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  • Contending with Tennyson:Pauline Hopkins and the Victorian Presence in African American Literature
  • Daniel Hack (bio)

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Mr. Ryder, the protagonist of Charles Chesnutt’s well-known story “The Wife of His Youth,” longs for “absorption by the white race” of “people of mixed blood” such as himself (104). Paging through “a volume of Tennyson—his favorite poet” for suitable quotations to toast the light-skinned woman he hopes to marry, he is interrupted by the arrival at his door of ’Liza Jane, a “very black” woman “who looked like a bit of the old plantation life” (104, 105). The story ends with Mr. Ryder responding to the toast “The Ladies” not by quoting the Victorian poet laureate as planned but instead by telling ’Liza Jane’s story and acknowledging her as his wife, whom he had married in the antebellum South a quarter century earlier. Implicitly, then, for Mr. Ryder to accept in the person of ’Liza Jane the black past and identity he sought to escape means giving up not only a light-skinned fiancée but Tennyson as well.1

Possibly the earliest fictional depiction of an African American reader of Victorian literature, “The Wife of His Youth” can be read as an allegory of—if not the template for—the role long accorded that literature in African American literary history. That is, an African American writer’s use of Victorian literature as anything but a foil has typically been seen to reflect that writer’s regrettable embrace of genteel values and desire for bourgeois respectability, and a corresponding disdain for a more authentically African American [End Page 484] culture. To look to the Victorians—or even worse, to be in some sense “Victorian”—is to eschew African American experience and culture as subject matter and as the source of one’s aesthetic; accordingly, African American literature, like Mr. Ryder, is truest to itself when it turns its back on Victorian literature.

This anti-Victorianism is rarely articulated this baldly, but manifests itself instead in the casual use of “Victorian” as a dismissive epithet and, more substantively, in a tendency to downplay or ignore moments in and aspects of texts that draw on or are in dialogue with Victorian literature. This avoidance—even abjection—of the Victorian is captured neatly by the opening lines of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s, General Editor’s foreword to the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers—a foreword that appears in each of the two-dozen-plus volumes in that groundbreaking series. This foreword takes as its epigraph a series of passages from the opening paragraphs of Anna Julia Cooper’s 1892 collection of essays A Voice from the South (itself a volume in the Schomburg Library). The epigraph begins:

One muffled strain in the Silent South, a jarring chord and a vague and uncomprehended cadenza has been and still is the Negro. And of that muffled chord, the one mute and voiceless note has been the sadly expectant Black Woman,.…

(vi [Gates’s ellipsis])

This seems a fitting statement with which to open an essay titled “In Her Own Write” and to stand at the head of the Schomburg Library as a whole. Yet its appropriateness, at least for Gates, is evidently purchased at the expense of the rest of Cooper’s sentence, which continues:

An infant crying in the night,An infant crying for the light;And with no language—but a cry.

(“Our Raison d’Être” 51)

These lines, as Cooper expects her readers to recognize (or so the fact that she does not name her source suggests), are from Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850). Cooper’s recourse to an Englishman’s poem at the very moment she is proclaiming her intention to give voice to black American women is at the very least paradoxical; however, rather than explore this paradox, Gates simply omits the quotation. Thus, just as Mr. Ryder’s acceptance of his African American identity entails a turn away from Tennyson, Gates’s argument for a distinctive African American literary tradition, and within that for a tradition of “black women writers [End Page 485] read[ing], and revis[ing], other black women writers...

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