Pauline E. Hopkins: A Literary Biography

Introduction

Introduction O n the first page of Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900), the portrait of a beautiful and dignified Pauline Hopkins (1859–1930), one of the two pictures available to us, is inscribed “Yours for humanity.” The author looks the reader directly into the eyes; her mien is serious, unsmiling, as was the custom of her time. The hat, decorated with ostrich feathers and a ribbon according to the fashion of her day, accentuates her stylish outfit, while her dark dress with the white collar that reaches up to her neck underlines the somberness and noble attitude. The reverse of this page of Contending Forces brings the reader right into the story. It is a picture, drawn by R. Emmett Owen, of the whipping scene from the book in which Grace Montfort lies on the ground in a puddle of blood with her back bare and marked by the lash, while one of her torturers looks down upon her, with one hand holding a whip and the other stuck in his waistband. His broad-brimmed black hat and his black leather boots emphasize his menacing attitude. The other man binds his whip into a hook, looking away from her as if wanting to demonstrate an utter negligence of the woman’s pain. The caption of the drawing reads, “He cut the ropes that bound her, and she sank upon the ground again.” The photograph of the author and the engraving placed next to each other accentuate a duality between the present and the past, the African American author in her full right and the light-colored woman deprived of all her rights, the author who looks at you and talks to you and the woman whose face is turned away, who is powerless and dominated by the two men. The two images symbolize the passage of time from slavery to Boston at the turn of the century. The title page—with the full title, names of the author and illustrator, and date and place of publication—bears an epigraph by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “The civility of no race can be perfect whilst another race is degraded.” Finally, the page preceding the table of contents bears a dedication: “To the Friends of Humanity Everywhere I offer this humble tribute written by one of a proscribed race.” By identifying herself as “one of 1 2 Introduction Pauline E. Hopkins in her feather hat on the first page of Contending Forces (1900), signed “Yours for humanity, Pauline E. Hopkins.” a proscribed race,” Hopkins clarifies her viewpoint right from the beginning. Her position is one of identification. She is one of the writers whose pen is, to use Anna Julia Cooper’s phrase, “dipped in the life blood of their own nation.” The literal flowing of blood from the woman’s wounds highlights the “distinctive American note” of this thrilling story (Voice from the South 175, 224). The creative writing of Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins is one of the most interesting rediscoveries of recent African American literary history. Virtually unknown for the better part of the twentieth century, Hopkins’s remarkable achievements merit the revaluation and revisionism that characterizes so much of recent literary studies. Prompted by a desire to recover, republish, and make available to readers and critics the lost texts of literary history, the contemporary critic will find a rewarding subject in Hopkins. The concerns of Hopkins were the contending forces she alluded to in the title of her first novel. The difficult transition of the African American population from the time of slavery through Reconstruction into the twentieth century, the old strife between the North and the South, the legacy of the past, and the growing materialism and imperialism of the United States at the turn of the twentieth century were Hopkins’s prime agenda. Her own fiction, journalism, historiography, and work as editor of the Colored American Magazine show Introduction 3 The title-page spread of Contending Forces (1900). The caption reads: “He cut the ropes that bound her, and she sank upon the ground again.” her to be passionately committed to righting the wrongs done to her race, investigating the past, and envisioning a better future. Much of her fiction has been republished in the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, under the general editorship of Henry Louis Gates Jr. In 1988 the Oxford...