Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded Age America

4. “A Story Written on Her Face”: Pauline Hopkins’s Unmaking of the Inherited Character of Race

157 4 “A Story Written on Her Face” Pauline Hopkins’s Unmaking of the Inherited Character of Race Natural history must provide, simultaneously, a certain designation and a controlled derivation. And just as the theory of structure superimposed articulation and the proposition so that they became one and the same, so the theory of character must identify the values that designate and the area in which they are derived. . . . The structure selected to be the locus of pertinent identities and differences is what is termed the character. —Michel Foucault, “Character,” in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences1 The concept of character will have to be divested of those features that constitute its erroneous connection to that of fate. This connection is effected by the idea of a network that can be tightened by knowledge at will into a dense fabric, for this is how character appears to superficial observation. Along with the broad underlying traits, the trained eye of the connoisseur of men is supposed to perceive finer and closer connections, until what looked like a net is tightened into cloth. —Walter Benjamin, “Fate and Character”2 In January 1905, the editor of the periodical the Voice of the Negro published a series of short “Messages” intended to give advice to its readers on the important question of “the betterment of the race.”3 The short and prescriptive messages, in their effort to encompass the “republic of thought” spanning “both sides of the color line,” were solicited from a range of esteemed and “representative white men as well as those 158 “A Story Written on Her Face” of the race.” And yet although the editors strove to represent many different “schools of thought,” what is most striking about these messages is the common emphasis they place on the role of character in the project of racial uplift. As Rev. H.S. Bradley advocates, “put character above color and principle above pigment cells. Let each individual determine to deserve the good will of the other race.”4 “Character tells, money talks,” according to William Hayes Ward, editor of the New York Independent, for “after all that can be said the substance of it is character. If the white people of the South all had character and the Negroes all had character there would be no trouble.”5 For William H. Council, head of a southern industrial school, the maxim which comes second only to “Hold onto God in all good faith” is “Get character. Get brains. Get dollars. They all count for something in any people.”6 And for Kelly Miller, the foundation of any personal or political action is character, for “[t]he salvation of any overshadowed race will depend upon what they are rather than what they do, upon character more than enterprise, upon endurance rather than endeavor.”7 The prominence of the rhetoric of character within what has been called the “racial uplift ideology” of the postbellum period was of course not limited to the pages of the Voice of the Negro.8 Getting, having, building , and perhaps most importantly displaying character had been seen by many social reformers as critical to the project of addressing class and racial inequality throughout the nineteenth century, and character was valued as a particularly powerful instrument of reform in the abolitionist movement as well as postemancipation projects of racial uplift.9 By the time the editor of the Voice of the Negro solicited his “Messages” from “representative men” drawn from both sides of the color line, however , the question of character’s role in challenging racial inequality in the United States was increasingly dominated by “two different schools of thought,” the two schools of thought, that is, that had by that time become prominently identified with W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington .10 The famous debate between these two “representative men” that has dominated understandings of the politics of racial uplift at the turn of the century has usually been understood as a clash driven by their differing educational and political philosophies. But what these opening examples suggest is that this debate is more fundamentally structured by a disagreement over the form and function of character as a vehicle of social reform, a disagreement premised on two different strategies of articulating and asserting class character. For Booker T. Washington, character was premised on the achievement “A Story Written on Her Face” 159...