Appropriating Tropes of Womanhood and Literary Passing in Pauline Hopkins's Hagar's Daughter

In 1902 Pauline Hopkins published her first serial novel, Hagar's Daughter, in the Colored American Magazine. Eighteen years earlier, a story titled "Two Women" by Fanny Driscoll, a now-forgotten white author, appeared in Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly. Hopkins would import nearly 80% of "Two Women" into her novel, including character profiles, narrative commentary, and romantic plotline. Unlike the novel's better-known source texts, such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Maud (1855) or William Wells Brown's Clotel (1853), Hopkins's readers were unlikely to recognize Driscoll's "Two Women," a little-known work of popular fiction that blends seamlessly with Hopkins's own writing. Thus, while earlier critical approaches to Hopkins's intertextual practice emphasized her incorporation of canonical texts whose cultural authority she could coopt to support her radical racial politics, this essay examines Hopkins's appropriation and reformulation of Driscoll's text as a unique confrontation with the tropes of sentimental womanhood central to white and black women's writing at the turn of the century.¹ What emerges is Hopkins's indictment of the very conventionality of such tropes, for the way they invariably yoke black women to allegories of US progress or stagnation. By explicitly racializing Driscoll's socially progressive but colorblind romantic formula, Hopkins highlights the problematic symbolic links that it establishes between two figures allegedly incapable of virtue—the implicitly white femme fatale and the mixed-race woman. In doing so, Hopkins exposes how deeply racist discourses are embedded in sentimental tropes of womanhood, even when the tropes themselves are under assault.

"Two Women" parodies the sentimental stereotypes of the "true woman" and the femme fatale to critique the restrictive notions of female identity they authorize. Driscoll dedicates a sizeable portion of her brief narrative to an accumulation of binary descriptors linking her true woman, Mignon, to white lilies, angelic frailty, and pious, maternal influence, and her femme fatale, June, to tropical blooms, startling beauty, and a dangerously irresistible allure. Both women vie for the weak-willed Don Eastern, but June finally triumphs after Mignon's cliche sentimental death of a broken heart and a fever. The story endorses the morally tainted but self-governing femme fatale rather than the impossibly pure and frail true woman. Driscoll's flouting of sentimental gender conventions seems progressive, but her racial privilege as a white woman writer obviates a confrontation with the racist assumption that the femme fatale's unrestrained passion derives from her exotic, tropical origins. Driscoll's uncritical harnessing of these tropes in service of a budding feminist agenda thus betrays how deeply ideologies of race permeated the white sentimental imagination.

Hopkins's appropriation and adaptation of Driscoll's romance denaturalizes and recalibrates tropes of white and black womanhood as moral barometers of American liberalism in two ways. First, Hopkins resituates Driscoll's self-contained romantic triangle and dichotomous-heroines trope within the sociopolitical context of slavery and opens the novel with a plotline and genealogy that exposes the trope's racist subtext. Secondly, Hopkins transforms Driscoll's two, white romantic rivals—Mignon and June—into the mixed-race heroines, Jewel and Aurelia, to expose American racism—rather than sentimental standards of female virtue—as the true index of national character and the limits of its progress after Reconstruction.

Through the tragic fate of the "refined, cultured" Hagar, Hopkins explicitly links the unjust racial dichotomization of female virtue with the hypocrisy of a government supposedly grounded in Christian morality and democratic, egalitarian principles. The catalyst for her downfall is the revelation of her mixed-race status, which rocks her blissful marriage to Ellis Enson, a white plantation owner. Here Hopkins establishes precisely what is at stake in representations of white and black womanhood:

[T]he one drop of black blood neutralized all her virtues, and she became … an unclean thing. Can anything more unjust be imagined in a republican form of government whose excuse for existence is the upbuilding of mankind!

(Hopkins 62)

Ellis's suspicious death leaves Hagar and her infant daughter in the clutches of a...