by Eugen Margariti
Double identities, decaying plantations, dastardly patriarchs, and bigamous marriages: Pauline Hopkins was a pioneer in bringing the African American Gothic novel into the twentieth century. During her time as editor of the Colored American Magazine, the first American monthly publication that specifically catered to an African American readership, Pauline Hopkins published multiple serialized domestic novels that utilized and subverted contemporary generic tropes. The first of these magazine novels, Hagar’s Daughter: A Story of Southern Caste Prejudice, was released with J. Alexandre Skeete’s illustrations throughout four issues between May and August of 1901. Hopkins’s serialized formatting of her sensational story and Skeete’s atmospheric illustrations dramatically heighten feelings of suspense through waiting for the next issue. By manipulating magazenial content, form, and J. Alexandre Skeet’s gothicized depictions of white villainy, Pauline Hopkins simultaneously rejects historically racialized depictions of Black Americans while also circumventing an established but essentialized and colorist literary tradition of the “tragic mulatta” heroine. Furthermore, through utilizing illustration, suspense, and Victorian generic conventions, Hopkins’s defiance of the “tragic mulatta” narrative centers a collective political desire for the unmasking of historical truths as a means for racial uplift.
Hopkins uses printed advertisements to center her authorial intention that legitimizes the political power of real history. In her January 1901 advertisement for her novel, Contending Forces: A Romance of Negro Life North and South, Hopkins tempts her reading “AGENTS” with a “LIBERAL COMMISSION” for the dissemination of a tragic mulatta narrative portraying “truthful” incidents of “lynching and concubinage” that “HAVE ACTUALLY OCCURRED” (Hopkins, ‘Contending Forces’ Advertisement). Hopkins encourages intellectual change through sensational use of capital letters, as well as material transformation and active literary participation in her dissemination of bound novels, magazines, and wages. Furthermore, Hopkins roots Contending Forces in an American historical context, citing the “archives of the Court House at Newbern N.C and at the seat of government at Washington D.C” (IBID). While this advertisement is for her bound novel Contending Forces, Hopkins’s serialized novel, Hagar’s Daughter, is similar in plot. Hagar’s Daughter also centers the American historical reality of systemic sexual assault and political leaders as perpetrators and protectors of white supremacy.
Pauline Hopkins manipulates the columnar style of the Colored American Magazine to create a metatextual reading experience that rejects dominant yet ahistorical narratives of reconstruction. Hopkins roots Hagar’s Daughter in a historical reality by mimicking newspaper conventions. She cites the specific date of 1860, specific events including the election of Lincoln and the terrorism of the Klu Klux Klan, and she atmosphericaly describes “columns of partisan newspapers each day in the year describing disgraceful scenes enacted by Pro-Slavery men” (Hopkins 3). The first page of Hagar’s Daughter mimics partisan newspapers both in form and through the dissemination of factual content. The Black experience Hopkins describes is gothic as well as political, for there “is no safety beneath the Stars and Stripes” (Hopkins 4). Hopkins’s combination of historical fiction with newspaper conventions centers the intentful “historical” aspect of her historical fiction.
Hopkins combines fictional and literary histories through her employment of J. Alexandre Skeete’s depiction of Southern white patriarchs. Skeete’s frontispiece“I’d Do Anything That Would Break This Cursed Luck I’m Having” appears over twenty pages before the first installment of Hagar’s Daughter, suspending readers in a state of uncertainty; after all, why is there an illustration of two white planters lamenting bad economic luck in a magazine that performs race-work? Skeete’s caption pointedly urges readers ahead to page 352 of the magazine, where the novel’s villains catalyze the destruction of Hagar’s perfect marriage through secretive plotting. Hopkins and Skeete create a foreboding gothic landscape that foreshadows troubled romances, for the villainous “Enson gazes moodily out upon the dark waters of the Atlantic” while slave-trader Walker recalls “old friends, the Sargeants” as a means to quick fortune (Hopkins 29). Furthermore, Skeete’s illustrations of white villainy reverse a history of American colonial and post-colonial print culture depicting Black Americans as “untrustworthy, demonic, and violent” in illustrated advertisements (Zackodnik 141).
Hopkins’s interest in William Wells Brown’s tumultuous life establishes a subversive layering of appropriated language that stretches from early nineteenth-century articles, to Brown’s novels, and finally to Hagar’s Daughter. In one installment of her article series, Famous Men of the Negro Race, Hopkins frames the benefits of uncovering and “pondering the history of our race” through descriptions of Brown’s illustrious literary career, citing his 1853 European publication of Clotelle (Hopkins, 233 & 236). Hopkins’s article favorably portrays Brown’s multifaceted career as an activist, doctor, and writer of historical fiction. Brown’s bravery and resistance to silencing are traits Hopkins portrays in all of her protagonists, mixed-race and dark-skinned, reversing racialized depictions of heroism.
