Metaphors, Context, Uplift?

In Tuesday's class, several of you offered explanations for why you did not think that race mattered in the outcome of "Two Offers" and/or why it would be difficult for us to discern whether Harper's characters, Laura and Janette, are written to be white or black. Those were very useful points to make, and they intensified my desire to think more about how such a story could impact a black woman's literary tradition. In other words, Harper was a known author, and this story was well circulated in The Anglo-African Magazine, raising the possibility that her story could empower readers by representing a northern woman's experience as, well, a woman's experience, rather than drawing marked distinctions between them.

(I discovered some information about Harper's literary activities on the Women and Social Movements database , specifically that in 1854, she was employed as a lecturer by the Maine anti-slavery society, and she may possibly have been the first black woman in the United States to be employed full time in this capacity. On the lecture circuit, her audiences wer etypically mixed. And of course, with more time, perhaps I could investigate Anglo-African Magazine, to learn more about its publication range and readership.)

This is what led me to suggest in class the possibility that perhaps Harper's story is implicitly promoting racial uplift, or at least could be argued as promoting racial uplift for African-American women, simply in the way that it conceals from us the racial identity of the characters. Janette's and Laura's portraits are complex enough, as many of you pointed out in class, simply based on the gendered expectations they must negotiate. For example, Should they marry for love or financial security? Is education for practical gains or personal fulfillment? Can they exercise passion and reason in the same being? In other words, both women already represent a kind of fusion of values that had been understood as dichotomies in other stories or literary traditions. So, what a powerful way for Harper to validate the experiences of black women in the north -- by not differentiating their experiences from those of white women in the north, and vice versa.

That said, I see several metaphors that could be extended to demonstrate how Harper's essay argues more abstractly for racial uplift. To justify this extension, I draw on Ong's claim that writing, unlike speaking, must construct a context for the reader given the absence of a circumambient actuality (Ong 10). Several of you have already noted one of Ong's most important aims in writing this article: to help us better understand the role of the reader in variuos literary and textual traditions (Ong 9). We see very few instances of Harper explicitly addressing the reader in "Two Offers": the first instance is on page 116, first column, and the second instance is on page 117, second column. Perhaps the remaining addresses are embedded in Harper's metaphors. For example, Janette's "bloom of ... girlhood had given way to a higher realm of spiritual beauty, as if some unseen hand had been polishing and refining the temple in which her lovely spirit found its habitation" (Harper 117). What could this metaphor be communicating to other readers, especially readers who were in underrepresented groups? Or, how could this metaphor help to reposition Harper's readers?

-Prof. Graban