Rethinking Pauline Hopkins

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Rethinking Pauline Hopkins: Plagiarism, Appropriation, and African American Cultural Production Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/30/4/e3/5099108 by guest on 29 September 2021

Introduction, pp. e4–e8 By Richard Yarborough

The Practice of Plagiarism in a Changing Context pp. e9–e13 By JoAnn Pavletich

Black Livingstone: Pauline Hopkins, Of One Blood, and the Archives of Colonialism, pp. e14–e20 By Ira Dworkin

Appropriating Tropes of Womanhood and Literary Passing in Pauline Hopkins’s Hagar’s Daughter, pp. e21–e27 By Lauren Dembowitz Introduction

Richard Yarborough* Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/30/4/e3/5099108 by guest on 29 September 2021

I recall first encountering Pauline Hopkins in graduate school in the mid-1970s. Conducting research on her work entailed tolerat- ing the eyestrain brought on by microfilm and barely legible photo- copies of the Colored American Magazine. I also vividly remember the appearance of the 1978 reprint edition of her novel Contending Forces (1900) in Southern Illinois University Press’s Lost American Fiction series. I experienced both gratification at the long-overdue attention the novel was garnering and also no little distress upon reading Gwendolyn Brooks’s afterword to the text. While acknowl- edging our “inevitable indebtedness” to Hopkins, Brooks renders this brutal judgment: “Often doth the brainwashed slave revere the modes and idolatries of the master. And Pauline Hopkins consistently proves herself a continuing slave, despite little bursts of righ- teous heat, throughout Contending Forces” (409, 404–405). This view of the novel as a limited, compromised achievement reflects the all-too-common lack at the time of a nuanced, informed engagement with much post-Reconstruction African American literature broadly and with that produced by African American women in particular. Although the most dramatic shift in scholarly treatments of Hopkins occurs in the 1980s with the work of, among others, Claudia Tate, Hazel Carby, and Jane Campbell, I would be remiss not to call attention to the commentary on Hopkins by Ann Allen Shockley, whose indispensable 1972 essay “Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: A Biographical Excursion into Obscurity” can be over- looked in retrospective constructions of the evolving body of scholarship on the author. Dorothy B. Porter’s 1982 entry on Hopkins for the Dictionary of American Negro Biography merits notice in this

*Richard Yarborough is Professor of English and African American Studies at UCLA. His work focuses on race, representation, and American culture. He is the associate general editor of the Heath Anthology of American Literature.

American Literary History, vol. 30, no. 4, e3–e30 doi:10.1093/alh/ajy014 Advance Access publication October 17, 2018 VC The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] American Literary History e5

regard as well. (The absolutely invaluable contributions rendered by Shockley at Fisk University and Porter at Howard University in building crucial black literature archives should be legendary.) With the release in 1988 of Contending Forces and TheMagazineNovels in the Oxford/Schomburg Black Women Writers series (with intro- ductions by Richard Yarborough and Hazel Carby, respectively), it became possible to teach Hopkins’s fiction using affordable, easily available reprints. Not surprisingly, since then we have witnessed Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/30/4/e3/5099108 by guest on 29 September 2021 the rapidly growing recognition of Hopkins’s undeniable impor- tance. The inclusion of her writing in major anthologies has been but one sign of her shifting status within the American and African American literary canons. There has also been a steady stream of scholarship on Hopkins herself, including biographies by Hanna Wallinger and Lois Brown. Clear as well has been the burgeoning role that developments in such fields as queer theory and Black Diaspora studies have played in catalyzing fresh critical perspectives on Hopkins’s work. Just as our theoretical tools for analyzing Hopkins’s writing have become more diverse, we have seen the emergence of innovative archival methods that open up fascinating new areas for research. The digitization of older texts and our resultant ability to do exhaustive word searches have allowed us to tease out, in the specific case of Hopkins, the myriad canonical and noncanonical sources from which she appropriated material to incorporate into her fiction. It is difficult to overstate the extraordinary value of this scholarship for our understanding both of Hopkins’s approach to writing and of compositional strategies adopted by late nineteenth- century authors generally. In gauging the significance of this groundbreaking new research, one first needs to acknowledge the discomfort that these discoveries may cause, for all our academic objectivity. Although the following essays provide thoughtfully and complexly mounted analyses of Hopkins’s appropriative practice, the question “Is this or is this not plagiarism?” will not likely go away, especially given the in- creasing pedagogical challenges that many of us confront in teach- ing students how to utilize sources in a transparent and responsible fashion. The literary politics of such questions can hardly be more fraught, with roots extending at least as far back as Thomas Jefferson’s condescending dismissal of Phillis Wheatley in Notes on the State of Virginia and his broader contention that blacks are incapable of true creativity. One calls to mind the ongoing discussions regarding the veracity of Olaudah Equiano’s narrative in the wake of research that suggests that he may not, in fact, have been born in Africa and that a sizable portion of his autobiography was derived from outside sources. Complicating our responses to such new e6 Rethinking Pauline Hopkins

information is the extent to which the significance of black authors can sometimes be linked to their effectiveness as potent counters to racist claims of black inferiority. In the case of Hopkins, I would suggest that at minimum we are now confronted with the need to revise our sense of exactly what kind of writer she is and of exactly how she went about practicing her craft. The evaluation of Hopkins’s widespread, uncited appropriations may well never at- tain scholarly consensus and surely should be conducted with an Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/30/4/e3/5099108 by guest on 29 September 2021 awareness of late nineteenth-century editorial practices, an area in which much research needs to be done. However, we must con- tinue to engage the topic, and JoAnn Pavletich’s historical contextualization can serve as a productive springboard for such engagement. It appears that the newly discovered appropriations in Hopkins’s fiction fall into two broad categories. First, there are the unacknowledged borrowings from a range of published texts (in often quite small chunks) that bear relatively little thematic significance. The three essays that follow do not spend much time examining such instances—and understandably so, given the limita- tions of space. However, it is worth keeping in mind that a number of Hopkins’s appropriations are not, in fact, directly related to her political agenda. Second, there are borrowings that reflect Hopkins’s complex use of published materials to counter negative representations of African Americans generally and, as these essays convinc- ingly argue, of black women and of Africa itself more specifically. Especially helpful is the extent to which these three scholars— Pavletich, Ira Dworkin, and Lauren Dembowitz—emphasize Hopkins’s adept and subversive reworking of the racially charged conventions of popular literary forms of her day—including travel narratives, sentimental romances, mysteries, and passing melodra- mas. Indeed, it is now clear that the bulk of her fiction is fueled by an abiding revisionist impulse as she seeks to mobilize mainstream [T]he bulk of her literary modes to contest the racist ideology informing the very gen- ﬁction is fueled by an res in which she is operating. abiding revisionist impulse as she seeks In considering Hopkins’s novels in light of the eye-opening to mobilize insights offered by Pavletich, Dworkin, and Dembowitz, I find my- mainstream literary self awestruck by certain aspects of her creative enterprise. One can- modes to contest the not seriously come to terms with the vast array of source texts from racist ideology which Hopkins took material without being mightily impressed with informing the very the absolutely extraordinary range of her reading. Furthermore, one genres in which she is operating. is stunned not simply by just how literate she was (in every sense of the term) but also by her genius at recall. Then one has to wonder at the logistics of her writing process itself. After reading Dembowitz’s essay, for instance, we must ask what caused Hopkins to draw so much material from Fanny Driscoll’s “Two Women” (originally American Literary History e7

