“A Delicious Sense of Joy and Love”: On Centering Black Women Readers and Black Domestic Idealism in Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy

Abstract: The emotional pleasure and joy of late nineteenth-century Black girl and women readers have rarely been considered by scholars of African American literature. Through a close textual analysis of Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), I demonstrate the usefulness of centering the interiority of Black girls and women in my reading of the novel’s domestic idealism. That is, I read the novel’s sentimental rhetoric and its romantic marriage plot as working to create and nurture feelings of joy and pleasure for Black girls and women. By imagining Black girls and women as consumers of Harper’s novel, I demonstrate the importance of decentering discourse of both anti-racism and true womanhood when analyzing Iola Leroy . In doing so, I offer unconventional readings of Iola’s near whiteness and the novel’s incorporation of sexual violence, marriage plots, and dual heroines.