Homecomings: Black Women’s Mobility in Early African American Fiction

Abstract

In this article, I examine the patterns of black female mobility as represented in three African American mulatta novels: William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853), Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Iola Leroy (1893), and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins’s Hagar’s Daughter (1901-1902). First of all, I discuss their protagonists’ movement into bondage and forced travel resulting from the withdrawal of their father’s protection. Such imposed mobility is countered by the self-determined action undertaken by the black heroines not only to free themselves but also to reunite their families. As a result, their itineraries are circular rather than linear and frequently take the form of a homecoming. In contrast to the paradigm of the traditional slave narrative, which focuses on a single individual, the novels I analyze simultaneously follow two or three generations of family members. Such representations result in a chaotic aesthetics that successfully depicts the unpredictability of the fate of black families under slavery, and it foregrounds the relationality of the novels’ characters.

Keywords

• melodrama
• travel writing
• mulatta
• African American novel