published in 1884) as she was composing Hagar’s Daughter (1902). Did she begin writing this novel in the mid-1880s? Had she saved the issue of Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly that car- ried Driscoll’s tale? Had she clipped the story upon first reading it and filed it away? Or did she come across the magazine at some point after it had initially appeared? In her recent CLA Journal article on Hopkins’s Winona (1902), Pavletich identifies sources for the novel that were published in 1840, 1860, 1864, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/30/4/e3/5099108 by guest on 29 September 2021 1887, and 1890. And a key text that Dworkin discusses—John Coombs’s book on Dr. Livingstone—appeared in 1857. What boggles the mind is the extent to which Hopkins’s approach depended, in part, upon her ability not simply to remember specific details of the texts from which she borrowed but to weave these plot turns, snippets of description, and passages of dialogue into coherent narratives informed by her racially progressive goals. Judge her intertextual appropriations as you will, it hardly resulted from any reluctance to expend the creative labor necessary to produce fiction. I would conclude by highlighting a crucial point on which all three scholars agree. Dembowitz contends that “Hopkins’s appropriation and reformulation” constitute a formidable challenge to the “sentimental conventions of turn-of-the-century white women’s fiction.” Dworkin suggests that Hopkins’s plagiarism functioned as a way “to offer an expansive revision and critique of such accepted modes of knowledge production.” And Pavletich frames Hopkins’s appropriative practice as her “unique form of political conquest” that employs “literature as her weapon and plagiarism as a strategy” (“‘... we are going’” 115). Such fine-grained articulations effectively point us in some potentially quite fruitful directions as we seek to appreciate fully the fascinating work of this remarkable author. In her 1978 afterword to Contending Forces, Brooks posits,

Pauline Hopkins, had we met, might have said ...that her interest was not in Revolution nor exhaustive Revision. But it is per- fectly obvious that black fury invaded her not seldom and not softly, and if she has not chosen from her resources words and word jointures that could make changes in the world, she has given us a sense of her day, a clue collection, and we can use the light of it to clarify our understanding and our intuition. (404)

Regardless of what we think of Brooks’s overall evaluation of Contending Forces, we can agree with her on the presence of “black fury” in Hopkins’s prose, veiled and indirectly expressed e8 Rethinking Pauline Hopkins

as it may be on occasion. Indeed, these three essays by Pavletich, Dworkin, and Dembowitz compel us to recognize the extent to which Pauline Hopkins was committed, perhaps more than we could have ever guessed, to both “Revolution” and “exhaustive Revision.” Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/30/4/e3/5099108 by guest on 29 September 2021 The Practice of Plagiarism in a Changing Context

JoAnn Pavletich* Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/30/4/e3/5099108 by guest on 29 September 2021

In order to determine if plagiarism is an accurate term for Pauline Hopkins’s textual appropriations, we must examine her rhetorical context, including audience and purpose. In the narrow context of a mainstream audience and mainstream publishing around 1900, the unattributed incorporation of ﬁfteen different texts from a wide array of genres found in Hopkins’s third novel, Winona, A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest (1902) would inevitably be seen as plagiarism. In my recent essay on Winona, I employ the term as a starting point to understand Hopkins’s purpose for con- structing at least 25% of that novel with passages written by others.1 Although future discussions will necessarily refocus the lens of audience, purpose, and context, discussing plagiarism from a narrow historical perspective is a logical starting point for understanding the risks Hopkins took with her startling compositional practice and the possibilities those risks generate.2 Winona is presciently described by Elizabeth Ammons as pos- sessing a “multivocality ... by no means totally under control” (214). Writing in 1996, Ammons could not have imagined the text’s numerically and generically abundant voices in conversation and conflict with each other: in Winona, Hopkins employs speeches, news reports, prison narratives, historical texts, short stories, and novels. She uses some very briefly, others repeatedly and at length. Some of the texts that appear in Winona also appear in her two other serialized novels. The plagiarism in Winona is not subtle or acciden- tal. It functions as a weapon, a distinctive method of political resis- tance that utilizes literature as a strategy. By appropriating and giving new meaning to other authors’ words, this strategy explodes racist assumptions about character, gender, and race as it expands

*JoAnn Pavletich is Associate Professor of English at the University of Houston- Downtown. She is the author of recent essays on Pauline Hopkins and treasurer of the Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins Society. Her research centers on African American literature and culture of the nineteenth century. e10 Rethinking Pauline Hopkins

