by Lizzy Sobiesk
Introduction
In 1854, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper published Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, a 40-page pamphlet which, as the name suggests, covered an array of topics, but specifically highlighted narratives about enslaved people. Pamphlets were a popular format in distributing abolitionist discourse and provided specific rhetorical strategies that Harper utilized when disseminating her work. Furthermore, her poetry was definitively sentimental, which performed persuasively through sympathy and relational contexts. Harper used the pamphlet format, poetic genre, and sentimental style in her pamphlet as rhetorical devices to promote abolitionist reform to a range of audiences on her lecture circuit.
To fully situate Harper’s rhetorical methods, attention to the historical context in which she published is crucial. The citizenship rights of Black Americans continued to blur with the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which extended the boundaries of slavery, repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820, and authorized popular sovereignty. Since this act was passed in May of 1854, Harper was likely impacted by its political ramifications both in her writing and when she began lecturing in August of 1854. Although dissent had been progressing in Black organizational networks, Walter C. Rucker claims the Kansas-Nebraska Act further radicalized many Black people: “…the many political compromises between 1820 and 1854 extended the temporal and geographic scope of slavery, guaranteed a subordinate status for free blacks, and elevated white supremacy to the status of official federal governmental policy” (131). With these contemporaneous events in mind, along with the rising tensions that would culminate in Civil War starting in 1861, the environment in which Harper was lecturing for the Anti-Slavery Society was exceedingly dangerous. Harper’s participation had higher stakes, but also the urgency of her mission called for greater mobility. Meredith McGill, a scholar in African American print culture, explains, “… [Harper’s] legal status enabled her to represent identification with the enslaved as a choice that was nonetheless compelled by law and by racial identity, to strike a posture of genteel vulnerability that resonated thrillingly with many white abolitionists” (68). By publishing a pamphlet of primarily sentimental poetry, Harper mobilized format, genre, and style as rhetorical devices to advocate for abolition.
The Format of a Pamphlet
The circulation of Harper’s poetry through the format of a pamphlet works to frame the text as inherently rhetorical. In the nineteenth century, pamphlets had a distinct history, compared to other formats such as the book. McGill sees format as an important point of analysis in history: “Format is where economic and technological limitations meet cultural expectations… Particular formats get associated with particular kinds of texts, although these associations change over time.” (55). Harper’s pamphlet, which is 17 centimeters in length, was portable and easily manufactured. The mobility of her printed work, paired with her travels on the lecture circuit, serves to be accessible to audiences by necessity. Additionally, the history of pamphlets places Harper’s work in a larger paradigm. Herbert Pimlott, in “Eternal Ephemera,” defines a pamphlet in two ways. One definition is “a small, usually unbound booklet or leaflet containing information,” while the other definition describes a pamphlet as “short treatise on a controversial, especially political subject” (517). Harper’s usage of a pamphlet medium functions within the two definitions — its cheap, light binding makes the materials easily distributed, while also placing Harper’s work in a political and rhetorical tradition. Before Harper’s publication, there was a long history of abolitionists using pamphlets to circulate anti-slavery texts— including, but not limited to, texts like David Walker’s Appeal in 1829. Like many pamphleteers, Harper’s was inherently associated with her lectures: “Published in small print runs in successive batches to be given away or sold at her antislavery lectures, with no copyright notice overleaf, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects bears in its format the traces of a strong relationship to oral performance…” (McGill 57). Material portability worked in tandem with the geographical variability of Harper’s lecture circuit. When associated with Harper’s lectures, the pamphlets extended the life of her lectures and those lectures’ arguments.[1] Although pamphlets were considered ephemeral, they had an ability to reference and re-reference Harper’s thoughts, which could not be achieved with oral lectures. Harper’s pamphlets therefore further consolidated the abolitionist message of her lectures through a different medium, which strengthened the efficacy of the arguments.
Since Harper was constantly traveling in the lecture circuit, pamphlets also acted as an ideal format to fit her ever-changing audience. Pimlott notes the flexibility of pamphlets compared to one-off editions “…because of the latter’s disadvantage during a time of rapid political change, where people’s freedoms, political and otherwise, were subject to unexpected, and frequently brutal, curtailment” (518). Although republished many times over the next few decades, Miscellaneous Subjects had the advantage of accessibility that acted materially and ideologically transgressive. Even if Harper’s movement was limited and threatened by the Fugitive Slave Law, the abolitionist ideas in her poetry could circulate unrestricted. Housed in a pamphlet format, the poetry’s rhetorical power could easily travel to different spheres of the reader’s life, including their community. McGill expounds on Harper’s reach arguing that “They help produce the sense of temporal dislocation necessary to sustain the abolitionist movement—the need for the activist, if only at intervals, to live outside of ordinary time” (73-74). In the constantly changing political landscape of the 1850s, a pamphlet’s flexibility adapted to multiple circumstances. Harper’s employment of a format which could transcend so many boundaries, including physical, intensified the depth and breadth of her arguments.
