Pauline Hopkins and the American Dream: An African American Writer’s (Re) Visionary Gospel of Success by Alisha Knight (review)

At the crux of divergent perspectives on the writing of Pauline Hopkins are questions regarding what literature should do. African Americans attained a literature in pursuit of certain goals, and only as we began to secure recognizable gains across areas of social and economic activity did questions unrelated to the best interests of “the race” begin to weigh more heavily on the valuation of black authors’ work. Ken Warren’s 2012 effort to historicize African American literature (to consign it to history, in a sense) drew a distinction between the period when political criteria were foremost in the consideration of black authors’ contributions to literature and the advent of a paradigm in which those questions are less salient in the literature’s production as well as its interpretation. Pauline Hopkins’s career belongs to the former era. Contemporary criticism regarding her work has the dual tasks of situating its significance in its own context and questioning its enduring relevance. Alisha Knight’s book, Pauline Hopkins and the American Dream, sets an example for what criticism concerned with literature’s past can do by augmenting our notions of what literature could do in the past. She makes the case that Hopkins was engaged in a critical project we may not have recognized until now.

Situating Pauline Hopkins in the center of a debate about what literature can achieve is an improbable undertaking. As Knight demonstrates by giving ample consideration to the scholarly context in which treatments of Hopkins have emerged, the turn-of-the-century novelist did not attain the iconic quality of other writers from her era: Frances E. W. Harper, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington. Her novels predated the New Negro Renaissance, although they prefigured some of its concerns. Considering her choices regarding what sorts of heroes and heroines to depict in her work and what aspirations to vocalize through them, contemporary critics have viewed Hopkins’s writing as an extension of the sentimental tradition. This classification typically accompanies an emphasis on the limits of Hopkins’s vision, which Knight argues does a disservice to the ambitions evident throughout her career. While she acknowledges the accuracy of critiques that observe resemblances between Hopkins novels and nineteenth-century sentimental fiction, Knight argues against reading Hopkins as an example of what African American authors did with that genre. Instead, she outlines an alternative frame of reference for appraisals of Hopkins’s work: the “success literature” typically associated with white American ideals of the self-made man and the American Dream.

Knight characterizes success narratives as an integral force in the construction of American identities, and she demonstrates how Hopkins—rather than emulating white writers—interrogates national ideals by drawing attention to the diminished life chances of African American men and women. Because black people were systematically excluded from market competition by the racial caste system of Jim Crow, the popular literature that gave rise to an archetype of the self-made man who thrives through his own industry appears incognizant of the concerns of the black public (5). Accordingly, few scholars address the role that the gospel of success in literature played in the lives of African Americans at the dawn of the last century. By locating Pauline Hopkins in the tradition of the sentimental novel, or otherwise eliding the possibility of a dialogue between black authors and success literature, critics from Gwendolyn Brooks to Richard Yarborough have read her portrayals of sympathetic women as contributions to a project of moral education while characterizing the figure of the self-made man that emerges in her fiction as an anomaly.

In light of her protagonists’ tendency to pursue respectability in terms that mirror their white counterparts, it is easy to identify the self-made men who appear in fiction by Hopkins with an assimilationist orientation to the American Dream; Knight associates [End Page 211...