Hopkins’s repertoire of strategies for representing black female agency. Specifically, Hopkins manipulates four of Winona’s most important source texts to imbue her heroine with sexual agency and moral authority, qualities made possible largely by the specific texts and passages she appropriates. Thus, this risky compositional practice appears inextricable from Hopkins’s generally politicized themes, characters, and intentions. Geoffrey Sanborn’s 2015 essay detailing similarly extensive Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/30/4/e3/5099108 by guest on 29 September 2021 appropriations in Hopkins’s final novel, Of One Blood, Or the Hidden Self (1903) also uses the term plagiarism. Sanborn identifies 72 passages from 28 different sources that are “more or less tran- scribed, without attribution, from other texts” (“The Wind of Words” 68). However, he does not engage the plagiarism through Hopkins’s well-known political concerns, focusing instead on an in- terpretation of the voice created by the appropriations, arguing that they are “remarkably nonagonistic” and exemplify her participation in an “unendingly nonsubjective voice” (73, 74). Quoting Barthes’ famous declaration, “in the text, only the reader speaks,” Sanborn asserts that Hopkins’s melding of voices conveys for her “the unowned, unownable flowing of language, the babbling of the intertextual brook” (74). Context and audience seem unimportant to Sanborn, but central to his argument is the assertion that her purpose is essentially aesthetic. He contends that Hopkins developed a “plagiaristic aesthetic: an insistent, increasingly complex interest in the formal possibilities of the practice” (84n8). The considerable dif- ferences between my approach and Sanborn’s speaks to the equally considerable number of possible avenues for exploring Hopkins’s compositional choices and the role of her textual appropriations within them. Since news of Hopkins’s extensive plagiarism began circulat- ing, the most frequent informal response has been a rather defensive “but things were different back then.” This retort, however, disre- gards ample evidence that while conceptions of plagiarism have changed across time, place, and genre, they have consistently been identified as a problem. Even a brief look at the changing nineteenth-century views toward the unattributed appropriation of material demonstrates that Hopkins’s practices would not be found acceptable by most of the reading public. For example, accompany- ing the Romantic period’s celebration of the heroic genius-author, there emerged “plagiarism hunters”: the term coined by Robert Macfarlane for critics who made careers out of accusing other writers of plagiarism (42). By the second half of the century, however, notions of authorship were becoming somewhat more collective and late century critics pointed back to thinkers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson to support this view (Macfarlane 46). In the essay American Literary History e11

“History,” for instance, Emerson rhapsodizes that “he that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate,” and thus whoever “hath access to this universal mind, is a party to all that is or can be done.” Hopkins quotes Emerson’s essay in her article on Edwin Garrison Walker in the “Famous Men of the Negro Race” series in the Colored American Magazine; perhaps she was influenced by his liberal idealism. However, for African Americans living and writing in the tense and violent Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/30/4/e3/5099108 by guest on 29 September 2021 post-Reconstruction period, this apparent sanctioning of authorial ex- pansiveness would have been a double-edged sword given that accu- sations of plagiarism have been used frequently against newcomers or those with unpopular perspectives (Randall 189). As Marilyn Randall asserts on the first page of her important book, Pragmatic Plagiarism (2001), “plagiarism is power” (vii). Thus, a black author’s presumption of access to the Emersonian “universal mind” could easily be denied by dominant-culture gatekeepers in the context of fin-de-sie`cle racism and the problem of plagiarism employed to support that denial, regardless of the author’s intent or purpose. Moreover, Hopkins’s collage of appropriated material, which might weave multiple sources across one scene, does not imitate the prose or the sentiments of an acknowledged master or attempt to im- prove some valued original, both of these practices serving as accepted defenses for the use of unattributed material. Macfarlane observes that some critics “argued for the category of plagiarism to be shrunk, until it was only applicable to the large-scale and entirely furtive interpolation of another’s words” (43); however, even that narrow definition would apply to Hopkins’s appropriations. They were large scale, if by that we mean appropriations constituting about 25% of the novel. They appear to be furtive, but that term implies an intent we do not yet understand. If discovered, however, Hopkins’s unacknowledged appropriations could have been met with ridicule, if not severe condemnation. For example, in “The Psychology of Plagiarism,” William Dean Howells characterizes plagiarists as “hard pressed for ideas” and warns that the “world is full of idle people reading books” who are all “too glad to act as detectives,” leaving writers “no safety in the obscurity of the author from whom you take your own” (276). It was not only gatekeepers such as Howells that condemned the practice. Samuel Clemens, who fully understood the common newspaper practice of using and reus- ing material with different attributions, was appalled at even a rumor of plagiarism in his own fiction (Kruse 10). There are many examples of established writers addressing complaints of plagiarism at this particular moment as the text-as-individual-property becomes more firmly entrenched in the increasingly rationalized world of mainstream publishing, a world consciously attempting to move e12 Rethinking Pauline Hopkins

away from the rough and tumble context of the antebellum publishing world.3 However slight the difference that the discourse on fin-de-sie`cle plagiarism was from our own, Hopkins’s composing strategies were not commonly accepted practice. Nor is it likely, if for somewhat different reasons, that Hopkins’s piecings would have been accepted by the Boston Literary and Historical Association (BLHA) or by the Woman’s Era Club, organizations that provided extensive support for African Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/30/4/e3/5099108 by guest on 29 September 2021 American writers and played a major and currently underexamined role in defining the cultural politics of African American Bostonians. Hopkins was a member of the BLHA and read from Contending Forces (1900) at the Women’s Era Club (McHenry 231–32). Notably, however, the majority of works featured by the BLHA reflect a decided reluctance to embrace popular literature (McHenry 173)—the very literature from which Hopkins took many of her characters, plot lines, and dialogue. This particular collision of audience and purpose raises questions regarding Hopkins’s possible marginalization within black middle-class society and the possi- bility of a writing strategy that challenges both the context of the dominant publishing industry and elitist perspectives among some African Americans. Motivation for the plagiarism might be found in more basic contexts. For example, the precarious finances of the Colored American Magazine, the periodical Hopkins edited and in which three of her four novels were published, invites questions. Did Hopkins employ white-authored texts with the hope of attracting white subscribers? Did the pressures of serialized publication drive her practice? The recent launching of newly digitized copies of the Colored American Magazine directed by Brian Sweeney and Eurie Dahn in partnership with the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library will permit a nuanced contextualization of the issues Hopkins presents in articles and advertisements in the magazine and their possible relationship to the specific sources she uses in the serialized novels at the moment of their publication. Finally, now that we know William Wells Brown employed a similarly appropriative writing strategy, we must renew our curiosity about the intertextual, possibly palimpsestic relationship between Brown and Hopkins.4 When Hopkins won a high school essay contest, it was Brown who bestowed the ten-dollar gold prize upon her; she makes clear her re- spect for him through her “Famous Men of the Negro Race” series as well as in her copious use of elements from his own work. Examinations of this connection will undoubtedly illuminate her purpose and practices. 2018 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers’ republication of American Literary History e13

Hopkins’s novels. This signal achievement transformed discussions of black women’s literary contributions, the African American literary canon, and much more. It is fitting, therefore, that at this moment in Hopkins studies, we are reminded of how much we do not know about Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, her audience, purpose, and compositional strategies. Our growing awareness makes clear that her multi-vocal rhetorical expression and context is richer, more complex, and, more unknown than any of us could have imagined. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/30/4/e3/5099108 by guest on 29 September 2021

Notes

1. See Pavletich.

2. To encourage discussion and research, The Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins Society has created a webpage with bibliographies of the appropriated sources identified thus far in Hopkins’s serialized novels: “‘Inspired Borrowings’: Pauline Hopkins’s Literary Appropriations,” The Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins Society,web.

