racial violence in the 1890s, I actually see an emergent and radical questioning of the meaning and purpose behind memory and the uses of historicity to substantiate the mind's imaginings.

The novel begins in the days before the end of the Civil War, with soon-to-be ex-slaves chatting in code to protect themselves from their exhilarating feelings about their upcoming freedom. A few chapters later, the novel's temporality goes back a few days, with the next chapter bringing us to the future, and the next plunging the reader deeper into the past. Throughout the novel, a smooth, uninterrupted timeline is continually transgressed with asides, vignettes, entire episodes seemingly tethered to the present moment but also completely immersed in an entirely foreign world. One purpose this shuffling between time zones offers is--in Faulkner's famous phrasing--to ensure that "the past is never dead. It's not even past." Why would it be important to question the severing between temporalities and periods? Well, in a post-Civil War world of a failed Reconstruction, the white claim that since slavery had ended the state shouldn't be concerned about any form of reparations denies the way historical relationships between competing collectives continue to haunt and determine the present.

Basically, saying that the past is in "the past" and hence unconnected to the present elides important historical and material powers of ideological subordination. At the same time, is not configurations of memory and temporality also beholden to the moment's hegemony, signifying that memory would be beholden to the representational apparatus available to the time?

At one point in the novel, a highly revered reverend exclaims: "Time alone will tell whether or not the virus of slavery and injustice has too fully permeated our Southern civilization for a complete recovery" (442). The emphasis on time de-authorizes the agency of the moment's actors, suggesting that the solution lies in futurity. Of all the problems of the novel, I suppose its emphasis on futurity is the problem I find most troubling. The future and constructions of temporality dominate the possibility for transcendence from the iron-clasp of slavery's aftermath.

Iola while a nurse during the Civil War feels that she "had lived through ages during these last few years" (344). Time here proves her master, dominating her understanding of how she has changed. There are other ways to thing about change--it can be spatial, not just temporal. What would a spatial configuration of ending the specter of slavery look like? Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted meditates on how the temporal marker of social change dominates war and racial memory of the 1890s. Or, perhaps, the novel is trying to counteract the very spatial configuring Jim Crow. As bodies were being drawn on racial lines, temporal models of social change became an alternative for the failed moment of embodied racial equality. The dream, in summary, seems to have been deferred on temporal lines.

Reflecting on her past, Iola states: "But it is useless . . . to brood over the past. Let us be happy in the present" (387). How should the past look to the present? How should futurity take into account the present and the past? Should we even draw lines of continuity to chart societal change? What present(s) are being suppressed in the effort to rethink connections over time?

Something I'd like to look at more is this interesting line: "Caste plays such fantastic tricks in this country" (430). Indeed, how does class configure in the spatial and temporal axes?

WORKS CITED
Harper, Frances. Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted. 1892. Three Classic African-American Novels. Ed. Henry Louis Gates. New York: Vintage, 1990.