Pauline E. Hopkins: A Literary Biography

Hagar’s Beautiful Daughters

Hagar’sBeautifulDaughters I n the March 1903 issue of the Colored American Magazine, when Cornelia Condict criticized Pauline Hopkins for writing about interracial love rather than intraracial love, her reproach was basically aimed at the figure of the mulatta, the beautiful light-colored woman who may pass for white and who occasionally marries a white man without letting him know of her ancestry.1 In a country where interracial marriage was legally forbidden—in the case of Alabama even up to the election of the year 2000—the position of the mulatto was and continues to be of special and conspicuous significance. It is not surprising, then, that when African American writers are looking for a subject “dipped in the life blood of their nation” (Cooper, Voice 175), a subject that allows them to treat both the African American and white American side of race relations, they choose to include mixed-race characters. For many, the most enticing subject is the nearly white woman whose trace of black blood leads to tragedy, becomes a test of character, and allows bitter, ironic attacks against a system of double morality. Beauty and virtue, when they are combined with color, highlight a nation’s concern with race, class, and the role of women. This chapter will demonstrate that the treatment of the mixed-race character may be seen in close connection with such aspects of genre as the sentimental or melodramatic mode, the detective story, tales of adventure and local color, or political and social tracts. Pauline Hopkins recognized the possibilities inherent in the fictional negotiations of color in combination with beauty and virtue, although this way of writing did not always meet the expectations of her audience. Like the Smith family in Contending Forces, many light-colored African Americans formed their own “blue vein societies” or “upper 400” reserved for African Americans of light color, good education, wealth, or prominent family background. Although they usually measured their success against that of the white society and although many of them chose to pass for white, most would define themselves as African American despite any visible blackness . As many recent studies have shown, the fundamental issue at stake 170 Hagar’s Beautiful Daughters 171 here is that of race itself, including whiteness as a supposedly superior and unquestionable category. To challenge the boundaries of race, as people of mixed-race origin usually do, includes contesting the established nature of progress, civilization, manhood, and virtue as privileges of the so-called dominant race or hegemonic group. The case of light-colored heroines who pass between the races, as is the case with the women in Hagar’s Daughter, is an especially good example of what Mary V. Dearborn writes about in Pocahontas ’s Daughters: “Miscegenation, or intermarriage, functions in the American cultural imagination and in ethnic fiction as a locus for the ambivalence of author and readers to questions of gender, ethnicity, inheritance, and identity ” (132). The subject of miscegenation and its result, the mulatto, attracts the ethnic woman writer because of its aptness and promise and because it allows her, as Dearborn says, “to explore her own ambivalence and that of her culture to female sexuality and ethnicity, to protest against the ways in which intermarriage has assumed oppressive meanings and has expressed an oppressive actuality, and to displace into fiction complex social and economic problems” (132–33). In the fiction of the pre–Harlem Renaissance period, the issue of voluntary, involuntary, temporary, or permanent passing takes up much fictional space. The exchange of babies and mistaken identities are the stock ingredients of this literature, beginning with William Wells Brown’s several treatments of the theme in the various versions of Clotel. The topic appeals to both black and white writers, as shown by the novels of Frances E. W. Harper, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Nella Larsen, Charles W. Chesnutt, Sutton E. Griggs, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Walter White, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, and William Dean Howells.2 Often they illustrate what Giulia Fabi calls the “profoundly different literary traditions” of novels of passing in African American and white-authored representations (Passing 3). Recently, Janet Gabler-Hover has presented a comprehensive analysis of Hagar’s Daughter in the context of a number of white-authored Hagar novels. The crossing of color lines has the power to arouse interest and public controversy. While it stirs fear in the white population about the colored son- or daughter-in-law who would bring disgrace and taint...