3. See Lara Langer Cohen, The Fabrication of American Literature: Fraudulence and Antebellum Print Culture (2011). Cohen’s book “recovers controversies over literary fraud that plagued the period,” providing important historical context to discussions of late nineteenth-century plagiarism (1).

4. See Geoffrey Sanborn, Plagiarama!. Sanborn details Brown’s appropriation of “at least 87,000 words from at least 282 texts” and theorizes that Brown’s compositional strategy, much like Hopkins’s, constitutes an aesthetic category of its own (8). Black Livingstone: Pauline Hopkins, Of One Blood, and the Archives of Colonialism Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/30/4/e3/5099108 by guest on 29 September 2021

Ira Dworkin*

And in writing that code there was the sense that I was really fucking with the language at its most intricate level. It was as if I was finally get- ting my revenge on something that had fucked me over for so long, that I felt that this broken, stumbling thing that “Ferrum” is, is my very own language. For the first time in my writing life, I felt, this is my language—the grunts, moans, utterances, pauses, sounds, and silences.

M. NourbeSe Philip

In an interview with Patricia Saunders, M. NourbeSe Philip describes the process that led her to write Zong! (2008), her brilliant poem (of which “Ferrum” is a part) constructed from the remaining legal archives of the infamous 1781 massacre of captives aboard the eponymous slave ship. That process, Philip explains, includes an earlier work from 1991, Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence, which also draws on an archive, albeit one which she invented with an elaborate backstory. Looking for Livingstone con- cludes with an “Author’s Note” that describes in precise physical terms the diary of her fictional Traveller, detailing encounters with the nonfictional missionary explorer David Livingstone. Near its end, Looking for Livingstone’s “Author’s Note” mentions a hand- written annotation in the diary that claims that its two volumes are facsimiles not originals, only to be followed by a contradictory memo from the Oxford University archivist declaring their originality (78). All of these personae are constructions by Philip, who bril- liantly asserts her own voice within a contested archive where her Traveller displaces Livingstone.

*Ira Dworkin is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University. He is the author of Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State (2017) and editor of Daughter of the Revolution: The Major Nonfiction Works of Pauline E. Hopkins (2007). American Literary History e15

Philip’s seamless curation of real and imagined sources is an exemplary modern extension of what Brittney Cooper calls “unexpected archives of Black women’s thought,” which defy categories of literary genre and the expectations of readers (12). Philip’s deft archival displacement of Livingstone provides an entry point for reading Pauline E. Hopkins’s novel Of One Blood; or, the Hidden Self (1903), written nearly a century before Looking for Livingstone. Hopkins, who is a central figure in Cooper’s Beyond Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/30/4/e3/5099108 by guest on 29 September 2021 Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017), cultivated her literary voice by appropriating and manipulating the historical Livingstone in the service of a fictional discourse of African American travel. In Of One Blood, the three primary characters—Reuel Briggs, an African American medical doctor who travels to Africa; Aubrey Livingston, his supposedly white rival; and Dianthe Lusk, a Fisk Jubilee Singer and the object of their affections—are ultimately revealed to be members of the “Livingston” family (spelled without the concluding “e”). As Geoffrey Sanborn has uncovered, Of One Blood goes much farther in its allusions to Livingstone, incorporating more than 300 words, without attribution, from John Hartley Coombs’s Dr. Livingstone’s 17 Years’ Explorations and Adventures in the Wilds of Africa (1857). Although Sanborn does not believe there is “a critical edge in her nearly word-for-word repetition of Coombs’s description of central Africa as ‘a gorgeous scene,’” I find several critical interventions including Hopkins’s deletion of Coombs’s “black-faced” adjective used to describe “a goodly number of baboons,” eliminating possible racist connotations (Sanborn, Plagiarama! 23; Coombs 131; Hopkins, Of One Blood 565). Furthermore, Hopkins revises Coombs’s meandering explication of “the prevailing notions of Europeans respecting the central regions of Africa. It has been believed by many that the greater part of that ground which is marked on the maps as ‘unexplored,’ is a howling wilderness, or an arid, sterile and uninhabitable country” to read “the European idea respecting Central Africa, which brands these regions as howling wildernesses or an uninhabitable country” (Coombs 131; Hopkins, Of One Blood 565). Hopkins more precisely demarcates the geography as “Central Africa” rather than its “central regions,” and corrects Coombs’s passive voice (“It has been believed”) by clearly ascribing such prejudices to a “European idea,” something more deeply institutionalized than Coombs’s “prevailing notions.”1 While individual examples such as these suggest that, contra Sanborn, Hopkins’s revisions might actually be considered “in Henry Louis Gates’s terms, ‘motivated Signifyin(g),’” I want to think in the aggregate about the dozens of published sources identified by Sanborn that Hopkins weaves together as a carefully curated, e16 Rethinking Pauline Hopkins

