Pauline Hopkins and Psychologies of Race

Abstract

Over the last decade, scholars of American cultural studies have taken as one of its central tasks identification of the ways in which Anglo-American writing is bound up in the African American tradition against which it had historically tended to distinguish itself. This project has involved, on the one hand, deconstructing distinctions between Afro-American and Anglo-American literary traditions and, on the other, affirming the distinctiveness of an Afro-American literary tradition by reclaiming lesser-known African American literary texts, such as Pauline Hopkins'sOf One Blood; Or, The Hidden Self. Indeed, the wealth of recent critical analyses of Pauline Hopkins's now almost canonical 1902 serial novel has engaged these two distinct lines of inquiry. By using the second half of her title as a way of understanding the first — that is, by assessing how William James's popular 1892 essay forScribner's Monthly, entitled “The Hidden Self,” operates as an organizing principle for Hopkins's fictional account of bloodlines — scholars have charted a series of interconnections between Afro-American and Anglo-American traditions even as they have made a case for the value of Hopkins's sensation novel. Familiar with James's contention that there is a “hidden self” within the individual, Hopkins, in these accounts, appropriates James's term to express the social condition of the African American after Reconstruction. Just as James's student, W. E. B. DuBois, declares in an 1897 essay for theAtlantic Monthlythat the African American experiences an inevitable “double-consciousness” proceeding from “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body,” so too does Pauline Hopkins, in these accounts, use James's description of a “consciousness split into parts which coexist” as a way of expressing the psychosocial condition of late-19th-century African Americans.