Sowing Seeds in an Untilled Field: Temperance and Race, Indeterminacy and Recovery in Frances E. W. Harper's Sowing and Reaping

[Woman's] individuality must be recognized before the evils of intemperance can cease to exist. How absurd the idea—how degrading the idea that woman, before marriage, can enjoy freedom of thought; but afterward that she must endorse her husband's sentiments, be they good or bad. Call you not this slavery?

Amelia Bloomer

In an 1853 speech to temperance proponents in New York's Metropolitan Hall, Amelia Bloomer directly connected women's temperance mission to female subordination.¹ Authors often equated intemperance and women's oppression with slavery without recognizing how disingenuous such symbolic comparisons were. Of course, the realities of slavery in the South and nominal freedom in the North belied such equations. The troubled relationship between the mainstream temperance movement and African Americans—illustrated by temperance rhetoric and antislavery discourse—occasioned responses by African American writers who had multiple approaches to race-ing temperance.² They displayed innovative means by which race, whether foregrounded or situated as subtext, always already operated as a social factor. Because of the prolific racial pejoratives found in mainstream temperance rhetoric, African Americans had to counter these images while simultaneously engaging in temperance activism.

Black-authored temperance literature often presented an alternative anti-drink paradigm in which the drunkard's race was either explicitly white or so ambiguous as to destabilize racial categories altogether. Frances E. W. Harper's Sowing and Reaping and another serialized novel, A Tale of New England Life, demonstrate one way that racial identification functioned, for each uses racially indeterminate characters and historical figures from outside the purview of the novel as a way of enhancing the text for various readerships. In this manner, these tales offer textual interrogations of race and racial categories while examining larger social issues of women's liberation and anti-drink reform. The approach to temperance reform or writing in these texts is significant because it opens up what might otherwise be narrowly understood as domestic temperance novels without any relation to larger racial and gender politics. Although the author of A Tale of New England Life is unknown, because of textual similarities that include this particular strategic method, I speculate that the author could be Harper. Whether or not we can confirm this to be the case, Harper's existing work offers an example that scholars of nineteenth-century African American women's writings can use to evaluate, understand, and identify newly recovered works first published during the period. In this essay, I will explore the intersections of racial discourse and temperance rhetoric in Sowing and Reaping and A Tale of New England Life, as well as the challenges literary historians and critics face in recovering texts with racial and authorial ambiguities.

In the antebellum period, many African American reformers regarded temperance commitment as a necessary component of antislavery advocacy. Although in 1843 William Lloyd Garrison proclaimed, "The temperance and abolition enterprises are the hope of our country, identical in principle, based on the same broad foundation of human brotherhood, and animated by the same spirit of Christian benevolence and charity" (qtd. in Hamilton 259), many white temperance activists failed to connect the two enterprises—failed to join human equality, freedom, and self-determination as the foundation of their temperance agenda and the inspiration of their abolitionist work. In fact, Frederick Douglass was strongly criticized by white American temperance delegates at the 1846 World's Temperance Convention in London for speaking out against slavery.³ Without disregarding certain racist and pro-slavery factions in the temperance movement, Douglass identified the relation between the degradation of enslavement and intemperance—between the freedom of self-control denied by slavery and the loss of self-control caused by drunkenness. As Donald Yacovone demonstrates, African American antislavery and temperance advocates almost never overlooked the relations between enslavement and drunkenness (284). Nevertheless, temperance activism in African American communities did not equate intemperance with slavery in the reductive manner seen in mainstream temperance tracts.

With the exception of the 1859 short story "The Two Offers" by Harper, née Watkins, antebellum...