if “unexpected,” composite archive (Plagiarama! 23; Cooper 12).2 Instead of only trying to decode each instance of her revision of Coombs and other sources, I consider her appropriations more broadly as a thoroughgoing practice in order, as Richard Yarborough explains above, “to revise our sense of exactly what kind of writer she is and of exactly how she went about practicing her craft.” Interestingly, Hopkins’s first novel, Contending Forces (1900), Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/30/4/e3/5099108 by guest on 29 September 2021 has minimal evidence of borrowings, while her fourth, Of One Blood, borrows extensively from dozens of sources. In the short time between these publications, she worked as an editor at the Colored American Magazine, where Of One Blood was serialized in 1902–1903 and which was part of a progressive activist community in Boston that included organizations like the Boston Literary and Historical Association and collaborators like George Washington Forbes, founding coeditor of the radical Boston Guardian and an in- fluential librarian. During this time, her work as an author and her practice as an editor seemingly merged. The popular white periodicals—namely Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, Scribner’s Magazine, and Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine—that Hopkins drew on for Of One Blood also served as models for her Colored American Magazine.3 Much scholarship on Of One Blood has highlighted one particular allusion—to William James’s “The Hidden Self” (1890) (from Scribner’s). Careful attention to the full range of sources that Sanborn uncovers shifts the meaning of the novel, which borrows more than five times as many words from Coombs as from James. As Scott Trafton foresaw, the novel is “not only about psychology and biological constructions of race; it is also a text structured by a problematic that underwrites these themes, a problematic that is patently and manifestly archeological”(242). Those “archeological” interests are apparent in Hopkins’s sources, which include another Scribner’s article, “Tadmor in the Wilderness” by Frederick Jones Bliss, an American archeologist noted for his work in Palestine. Hopkins consistently attends to what Trafton identifies as something more broadly “materialist” and “historicist” than the psychological focus visible in James (242). For Hopkins, these nonfiction sources coexist with more tradi- tional literature. Of One Blood includes recent works by two of the most popular British authors of colonialism—H. Rider Haggard’s She: A History of Adventure (1887) and Rudyard Kipling’s The Naulahka (1892), written with American Wolcott Balestier. Kipling was noted not only as the author of The Jungle Book (1894) and “The White Man’s Burden” (1899), but also for his “intolerance to- wards unauthorised publishers and his fierce protectiveness over his literary work,” which makes it possible to read Hopkins’s use of American Literary History e17

Kipling in circumvention of new copyright laws as a modest form of “revenge on something that had fucked me over” (Towheed 428; Saunders 71). Though tempting, it is not necessary to ascribe an un- ambiguous political motive to her practice. Instead, we can read her relationship to the archive as part of an innovative literary practice that extends the range of authenticating practices that Robert Stepto identifies as characteristic of early African American narrative, which are often defined by their relationship to other voices in their Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/30/4/e3/5099108 by guest on 29 September 2021 texts. Hopkins employs the sophistication of the “integrated” form but transforms its purpose (Stepto 11–16). Instead of substantiating her experiences, she manipulates those texts as part of a fictional voice that implicitly critiques the premises of literary ownership and authentication at a time when, as Pavletich writes above, Emersonian ideals of collective authorship were giving way to the codification of “the text-as-individual-property.” Hopkins has long demonstrated a remarkably precocious understanding of the legal parameters of literary proprietorship. According to Lois Brown, Hopkins filed her first copyright application as a teenager in 1877 for a musical, and she soon filed several others for her dramatic works (107–8). She registered the incomplete Hagar’s Daughter in 1891, a full decade before it was published (L. Brown 163). In her 1904 Colored American profile of South African journalist Alan Kirkland Soga, she notes that he submitted The Problem of the Social and Political Regeneration of Africa, which she hoped that the Colored Cooperative Publishing Company would issue “for copyright at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.” This ges- ture underscores the possibilities of literary proprietorship as consti- tutive of African authorship and further demonstrates her attentiveness to the mechanics of copyright law in the United States (Hopkins, “Mr. Alan Kirkland Soga” 297). Hopkins’s work represents a cumulative practice that includes selections, revisions, and omissions to an existing corpus of exploration narratives that slyly excludes the famous Henry Morton Stanley, whose reputation as a brutal imperialist and colonial agent was well established by the time that she elected to focus on the more sympathetic Livingstone.4 She draws on white periodical culture and European exploration narratives like “Lost in Sahara,” an article about Heinrich Barth, a German explorer whose contributions to the study of African history and culture remain of credible interest to Africanists in Africa and Europe.5 (“Lost in Sahara” was one of nine pieces from Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly that Hopkins used in Of One Blood.) Known for his travels in North Africa and his work on Islam in West Africa, Barth particularly interested Hopkins and appears in another of her sources, A. F. Jacassy’s “Tripoli of Barbary” from Scribner’s. Without overstating Barth’s e18 Rethinking Pauline Hopkins

exceptionalism, his career, like Livingstone’s, predated both the Berlin conference and Stanley’s dominance of an exploration discourse that directly served the most brutal interests of state colonialism. Hopkins’s reliance on a series of orientalist sources points to a critical, if underexamined, context for her work.6 Her largely favor- able engagement with Islam was part of an emerging “countertradition” in African American letters that included, most Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/30/4/e3/5099108 by guest on 29 September 2021 prominently, Edward Blyden (Campbell 129). AME Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, who was similarly allied, was part of a cohort of late nineteenth-century African American travelers to Africa that included Jane E. Sharp, a graduate of the same high school as Hopkins who moved to Liberia, and William H. Sheppard, the famed “Black Livingstone” of the American Presbyterian Congo Mission, whom Hopkins also references (L. Brown 387; Hopkins, “Mrs. Jane E. Sharp’s School” 303; Kennedy 159-60). Turner, for instance, made four trips to Africa during the 1890s, and his letters from Liberia and Sierra Leone “were widely reprinted and discussed in the African American press” (Campbell 119). These figures were repre- sentative of a much larger class of travelers during a decade that saw more than 800 people migrate from the US to Liberia (Barnes 329). In 1895, Turner wrote an introduction to Charles Spencer Smith’s Glimpses of Africa, a travel narrative published by the AME Church’s Sunday School Union, which historian Elisabeth Engel explains, “captures the style of both European science and sentimental travel writing,” while “show[ing] the intersections and divergen- ces between colonial and African American perspectives on Africa” (81). Smith, like Hopkins, uses previously published materials to di- verge from the uncharted itineraries that are privileged in most exploration narratives. As Engel argues, “By clearly avoiding new discoveries, Smith’s navigational narration generally foregrounded his personal mission of producing knowledge by means of compari- sons between colonial realties and books” (91). Without any personal experience in Africa, Hopkins could use fiction in similar fashion to synthesize discursive traditions. While introducing Smith’s Glimpses of Africa, Turner revises the European tradition of “African explorers as men possessed of heroic courage ... like the illustrious Livingstone” by claiming this mantle for Smith, just as Hopkins did for Reuel Briggs. While noting “nearly all of the information that we have happily obtained has come through European adventurers and explorers,” Turner still argues forcefully on behalf of the unique contributions of African Americans to the production of knowledge about Africa (13). He disrupts European expertise by criticizing this reliance on white explorers: “while knowledge in all of its departments is universal (for it must be of necessity, if it is American Literary History e19

