Contending with Tennyson: Pauline Hopkins and the Victorian Presence in African American Literature

Abstract

Countering a long history of critical slights, this essay calls attention to the scale and complex, multifaceted nature of African American writers’ engagements with Victorian literature. Focusing primarily on the uses of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poetry at the turn of the twentieth century, I show that neither the ideological nor the literary historical implications of such engagements are monolithic or predictable. Taking Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces (1900) as my primary example, I argue that her many citations of Tennyson do not index her formal or social conservatism as might be expected, but instead reinforce the challenges her narrative poses to her society’s racial and sexual norms. Sometimes—especially with regard to race—this involves brushing Tennyson against the grain, but more often—with regard to sexuality—it means seizing on counternormative impulses already present within the poet’s oeuvre. No isolated instance, Hopkins’s use of Tennyson recalls and responds to that of her contemporaries Charles Chesnutt and Anna Julia Cooper. Through such dialogue and re-citation, engagements with Victorian literature contributed to the formation of a self-reflective African American literary tradition.