"Bonds of Brotherhood": Pauline Hopkins and the Work of Melodrama

The house was filled with the cries and groans of the audience, sobs shook the women, while the men drank in the words of the speaker with darkening brows and hands which involuntarily clinched themselves in sympathy with his words.

. . .

As the speaker stood silently contemplating his weeping, grief-convulsed audience, a woman was borne from the auditorium in a fainting condition. John Langley from his seat on the platform leaned over and asked an usher who the lady was. “Miss Sappho Clark,” was his reply.

Amid universal silence, the silence which comes from feeling too deep for outward expression, the speaker concluded. ¹

At a pivotal moment in Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces, the heroine of the novel, Sappho Clark, falls prostrate into public life. The moment is brief, but exemplary of a central ambivalence in the text and of the problems and provocations that Hopkins has presented to contemporary readers. On one hand, the recent rediscovery of Hopkins and her contemporaries, inspired by the archival work of scholars like Hazel Carby and Claudia Tate and by the Schomburg Library’s republication series, has valued Hopkins for her work as a committed activist. As Carby puts it, “Pauline Hopkins was a black intellectual whose writing was part of, not separate from, the politics of oppression,” and her work aimed “to stimulate political resistance” and a “cathartic response” to white racism in her black audience. In this sense, Hopkins has seemed a worthy model of not only the engaged writer, but the activist New Woman of the turn of the century. On the other hand, it’s not always clear just what work the women in her novels might be said to perform. Sappho of Contending Forces is certainly an independent professional, whose commitment to civic issues makes her seem like Hopkins’s “political mouthpiece.” ² She attends church meetings and fairs, visits hospitals and homes for the aged, and takes part in a sewing circle—all as part of an explicit project for “racial development”(CF, 145). But, her arguments remain confined to these vaguely domestic spaces and concern the retention of suffrage for black men, who turn out to be the book’s significant political actors. Contending Forces has come in, then, for hesitant endorsement from contemporary critics: it is frequently praised for being an impassioned account of the history of racial and sexual violence in the nineteenth-century United States, but the same readers also often lament the novel’s sentimentality and its inability to imagine a black feminism worthy of the name. ³

When they are looking for a feature of Hopkins’s work on which to concentrate their ambivalence, such readers inevitably point to the sentimental or melodramatic underpinnings of the narrative, and they often suggest that the patterns of Hopkins’s novels exemplify the limits of her thought or, better yet, that these structures themselves constituted a check on the writer’s development as a social thinker. The very forms of melodrama, they imply, inscribed the constraints of racism and sexism that Hopkins otherwise sought to resist. The strongest form of this claim is probably Richard Yarborough’s contention that, out of the “desire to appeal to the minds and especially the hearts of white readers, many nineteenth-century Afro-American novelists adopted the sentimental romance as the most effective literary vehicle for conveying their urgent message.” ⁴ But, even critics who don’t see Hopkins’s stories as merely the product of a desire to pander to white audiences—who attempt to discover the particular authority that melodramatic narrative had for Hopkins and her peers—tend to describe the novels in similar ways. Thus, the title of Claudia Tate’s study of turn-of-the-century African-American women’s novels—”domestic allegories of political desire”—implies, as Yarborough does, that sentimental marriage plots were but the private language in which writers like Hopkins encoded the more important public and political concerns that inspired them. Carla Peterson similarly points out that Contending Forces’s concluding “marriage and family reunion strike many of today’s readers as an evasion...