genuine knowledge), there is, nevertheless, a racial and denomina- tional coloring which instinctively is stated to better advantage when one of the race or the denomination is the narrator” (11). Turner appreciates the epistemological stakes of African American writing about Africa. Hopkins provided a forum for such international engagements in the Colored American Magazine, and modeled that practice in her own writings, which highlight black women as “producers” of the kinds of racial knowledge advocated by Turner Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/30/4/e3/5099108 by guest on 29 September 2021 and acknowledged by Cooper (Cooper 28). By way of a preliminary conclusion, I want to move beyond a definition of Hopkins’s use of existing African exploration and orientalist narratives as supposed plagiarism and a lack of intellectual integrity. Instead, I propose that Hopkins uses the sources she does in the ways she does as part of her strenuous, broad-based critique of existing forms of knowledge. By claiming ownership of, and gaining authority from, a discourse that would have been familiar to her readers, Hopkins is able to offer an expansive revision and critique of such accepted modes of knowledge production. These interests are evident in her efforts elsewhere to produce a genealogy of black women intellectuals through a careful process of what Cooper describes as “listing, in which African American women created lists of prominent, qualified Black women for public consumption,” thus demonstrating a deep appreciation for alternative modes of cita- tion (26). If we understand citational practice as a form of—or at least variation on—listing, her exclusions demarcates the relative impor- tance of African American writers, activists, and intellectuals elsewhere in her oeuvre. This endeavor may be misconceived in either her assessments or her process, but it is not without a purpose, inten- tional or not, one worth recovering for its contribution to a critique of white travel writing that creates the conditions for African American knowledge production. The writings of Turner and Smith provide as much context for her practice as do those discovered sources she quotes without attribution because they locate her fiction within a thriving discourse concerning African American travel, including the writings of missionaries, educators, and emigrants, among others. As V. Y. Mudimbe explains in The Idea of Africa (1994), African literature needs to be appreciated “as discourse and what, in the variety of its events and signification, it could mean in a larger context of other local and regional discourses” (177). Mudimbe’s lesson for readers of Of One Blood is to consider not only what Hopkins says about imperialism itself, which, like Smith’s Glimpses of Africa, is not always as radical as modern readers may like, but also what Hopkins’s fiction does to imperialist discourse. While her efforts at “fucking with the language” may not be e20 Rethinking Pauline Hopkins

as explicitly transgressive as those of Philip, Hopkins can still curate an eclectic archive that critiques colonial discourse and contributes to the development of an emergent African American literature about Africa. By challenging the established parameters for gaining authority to write about Africa, Hopkins creates her own voice and her own language.

Notes Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/30/4/e3/5099108 by guest on 29 September 2021

1. For more detailed analysis of Hopkins’s use of Coombs, see my Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State (2017), pp. 145–47.

2. See Sanborn, “Wind of Words: Plagiarism and Intertextuality in Of One Blood”; Sanborn, “Plagiarism in Of One Blood,” Geoffrey Sanborn,web.

3. Among Hopkins’s sources, Sanborn identifies nine pieces from Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, three from Scribner’s Magazine, and four from Century Illustrated Magazine. See Sanborn, “Plagiarism.” It is important to acknowledge that there may be more ephemeral sources that Hopkins used which have not been uncovered as readily as those from major periodicals.

4. For more on Livingstone, see Daniel Kilbride, “The Old South Confronts the Dilemma of David Livingstone,” Journal of Southern History, vol. 82, no. 4, Nov. 2016, pp. 789–822.

5. See Adam Jones, “Barth and the Study of Africa in Germany,” Heinrich Barth et l’Afrique (2006), edited by Mamadou Diawara, et al., pp. 241–42, 248–49.

6. Also see, for example, N. Robinson,“The Colossal Statues of Egypt and Asia,” Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, vol. 17, no. 1, Jan. 1884, pp. 90–95. Appropriating Tropes of Womanhood and Literary Passing in Pauline Hopkins’s Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/30/4/e3/5099108 by guest on 29 September 2021 Hagar’s Daughter

Lauren Dembowitz*

In 1902 Pauline Hopkins published her first serial novel, Hagar’s Daughter,intheColored American Magazine. Eighteen years earlier, a story titled “Two Women” by Fanny Driscoll, a now-forgotten white author, appeared in Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly. Hopkins would import nearly 80% of “Two Women” into her novel, including character profiles, narrative commentary, and romantic plotline. Unlike the novel’s better-known source texts, such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Maud (1855) or William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853), Hopkins’s readers were unlikely to recognize Driscoll’s “Two Women,” a little-known work of popular fiction that blends seamlessly with Hopkins’s own writing. Thus, while earlier critical approaches to Hopkins’s intertextual practice emphasized her incorporation of canonical texts whose cultural authority she could coopt to support her radical racial politics, this essay examines Hopkins’s appropriation and reformulation of Driscoll’s text as a unique confrontation with the tropes of sentimental womanhood central to white and black women’s writing at the turn of the century.1 What emerges is Hopkins’s indictment of the very conventionality of such tropes, for the way they invariably yoke black women to allegories of US progress or stagnation. By explicitly racializing Driscoll’s socially progressive but colorblind romantic formula, Hopkins highlights the problematic symbolic links that it establishes between two figures allegedly incapable of virtue—the

