Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins | Caria L. Peterson (essay date 1995)
Caria L. Peterson (essay date 1995)
SOURCE: '"Whatever Concerns Them, as a Race, Concerns Me': The Oratorical Careers of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Sarah Parker Remond," in "Doers of the Word": African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830-1880), Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 119-45.
[In the following excerpt, Peterson analyzes the cultural contexts surrounding Harper's poetry, seeing her writing as an "experimental activity" that appropriated the nineteenth-century discourse of sentimentality and broke down social distinctions between public and private spheres.]
Poetry—in both its recited and printed forms—was … an experimental activity for Watkins Harper, serving as a structural frame through which she could fashion herself in the public role of poet-preacher in order to articulate her vision of nineteenth-century America. In accordance with Unitarian literary theory, in which the British novelist...
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