Historians and literary scholars alike explore Brown’s literary focus and appropriation of white journalist’s newspaper articles that bemoan the degradation of white-passing, enslaved “fancy girls” (Sanborn 89). Critic Geoffrey Sanborn argues Brown’s recycling and elevation of printed language describing the treatment of light-skinned enslaved women creates a fetishistic, Mulvean effect of a gothicized “phantasmic topography,” forcing readers to imagine realities of sexual subjugation and isolation (Sanborn 102). William Wells Brown’s published novels, including Clotel, Or the President’s Daughter and the serialized Miralda; or, The Beautiful Quadroon. A Romance of American Slavery, Founded on Fact of the New York Weekly Anglo-African, establishes his creative and literary fascination with the tragic mulatta figure as a communicative tool meant to center buried horrors of plantationocracy (Sanborn 107).
Brown’s literary influence is evident in the second installment of Hagar’s Daughter, both in Skeete’s illustration and in Hopkins’s prose. Brown’s chapter from Clotel, entitled “Death is Freedom,” and Skeete’s frontispiece, “With One Bound She Sprang Over The Bridge” are compositionally similar. Hopkins’s description of Hagar’s escape is an example of intentional, useful plagiarism, as she lifts directly from Brown’s description of his heroine’s death. However, Hopkins’s use of Brown’s prose disrupts limiting notions of the “tragic mulatta” figure, as she rejects the fallen woman narrative. Skeete’s illustration builds upon Brown’s description of Clotel’s suicide, focusing solely on Hagar’s successful escape, as opposed to Brown’s fatal and hopeless ending. In Skeete’s illustration, the darkly gothic waters of the Potomac River return, emphasizing the river’s importance as a site of capture and escape. This time, the heroine Hagar is a religious paragon of virtue; Hagar’s stylized hood symbolizes gothic entrapment as well as a hopeful and holy aureole. Even Hagar’s maternal posing recalls the Virgin Mary. In avoiding Hagar’s death, Hopkins simultaneously avoids and embraces essentializing entrapments of the “tragic mulatta” as an example of “true womanhood” (Pavletich 647). Skeete’s aureole highlights a particularly Victorian aspect of the gothic heroine in which she is a domestic angel and a “positive personification of the Perfect Lady (Cult of True Womanhood)” (Jorgensen-Earp 84). Thankfully, the
religious imagery of the aureole provides readers with a suspended basis of hope for Hagar’s fate.
While traditional “tragic mulatta” narratives favor heroines that promote unimpeachable standards of Victorian purity, Hopkins combines scandalous illustration and feminized generic conventions to reject essentializing and puritanical notions regarding Black sexuality. Aurelia Madison exhibits characteristics of the Victorian femme fatale, as she is a sexually transgressive figure who attempts to seduce Jewel Bowen’s “socially productive” beau, Cuthbert Sumner (Braun 15). Skeete’s July 1901 frontispiece, “A Deep Sigh Startled Him ” depicts Aurelia craftily laying her head upon Cuthbert’s shoulder in a moment of artful seduction. Hopkins gothicizes Jewel’s reaction towards this sexual deception, as she stares at Cuthbert “as pallid as a ghost” with her “frightened, woeful eyes” (Hopkins 124). Hopkins combines visual and literary representations of mixed-race women with radically differentiating attitudes towards sexuality to both simultaneously reject white supremacist stereotypes that hypersexualize Black women as “Jezebels” while also complicating fin de siècle notions of idealized sexual abstinence and social respectability (White 11).
Hopkins borrows from the intertextual language of political records and Brown’s literary career to historicize the systemic sexual subjugation of Black women. One villain of Clotel is slave trader, Dick Walker, a last name he shares with Bush Dynasty ancestor, Thomas “Beau” Walker (Brown & Bennett). Hopkins utilizes the Gothic trope of hidden identities by borrowing and transforming the surname Walker to a statelier and politicized Madison, reminding readers of a historical reality in which James Madison owned slaves(Spies-Gans 1289). This transformation in plagiarized naming allows Hopkins to disseminate historically relevant information, exposing systemic acts of violence inherent to the fabric of our nation.
Hopkins’s gothicized revelation of Aurelia’s hidden matrilineal origins allows her to unearth buried American history. In the halls of the White House, Madison’s stenographer, Elise Bradford, reveals Madison’s assault upon a slave woman around the “time the war broke out,” resulting in a daughter “beautiful beyond description” deserving of pity, for she lives in “deplorable conditions” due to the “education of generations of her foreparents” (Hopkins 159). Generations of white rapists leave Aurelia “helpless” to degradation (IBID). Aurelia’s court house unveiling reveals her lack of agency; “her father’s house was a gambling palace where men were fleeced of money for the sake of the smiles of the beautiful Aurelia” (Hopkins 259). Madison’s manipulation of Aurelia’s sexuality for monetary gain mirrors a reality where incest and “forced human breeding financed American agricultural wealth” and global political power (de Vita 162). Although Aurelia is an agent of transgression, Hopkins encourages empathy in descriptions of a historicized plight.
