Harper’s Hearts: “Home Is Never Natural or Safe”

The Political Poetess ◽

10.23943/princeton/9780691170312.003.0007 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Tricia Lootens

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper ◽

Intellectual Culture ◽

Separate Spheres ◽

American Intellectual ◽

Poetic Visions

This chapter examines how Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, from her early invocation of the specter of the Poetess on the auction block to her late replacement of earlier “heart” tropes with the figure of Harriet Tubman's bruised hands, deploys Poetess performance as a powerful, if ultimately insufficient, resource for articulating poetic visions of globally aware, politically ambitious African American intellectual culture. Building on Harper's own self-depiction as “our most celebrated poetess and oratrix,” the chapter considers the strenuousness and virtuosity of her engagements with “separate spheres.” It also explores how, through the “click of the cliché,” Harper corporealizes her narrator Chloe Fleet's well-known challenges to slaveholding domesticity. Finally, it analyzes two poems that seek to break the bounds of haunted, suspended spheres: “Do Not Cheer, Men are Dying” and “The Vision of the Czar of Russia.”

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“Not Another ‘Poetess’”: Feminist Criticism, Nineteenth-Century Poetry, and the Racialization of Suicide

The Political Poetess ◽

10.23943/princeton/9780691170312.003.0003 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Tricia Lootens

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

African American ◽

Crisis Intervention ◽

Feminist Criticism ◽

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper ◽

Century Poetry ◽

Second Wave ◽

Nineteenth Century Poetry

This chapter examines struggles to define relations between “Victorian femininity” and racialized Poetess reception, focusing in particular on early, explicitly racialized meditations on the loss of African American Poetess figures. Drawing on foundational Second Wave feminist texts such as Ellen Moers's Literary Women, Cora Kaplan's Salt and Bitter and Good, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's Madwoman in the Attic, Erlene Stetson's Black Sister, and Cheryl Walker's Nightingale's Burden, the chapter investigates how early strains in Second Wave thinking came to define feminist criticism itself as a politicized mode of crisis intervention. It also considers how Frances Ellen Watkins Harper came to be barred, explicitly, from the category of “poetess” and concludes with a reading of Alice Walker's 1976 Poetess novel Meridian.

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