The Genre of Poetry
Harper’s poetry acts as a rhetorical device in her abolitionist argument. Although poetry is sometimes conceived as an aesthetic object supposedly distinct from political contexts, poetry has historically acted as a vehicle for arguments to take hold. Scholar, Shira Wolosky, discusses how poetry functioned in the nineteenth century: “The notion of poetry as a self-enclosed aesthetic realm…seem[s] only to begin to emerge at the end of the nineteenth century” (147). Framed in the political context of Harper’s lectures, her poetry is an active agent asking readers to contemplate their role in slavery and abolitionist efforts. Instead of her poems reading only as constricted artistic expressions, she creates accessible narratives intended to challenge and connect with the reader. Through a variety of rhetorical tropes in her poems, Harper reproduces the cultural context of slavery, illuminates the suffering occurring under the reader’s watch, and incites the reader to initiate their own abolitionist endeavors.
Harper’s poetry uses the second-person point of view as a rhetorical trope to interrogate the institution of slavery. She implicates the reader as a bystander to slavery and, through that implication, calls for action. Wolosky notes, “Values, attitudes, interests, and cultural directions at large in the society are expressed through rhetorical tropes, which in turn reemerge in poetry, marking such specifically poetic structures… Conversely, poetic representation foregrounds and sharpens the terms of a culture’s rhetorical configurations” (148). Similar to addressing the present audience in a lecture, Harper’s poems regularly acknowledge and involve the reader. Compared to other methods of narrative in literature, this poetic incorporation publicizes her work. Rather than have a closed-off narrative around an individual, or “I” figure, she regularly addresses the reader, or “you.” In Harper’s poem,“The Slave Mother,” the employment of the second-person point of view is direct and ongoing. She writes, “Saw you the sad, imploring eye?/ Its every glance was pain,/ As if a storm of agony/ Were sweeping through the brain” (7).
Harper positions the enslaved mother to not only react to the forced separation from her child, but also to look at the reader with an “imploring eye.” The language used is not simply for aesthetic purposes, but persuasively frames the separation as a painful, ongoing event that the reader bears witness to. Consequently, the speaker of the poem implicitly asks if the reader saw the enslaved mother’s emotional supplication for outside intervention. The ensuing question from that is — why has the reader not helped her? The unrelenting gaze of the poem on the reader entreats them to directly act in order to resolve the problem of slavery.
The Sentimental Style
Harper’s use of sentimentality in her poetry works to close the affective gap between citizens and enslaved “non-citizens,” calling for direct action fueled by sympathy. Part of Harper’s sentimental strategy might have been prompted by the racial composition of her audience. In a letter to fellow abolitionist William Still, Harper emphasized the lack of nonwhite people in her journey.[2] Presenting a rhetorical argument as a Black woman with this possibly majority white audience, Harper would have to consider what storytelling approach would be most effective in spurring action. Through sentimentalism, she demonstrates how the issues of slavery are not some distant, indescribable evil, but rather immediate and tangible. At its core, sentimentalism in literature is fueled by relationships and bonds. The recreation of sacred relations, followed by estrangement from those relations, builds sentimental rhetoric. Joanne Dobson suggests, “Violation, actual or threatened, of the affectional bond generates the primary tension in the sentimental text and leads to bleak, dispirited, anguished, sometimes outraged, representations of human loss, as well as to idealized portrayals of human connection or divine consolation” ( 267). Harper plays on these relationships by emphasizing the violation of motherly responsibility in “The Slave Mother.” Even white readers would likely understand the importance of maintaining domestic spheres. In the poem, the reader is called on to witness a mother losing her child in slavery, which perfectly foregrounds the sentimental. Harper writes,“He is not hers, for cruel hands/ May rudely tear apart/ The only wreath of household love/ that binds her breaking heart” (7). The pervasive idea here is a severed connection and the dissolution of the family sphere. In the nineteenth century, white and free Black women were managing differing expectations of womanhood while enslaved mothers struggled to maintain their families. Hazel V. Carby explains, “First, in order to gain a public voice as orators or published writers, black women had to confront the dominant domestic ideologies and literary conventions of womanhood which excluded them from the definition ‘woman’” (Carby 6). By placing an enslaved woman in a domestic context, rather than in one defined by slavery, Harper’s poetry contests the typical representation of enslaved women. When considering the best way to represent enslaved women, domestic motherhood offers a link to middle class, white womanhood. Carby states that, in the nineteenth century, womanhood and motherhood were inextricably linked for, “Within the discourse of the cult of true womanhood, wifehood and motherhood were glorified as the ‘purpose of a woman’s being’; the home was the sphere of all a woman’s actions” (26). The association of enslaved women and motherhood in Harper’s poetry thereby reconfigures the valuation of enslaved women and positions them to be “worthy” of sympathy. Since motherhood was seen as a woman’s purpose, the poem poses slavery as a compelling crisis to women. By intentionally highlighting the enslaved woman’s status as a mother and then having the reader watch slavery threaten that status, Harper posits how slavery is not just an attack on Black people, but also on motherhood and the domestic sphere.
