Reconstructing Motherhood: Pauline Hopkins' Contending Forces

RECONSTRUCTING MOTHERHOOD: PAULINE HOPKINS' CONTENDING FORCES Allison Berg St. Mary's College of Maryland In his foreword to the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. names Phillis Wheatley the symbolic mother of the black female literary tradition and suggests that "all subsequent black writers have evolved in a matrilinear line of descent."1 The forty-volume Schomburg collection does much to flesh out this genealogy, for it includes several volumes offiction and nonfiction from the "woman's era," the period between 1890 and 1910 that saw an unprecedented flowering of African American women's writing .2 Contemporary black feminist critics have identified the political concerns motivating this generation of writers who, as Hazel Carby demonstrates, saw the novel as a "form of cultural and political intervention in the struggle for black liberation from oppression." Central to this struggle, Carby suggests, was the project of "reconstructing" womanhood , forblack women's public voice depended upon confronting and revising "dominant domestic ideologies and literary conventions ofwomanhood ."3 But how was black motherhood reconstructed in the fiction and feminism of the woman's era? Given the historical erasure of black mothers as speaking subjects, how could maternity be claimed as a site ofliterary intervention at the beginning ofthe twentieth century?4 Pauline Hopkins' Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North andSouth (1900) provides fertile ground for exploring such questions , for her "romance" functions in large part as a revisionary history of black motherhood; spanning from 1790 to 1900 and from Bermuda to Boston, Contending Forces juxtaposes the stories of slave mothers with those of early twentieth-century black mothers. While the novel's plot revolves as much around the reconciliation of a mother and her child as the union of star-crossed lovers, critics of Contending Forces have not examined in any detail its complicated representation ofmaternity .5 Yet Hopkins' ambivalent, and sometimes contradictory, portrayal ofmotherhood could contribute much to our understanding ofearly black women's writing about motherhood, from the vilification ofwhite mothers in Harriet Wilson's OurNig ( 1 859) to the valorization ofblack mothers in Frances E.W. Harper's Iola Leroy (1892).6 Contending Forces could 132Allison Berg serve, as well, as a benchmark for examining twentieth-century depictions of black maternity, for it reflects the contested meanings of black motherhood at the turn of the century, when white race theorists attributed the "degeneracy" ofthe black race to the maternal failings ofblack women, while black intellectuals lauded the mother's vital role in race progress. Hopkins' representation of maternity necessarily draws on ideologies ofwomanhood and motherhood current in the post-Reconstruction era: nineteenth-century, white notions ofTrue Womanhood, which emphasized piety, purity, and domesticity, as well as early twentieth-century definitions of the black "race mother," which echoed the tenets of True Womanhood to extol the virtuous mother's role in racial uplift.7 Yet as Hopkins shows, neither of these maternal ideals took into account the common experience of black mothers, who were victims of raciallymotivated sexual violence both before and after Emancipation. Her intervention in these ideologies thus involves not only telling the "real" story ofblack mothers (she claims that "incidents portrayed in the early chapters ofthe book actually occurred") but also interrogating contemporary racial and sexual discourses that contributed to black women's subjugation and limited their efficacy as mothers.8 After a brief summary of the novel's rather complicated plot and a preliminary analysis of one paradigmatic scene, I will examine the ways Contending Forces as a whole employs racialized constructions ofmaternity—ofwhite "true" mothers and black "race" mothers—even as it disrupts notions ofracial determinism and gender essentialism on which these constructions depended . While I will discuss separately Hopkins' engagement with racial and maternal ideologies, it is their inextricable connection that I particularly want to stress.9 Hopkins herself was clearly motivated by the related—yet often conflicting—imperatives of race and gender. As an editor of and frequent contributor to The ColoredAmerican Magazine, a periodical dedicated rather generically to the "uplift of the race everywhere," she was obviously invested in the goals of the racial uplift publishing industry, but the preface to Contending Forces suggests that...