Hopkins mercifully avoids Aurelia’s death to imagine sexual possibilities beyond a domestic angel’s essentializing, virginal entrapments. Traditional Gothic narratives punish pre-marital sex, survivors of sexual assault, and femme fatales as a literary inscription of a misogynistic society’s collective “moral condemnation” (Horvitz 246). Hopkins encourages readers to imagine Aurelia’s fate beyond the plotular constraints of Hagar’s Daughter, as the “unfortunate woman” vanishes “forever from the public view,” potentially escaping a white-supremecist gaze that simultaneously holds her to virginal standards while also praising her sensuality (Hopkins 272). Hopkins’s novel creates possibilities for the gendered fates of the fallen woman, broadening restrictive nineteenth century sexual standards.
Hopkins foreshadows the role historical unearthing and intergenerational solidarity play in Hagar’s Daughter through a dichotomization of illustration and portraiture. Between the frontispiece I’d Do Anything to Break this Cursed Luck I’m Having and the original installment of the novel itself is journalist Morris Lewis’s article, “The Old Folks’ Home of Chicago, With Portraits of Prominent Persons Connected With the Same”. Lewis’s article highlights the importance of Black elders, for their historical knowledge is invaluable. Particularly historical and political examples include Sophia Job, who was present at “George Washington’s 1794 inauguration” (Lewis 332). Lewis highlights the importance of intergenerational solidarity through photographic portraits of the home’s young benefactors. These portraits embody “cultivated asymmetries of aristocratic posture,” contrasting Skeete’s illustrations of white folks in sensational but compromising positions (Zackodnik 153). Hopkins’s stark contrast of sensational illustrations, meticulously posed portraiture, and plot foreshadow Venus and Aunt Henny’s as politically active, knowledgeable, and resourceful literary heroines.
Hagar’s Daughter’s culminating court-house scene destabilizes gendered, racialized, and generic conventions, shifting roles of active heroism from white to Black characters. Not only does General Benson kidnap Jewel Bowen to marry her and attain her fortune, but he kills Elise Bradford, a witness to his scheming and mother of his illegitimate child. Aunt Henny, a domestic worker in the White House, witnesses Benson’s villainy and “faint[s] with horror at the tragedy of the night” (Hopkins 262). While Aunt Henny’s reaction recalls exaggerated generic conventions of the sentimental gothic, her sentimentality reverses white supremacist notions of Black emotional inferiority. Aunt Henny’s participation in the courthouse as “the most important witness” to gendered, racialized villainy further establishes her role as an active and knowledgeable heroine (Hopkins 259).
Hopkins utilization of Victorian detective narrative disrupts colorist literary representations of heroism while valorizing the preservation of history. American information dissemination systems continue to minimize and obscurify the effects of white supremacy in our nation. Venus, Aunt Henny’s dark-skinned granddaughter, conceals herself through cross-dressing and sneaks around Washington and its surrounding plantations in search of her grandmother’s whereabouts. Without Venus’s intelligence, resourcefulness, and sleuthing, Hagar, Jewel, Aunt Henny, and Aurelia would be forced into lives of destitution and degradation. Furthermore, Venus’s sleuthing reveals a historical reality in which white politicians utilize racial institutions to ruin lives, as the novel’s villains are “known in society, having the entrée to the best houses” (Hopkins 259). More significantly, the court-house scene reverses the “”mammy” caricature” in which enslavers compartmentalized personal feelings of affection for Black female caretakers through exceptionalizing her “supposed intimate involvement in all aspects of domestic life in the Big House” (White 48). Aunt Henny’s connection to the Big House takes on a subversive role, as she politicizes her knowledge of unearthed history in a successful search for justice. Hopkins’s shifting of active heroism onto a family of Black characters is a final nail in the coffin of nineteenth century literature that favors light-skinned protagonists and heroes.
Gothic literature, utilized expertly by authors such as Pauline Hopkins, allows the writer to explore societal issues through symbols and metaphors as well as realist descriptions of historically accurate events and injustices. Although printed sources of entertainment, such as novels, magazines, and newspapers are losing technological relevance within our rapidly advancing techno-culture, the American news cycle’s internet and televised presence is a modern and relevant site of the dissemination of knowledge, violence, and spectacle. Despite the media’s collective misrepresentation of our American ’Culture and history, Pauline Hopkins’s fiction and magazine reminds us how invaluable unbiased representation, family, and history can be in the face of political subjugation.
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