*Lauren Dembowitz is a PhD candidate in the English Department at UCLA. Her dissertation examines the Black Venus as a flexible figure who embodies Atlantic entanglements of race, gender, empire, and commerce in the Romantic era and their legacies in the present. e22 Rethinking Pauline Hopkins

implicitly white femme fatale and the mixed-race woman. In doing so, Hopkins exposes how deeply racist discourses are embed- ded in sentimental tropes of womanhood, even when the tropes themselves are under assault. “Two Women” parodies the sentimental stereotypes of the “true woman” and the femme fatale to critique the restrictive notions of female identity they authorize. Driscoll dedicates a sizeable portion of her brief narrative to an accumulation of binary descriptors Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/30/4/e3/5099108 by guest on 29 September 2021 linking her true woman, Mignon, to white lilies, angelic frailty, and pious, maternal influence, and her femme fatale, June, to tropical blooms, startling beauty, and a dangerously irresistible allure. Both women vie for the weak-willed Don Eastern, but June finally tri- umphs after Mignon’s cliche sentimental death of a broken heart and a fever. The story endorses the morally tainted but self-governing femme fatale rather than the impossibly pure and frail true woman. Driscoll’s flouting of sentimental gender conventions seems progressive, but her racial privilege as a white woman writer obviates a confrontation with the racist assumption that the femme fatale’s unrestrained passion derives from her exotic, tropical origins. Driscoll’s uncritical harnessing of these tropes in service of a bud- ding feminist agenda thus betrays how deeply ideologies of race per- meated the white sentimental imagination. Hopkins’s appropriation and adaptation of Driscoll’s romance denaturalizes and recalibrates tropes of white and black womanhood as moral barometers of American liberalism in two ways. First, Hopkins resituates Driscoll’s self-contained romantic triangle and dichotomous-heroines trope within the sociopolitical context of slavery and opens the novel with a plotline and genealogy that exposes the trope’s racist subtext. Secondly, Hopkins transforms Driscoll’s two, white romantic rivals—Mignon and June—into the mixed-race heroines, Jewel and Aurelia, to expose American racism—rather than sentimental standards of female virtue—as the true index of national character and the limits of its progress after Reconstruction. Through the tragic fate of the “refined, cultured” Hagar, Hopkins explicitly links the unjust racial dichotomization of female virtue with the hypocrisy of a government supposedly grounded in Christian morality and democratic, egalitarian princi- ples. The catalyst for her downfall is the revelation of her mixed- race status, which rocks her blissful marriage to Ellis Enson, a white plantation owner. Here Hopkins establishes precisely what is at stake in representations of white and black womanhood:

[T]he one drop of black blood neutralized all her virtues, and she became ... an unclean thing. Can anything more unjust be American Literary History e23

imagined in a republican form of government whose excuse for existence is the upbuilding of mankind! (Hopkins 62)

Ellis’s suspicious death leaves Hagar and her infant daughter in the clutches of a wicked brother-in-law who attempts to sell the two into slavery; Hagar escapes this fate through a suicidal leap into the Potomac River. Hopkins thus layers Hagar’s story onto that of William Wells Brown’s heroine, Clotel—the slave daugh- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/30/4/e3/5099108 by guest on 29 September 2021 ter of a founding father.2 In doing so, she creates a textual palimp- sest that reveals the inequality festering at the heart of a nascent democracy in the form of racial exploitation and sexual violence. The national resonance of Hagar’s tragedy, and the implication that “one drop of black blood” is all that separates the true woman from the femme fatale in the eyes of white America, form the backdrop of the ensuing romantic rivalry between the novel’s sub- sequent generation of heroines, Jewel Bowen and Aurelia Madison. Hopkins imports and condenses Driscoll’s profiles of Mignon and June in her portraits of Jewel and Aurelia as she reworks Driscoll’s romantic triangle to undermine the racialized thinking beneath the conventional figures of the true woman and the femme fatale. Driscoll’s Don Eastern becomes the liberal Northerner, Cuthbert Sumner. Mignon becomes Jewel (Sumner’s virtuous fiancee), and June becomes the ravishing adventuress, Aurelia. A close echo of Driscoll’s Mignon, Jewel is a “true woman to the core,” a “fair fragrant lily” (268), and Sumner’s “good angel” (103). Driscoll seems to mock her society’s ideali- zation of the true woman, but Hopkins claims the value of this role for black women in the character of Jewel, who demonstrates that mixed-race women can be chaste, virtuous, and thus the proper subject of sentimental romance. Once Jewel has proven her mettle as a dutiful daughter and a loving and loyal fiancee, the revelation of her true identity as Hagar’s daughter undermines sentimental convention’s equation of whiteness and moral purity. Jewel’s death is almost identical to Mignon’s, but whereas Driscoll blames Mignon’s death on the frailty of her character— this true woman cannot survive her fiance’s betrayal—Hopkins ascribes Jewel’s death to the broken moral character of a racist nation, effectively subverting the moral significance that the figure of the (white) true woman was meant to embody. Hopkins’s Jewel is betrayed by Sumner’s prejudice: his rejec- tion of Jewel upon discovery of her racial identity sends her to her grave. e24 Rethinking Pauline Hopkins

“Two Women” Hagar’s Daughter Suddenly, with a great cry, Suddenly with a great cry he [Eastern] stood still before a fair, stood before a fair, slender shaft of slender, marble shaft. polished cream-white marble,

MIGNON: AGED 19. Jewel, aged 21. “Blessed are the pure in heart.” “Not my will, but Thine be done!” Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/30/4/e3/5099108 by guest on 29 September 2021

There was only one Mignon in He fell down with his face upon the world. He fell down with his her grave. She had died abroad of face upon her grave. She had Roman fever.... died in Rome of the fever. Cuthbert Sumner questioned Two years later, June ...was wherein he had sinned and why he Mrs. Don Eastern. (Driscoll 567) was so severely punished. Then it was borne in upon him: the sin is the nation’s. It must be washed out. The plans of the Father are not changed in the nineteenth century; they are shown us in different forms. The idolatry of the Moloch of Slavery must be purged from the land.... (Hopkins 283-84)

