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Winona,Manhood,andHeroism I n Hopkins’s fiction, the female protagonists correspond to the image of the beautiful heroines under duress who either must be rescued or rescue themselves through memorable deeds. The roles available to her male figures also correspond in part to accepted positions of heroes and villains, with race added to their noble or ignoble character traits. There is always an underlying argument about the validity of racial inheritance that puts black and white men at opposite ends of the scale of development. Often the test of manhood involves the position they take toward the woman of mixed blood. More than any other set of characters, the rivalry between dark-colored Judah and white Englishman Warren Maxwell in Winona reflects the debate surrounding the nature of manhood and heroism in a race-conscious environment. In essence, the description of them as opposite types of men highlights the differences underlying the rivalry between manly Will Smith and cowardly John Langley or between John Langley and accommodationist Arthur Lewis in Contending Forces, between Ellis and St. Clair Enson in Hagar’s Daughter, or between Charlie Vance and the servant Jim Titus in Of One Blood. There is no doubt who will win the love of the heroine or who will be rescued in the end. Reward is based on exceptional bravery, faithfulness, and manhood. The concept of manhood in the nineteenth century, as Gail Bederman has shown in Manliness and Civilization, was based on the Victorian middle-class ideals that “a man was self-reliant, strong, resolute, courageous, honest” (qtd. in Bederman 6). A real man would lay claim to a male body, male identity, and male power (10). When this claim was challenged through immigrants, working-class men, women, and nonwhite people, the familiar structure of power was endangered and had to be defended.1 While the intellectual heroism of Reuel Briggs is the subject of the next chapter, this part of Hopkins’s negotiations in gender treats the male characters in Winona, the white cast of male characters in Hagar’s Daughter, and 189 190 Negotiations in Literature Charlie Vance’s experiences in Africa. The concepts of manhood and heroism are called into question when they are at odds with racial identity. Hopkins’s third novel, Winona (1902), the only novel set exclusively before the Civil War, begins on an idyllic island in Lake Erie, near Buffalo on the Canadian border, a wilderness, untamed but not savage anymore: “The green world still in its primal existence in this forgotten spot brought back the golden period unknown to the world living now in anxiety and toil” (291). The happy family in this golden period consists of a white father of English descent, the mixed-race daughter, the adopted black son, and an old Indian woman as housekeeper. Elizabeth Ammons calls this family the trope for the truly human North American family: “multicultural, multiracial , anti-imperialist, unnational, antimaterialistic, environmentally attuned” (“Afterword” 214). The first sight the reader has of Judah, the young, courageous, and brave Negro who grew up as an Indian, is in a canoe rowing with Winona to their secluded island, surrounded by the primeval forest. The curly hair and dark skin color identify him as a Negro. His origin is rather odd. He is the son of a fugitive slave who died during her escape. He was then adopted by another fugitive slave who later married a white man, the rightful heir to a large English estate, who became known as “White Eagle,” an honorary Indian. Winona is the daughter of the white man and this light-colored fugitive slave. Both Judah and Winona are captured under the Fugitive Slave Act by Colonel Titus, the owner of a plantation in Kansas, and his overseer Bill Thomson. Judah’s mother was Bill Thomson’s property and Winona’s mother was Colonel Titus’s. After these two villains have killed “White Eagle,” they enslave Judah and Winona. Colonel Titus’s plantation is situated near Kansas City, and the year is 1856. The historical background is the debate over admitting Kansas as a slave state or free state. The border ruffians, here the gang of Colonel Titus’s overseer and his accomplice Bill Thomson, try to intimidate the antislavery settlers, who are supported by a militia led by the fanatic John Brown. In 1856 a gang of border ruffians rode into the antislavery town of Lawrence, Kansas, set it afire and killed several people. This...

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