The Wind of Words: Plagiarism and Intertextuality in Of One Blood

A mood come alive. Words walking without masters;walking altogether like harmony in a song.

—Zora Neale Hurston

In “The Haunted Voice,” a short story published in Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly in 1884, something strange happens as Lady Beatrice, whose spurned lover has recently committed suicide, entertains her guests with a song:

Scarcely was the second stanza commenced ere every person in the room started suddenly and listened with more eager interest than ever. As the air proceeded, some grew visibly pale, and, not daring to breathe a syllable, looked horrified into each other’s faces. The ladies trembled and grasped one another’s hands.

“Great Heaven!” whispered Lord Arthur, white as marble, “do you not hear another voice beside my wife’s?”

It was true, indeed. A weird baritone, vailed, as it were, rising and falling upon every wave of the soprano of Lady Beatrice, and reaching the ear apparently from some strange distance …

“I shall at last lie down by thee,” she sang, her voice dropping sweet and low, the haunting echo following it, and, at the closing word, she fell back in a dead faint.¹

A similar interruption, this time from the distant cries of a doomed ship’s crew, mingling with and briefly rising above the howling of a coastal storm, occurs in Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch’s Dead Man’s Rock (1887):

“Oh, God! there it is again! listen! listen!”

This time I heard—heard clearly and unmistakably, and, hearing, felt the blood in my veins turn to very ice.

Shrill and distinct above the roar of the storm, which at the moment had somewhat lulled, there rose a prolonged wail, or rather shriek, as of many human voices rising slowly in one passionate appeal to the mercy of Heaven, and dying away in sobbing, shuddering despair.²

And in Emma Hardinge Britten’s The Wildfire Club (1861), a dying singer is ushered out of this world by phantom orchestral music, accompanied by the chanting of invisible singers, which builds to a storm-like intensity:

At first, in low and wailing notes it stole, like the lament of some unquiet spirit, throughout the castle halls. But louder still it grew, now swelling, pealing through arch and corridor in mighty diapason, until the very tones of different instruments seemed to ring out, as from a vast orchestra … Louder, and yet more loud, the music swells to thunder! The unseen mass must be the disembodied souls of every age since Time began his course, so vast the rush and strong the footfalls sound. And now the chant of thousand, thousand voices swelling, in rich, majestic choral tones, joins in the thundering crash.³

All three passages play a significant role in Pauline Hopkins’s magazine novel Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self (1902–3). The first passage underlies the account of the party at which Dianthe Lusk re-exposes her musical talent and recovers her memory; the second passage forms the basis of the scene in which Reuel Briggs and Charlie Vance, in a tent in Ethiopia, hear Charlie’s sister Molly drowning in Massachusetts; the third passage is transformed into the “welcome of ancient Ethiopia” to Dianthe, the “dying daughter of the royal line.”⁴ And they are not alone. At least seventy-two passages, amounting to 18 percent of the novel as a whole, are more or less transcribed, without attribution, from other texts. Here are the passages, each identified by a phrase near its beginning that retrieves its source when searched online (see appendix for full bibliographic information):

Chapter 1

a phrase of mere dismissal (James 361): 16 words

No one could fail to notice the vast breadth (F. Crawford 710–11): 32 words

eyes, deep and earnest—terribly earnest (Campbell 44): 15 words

I am not sure that it matters (Gaboriau 713): 20 words

Chapter 2

Stealing, rising, swelling, gathering (Quiller-Couch 255–56): 58 words

Chapter 3

only for those who have a mental affinity (James 362): 12 words

Chapter 4

The most marvellous thing to watch (Thornton...