Whereas Driscoll’s conclusion jettisons the true woman as an antiquated, overly prescriptive, and unrealistic model of femininity, Hopkins’s saturates Jewel’s untimely end and the tragedy of her failed romance with Sumner with systemic implications.3 Sumner’s “sin” of racial prejudice, Hopkins suggests, is but one manifestation of the enduring racism not merely in the South, but thoroughly in- grained in the liberalism of the North. The nation’s sin, in other words, is not restricted to overt, legally sanctioned legacies of slavery like Jim Crow, but extends to what Hopkins deems a toxic literary inheritance that limits how Americans can imagine noble black womanhood constrained neither by the immobilizing expectations of utter self-sacrifice and submission bound up with the true woman nor by the insidious assumptions of licentiousness and selfishness embodied by the femme fatale.4 The latter figure endures Hopkins’s most trenchant critique in her transformation of Driscoll’s exotic June into Aurelia. Whereas June’s supposedly tropical nature likely serves as Driscoll’s literary shorthand for her femme fatale’s wanton allure rather than an inten- tional marker of her racial identity, Hopkins’s revision of that character in Aurelia exposes the explosive intersection between the figurative moral darkness of the presumably white femme fatale and American Literary History e25

the actual drop of black blood that condemns mixed-race women to contempt and sexual victimization. Indeed, the revelation that Aurelia is the product of forced miscegenation between a white slave-owner and his female slave brands her as the fulfillment of a stereotype, even as it undermines the validity of that stereotype by deeming Aurelia’s depraved nature one of the violent legacies of slavery. Both June and Aurelia forego female respectability by desper- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/30/4/e3/5099108 by guest on 29 September 2021 ately pursuing betrothed men in climactic scenes of romantic betrayal. Hopkins reproduces nearly two full pages of Driscoll’s story almost verbatim except for one significant alteration: June’s hyster- ics emerge from an impulsive and overwhelming passion, while Aurelia’s are calculated and rehearsed as part of the larger plot— orchestrated by the novel’s villains—to lay claim to the Sumner and Bowen family fortunes. June declares that “[s]he would have pre- ferred heaven and the ‘lilies and languors of virtue’; debarred from that, she would take hell and the ‘raptures and roses’ of a love to which she had no shadow of a right” (Driscoll 563). Aurelia echoes June’s sentiment almost verbatim, but unlike June, who embraces the femme fatale’s “raptures and roses” because they license her pursuit of illicit desire, Aurelia is forced to perform this role by the white men who exploit her sexual wiles for their financial gain while holding the threat of racial exposure over her head. Aurelia’s identity as a mixed-race woman and former slave categorically debars her from the “lilies of virtuous winning,” which are coded white (Hopkins, Hagar’s Daughter 102). Moreover, in her coerced perfor- mance of the implicitly white femme fatale, Aurelia ironically ful- fills the very stereotype of the dangerously seductive mixed-race woman that debars her in the first place. Aurelia’s behavior, therefore, does not mark her as a modern, liberated woman (as June’s may have done for Driscoll), but rather as a victim of the manipula- tion and disempowerment by white patriarchal systems that convene at the intersection of race and gender. Unlike Driscoll, who seems to exchange the stigma of the fallen woman for the bold promise of the twentieth-century New Woman, Hopkins cannot endorse her femme fatale’s depraved behavior. Instead, Hopkins repositions Aurelia as a victim of the material, ideological, and, I would argue, literary legacies of slavery, recalibrating the symbolic responsibility imposed upon women as guardians of the (white) nation’s morality: “Terrible though her sins might be—terrible her nature, she was but another type of the prod- ucts of the accursed system of slavery—a victim of ‘man’s inhuman- ity to man’ that has made ‘countless millions mourn’” (238). Near the close of the novel, the chivalric Sumner rejects Aurelia’s final plea by asserting, “if you were as pure as snow, and I loved you as e26 Rethinking Pauline Hopkins

my other self, I would never wed with one of colored blood, an octaroon” (238)! Here Hopkins reminds us that the tragedy of Jewel’s death and the viciousness of Aurelia’s character are insepa- rable from slavery’s monstrous intimacies and racist legacies, which include hypocritical sentimental tropes of womanhood constructed to secure national family romances predicated upon myths of white purity.5 Reading Hagar’s Daughter alongside Driscoll’s story—rather Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/30/4/e3/5099108 by guest on 29 September 2021 than against sentimental tropes of womanhood more generally— reveals that even as the standards of female virtue bound up with the true woman and the femme fatale were themselves rigid and antiquated, the conventions transmitting these standards were surprisingly flexible at the height of their literary popularity. The broad appeal and wide circulation of these well-worn tropes made them ideal vessels for various progressive social critiques like Driscoll’s. In addition to “Two Women,” I have identified five other source texts for Hagar’s Daughter from which Hopkins imports nearly a thousand words of uncited material. Half of these sources deploy this trope to socially progressive ends. Despite the relative degrees to which these white female authors challenge these stereotypes, they never acknowledge the racist discourses informing them. Hopkins’s silent inclusion of these texts—each with its own unique variation of and investment in this popular trope—recasts the seemingly static sentimental conventions of turn-of-the-century white women’s fiction as unstable and complex in their negotiation of gender, class, and race, and may illuminate both the process and the stakes of Hopkins’s inspired borrowings.

Notes

1. For discussions of Hopkins’s use of canonical sources, see Lois Brown, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution (2008), pp. 318–65 and Holly Jackson, “Another Long Bridge: Reproduction and Reversion in Hagar’s Daughter,” Early African American Print Culture (2012),editedbyLaraLanger Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein, pp. 192–202. For analyses of Hopkins’s engagement with tropes of womanhood, see Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (1987), pp. 145–62; Ann duCille, The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction (1993), pp. 35–43; Kate McCullough, “Slavery, Sexuality, and Genre: Pauline Hopkins and the Representation of Female Desire,” The Unruly Voice: Rediscovering Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1996), edited by John Cullen Gruesser, pp. 21–49; and Claudia Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century (1992), pp. 162–68.

2. See Jackson, and Brown, pp. 348–351. American Literary History e27

3. As Claudia Tate explains, Hopkins’s serial novels “do not transform the courtship story into an allegory of fulfilled political desire; rather, the modified courtship story is one of frustrated civil expectations” (195).

4. According to Teresa C. Zackodnik, who locates the emergence of this term in the black clubwomen’s movement, “noble black womanhood” challenges rather than capitulates to white notions of virtuous womanhood by contesting stereotypes of black female wantonness while simultaneously accounting for the lived experiences of black women (xxix). See Zackodnik, The Mulatta and the Politics of Race (2004). Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/30/4/e3/5099108 by guest on 29 September 2021

5. Building upon Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997), which argues that slavery rein- scribed relations of violent subjection into ones of intimate affinity (87), Christina E. Sharpe defines “monstrous intimacies” as the affective legacy of slavery that mani- fests as “a set of known and unknown performances and inhabited horrors, desires and positions produced, reproduced, circulated, and transmitted, that are breathed in like air and often unacknowledged to be monstrous” (3). See Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (2010). e28 Rethinking Pauline Hopkins

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