Although Harper places her poems within realms easily accessible to a variety of audiences, she also ensures the reader understands how slavery causes inconceivable pain. Glenn Hendler, notes how sentimentalism builds on sympathy: “Any being capable of feeling, ostensibly regardless of social differences such as race and age, can evoke sympathy, especially from a female character or reader who has had comparable feelings herself” (105). Hendler’s description of sympathetic identification in sentimental literature is evident in Harper’s poems, to a degree. Harper’s poetry does derive sympathy, but also shows how reductive equivalence is. In “The Slave Auction,” Harper is careful to delineate enslaved people’s pain from those who are not enslaved. She writes, “Ye may not know how desolate/ Are bosoms rudely forced to part,/ And how a dull and heavy weight/ Will press the life-drops from the heart” (15). Contrary to sympathetic equivalence, she denies the reader the easy satisfaction of one-to-one identification. In positing slavery as worse than any experience of the reader, Harper represents enslaved people’s irreducible loss and charges the reader with the responsibility to do their part to stop the violent cycle of slavery.
Conclusion
Harper used multiple rhetorical tools to present an abolitionist argument to a variety of different audiences. Through the format of a pamphlet, she both drew on the long political history of abolitionist pamphlets and provided an accessible method to distribute her works. Harper’s implementation of the poetic genre advanced her rhetoric through a medium other than a speech or essay. The second-person point of view in her poetry engaged the reader and called on them to assess what they can do to eliminate slavery’s presence. Sentimentalism developed a translatable ethos in motherhood, but also managed to allow for the fundamental privileging of the enslaved person’s pain over the reader’s experience. The blending of these rhetorical devices, within the form of pamphlet, helped further publicize and develop the abolitionist cause.
Works Cited
Bennett, Paula. Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women’s Poetry, 1800-1900 / Paula Bernat Bennett. Princeton University Press, 2003.
Carby, Hazel V. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist / Hazel V. Carby. Oxford University Press, 1987.
Culler, Jonathan D. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. 2nd ed., Fully updated new ed., Oxford University Press, 2011.
—. The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. Cornell University Press, 1981.
Dobson, Joanne. “Reclaiming Sentimental Literature.” American Literature, vol. 69, no. 2, Duke University Press, 1997, pp. 263–88.
Finkelman, Paul, and Bruce A. Lesh. Milestone Documents in American History: Exploring the Primary Sources That Shaped America / Paul Finkelman, Editor in Chief ; Bruce A. Lesh, Consulting Editor. Schlager Group, 2008.
Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins. Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects. J. B. Yerrinton & Son, 1854.
Hendler, Glenn. Public Sentiments Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature / Glenn Hendler. University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
McGill, Meredith. Early African American Print Culture. Edited by Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein, 1st ed., University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.
Mitchell, Angelyn, and Danille K. Taylor. The Cambridge Companion to African American Women’s Literature Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Newman, Richard, et al. Pamphlets of Protest: An Anthology of Early African-American Protest Literature, 1790-1860. Routledge, 2013.
Nord, David Paul. A History of the Book in America: Volume 2: An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790-1840. Edited by Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley, University of North Carolina Press, 2010.
Pimlott, Herbert. “‘Eternal Ephemera’ or the Durability of ‘Disposable Literature’: The Power and Persistence of Print in an Electronic World.” Media, Culture & Society, vol. 33, no. 4, SAGE Publications Ltd, May 2011, pp. 515–30. SAGE Journals.
Rucker, Walter C. The Nebraska-Kansas Act of 1854 / Edited by John R. Wunder and Joann M. Ross. Edited by John R. Wunder and Joann M. Ross, University of Nebraska Press, 2008.
Stancliff, Michael. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: African American Reform Rhetoric and the Rise of a Modern Nation State. Routledge, 2011.
Still, William. The Underground Railroad. anboco, 2016.
Wolosky, Shira. The Cambridge History of American Literature: Volume 4: Nineteenth-Century Poetry 1800–1910. Edited by Sacvan Bercovitch, Cambridge University Press, 2004.
[1] See McGill, especially page 67, for further information.
[2] See Still’s The Underground Railroad on page 339.