Reading/Photographs: Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins's Four Girls at Cottage City, Victoria Earle Matthews, and The Woman's Era

Abstract

Once exposed as a fraud ... you can never regain your legitimacy. For the violated criterion of legitimacy implicitly presumes an absolute incompatibility between the person you appeared to be and the person you are now revealed to be. Adrian Piper, for White, Passing for What, in fact, does it mean to rely on evidence when discussing blackness? Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent This essay focuses on late-nineteenth-century photography, and reform, as well as on re-forming contemporary interpretative practices that frame visual, racial, and historical evidence. Here I address the ways in which reading race and assimilating iconographic representation became increasingly central to late-nineteenth-century reading culture, bringing into view the emphasis on interpretation that is posed as critical to women's development. In her 1864 essay, Originality of Ideas, Julia C. Collins counsels female of the African American newspaper the Christian Recorder to sharpen their analytical skills, averring, It is good to read, but better to think. It is best to spend only half that time in reading, she exhorts, and advises her to use the remaining time in interpretative practice (127). (1) Collins anticipates the advice of subsequent Black thinkers, such as Anna Julia Cooper and Victoria Earle Matthews, and reflects the counsel expressed in the columns of the Woman's Era, the official news organ of the Black women's club movement. (2) As I will explore here, these principles are in nearly perfect alignment with those undergirding female development in Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins's novel Four Girls at Cottage City. The novel takes up the mutually constitutive relation between women's development and reform in ways that mirror the arc described in the pages of the Woman's Era and that are expressed throughout the Black clubwomen's movement. I frame this essay with a consideration of the twists and turns in Kelley-Hawkins's taxonomic history and with an examination of the politics of her recent reclassification as a white woman writer after decades of being categorized as Black. Through my critical lens, the recent discovery does not illustrate historical and interpretative mistakes African American(ist) archivists and critics have made; rather, it illuminates how Kelley-Hawkins is embedded in a cultural and iconographic archive that speaks to the multiple, conflicting, and multivalent investments in reading individual bodies and texts in relationship to sociocultural bodies of racial knowledge. I close by examining Four Girls and its lead heroine, Vera Earle, in the context of the contemporaneous prominence of journalist and activist Victoria Earle (Matthews) and what I call the photographic bylines in the Woman's Era. Frances E. W. Harper's choice of her heroine's name in Iola Leroy recalls Ida B. Wells's pen name, an echo that supports Frances Smith Foster's assertion that Harper was careful to select figures who were familiar to and instructive for the greatest number of readers (141). (3) Kelley-Hawkins's Vera Earle and Victoria Earle share closely coupled homonymic and phenotypic features. Additionally, in relation to many of the values Four Girls espouses, Vera Earle serves as a double of Victoria Earle, the journalistic name Matthews used. The connections between Vera Earle and Victoria Earle likewise augment the emphasis in Four Girls on education, and club work and further connect the novel to a broader overlapping circle of Black literary and political exchange. In this--and in its new--context, Vera Earle familiarly repeats the ways Iola functions as a narratively budding character planted in ground tended by an accomplished and actual writer, thinker, and activist. This histotextual link simultaneously re- and de-familiarizes readers' social understanding of cross-racial tropes, conjoinings, and cultural exchanges. (4) In the recent and broad publicity about Kelley-Hawkins's identity, her case has often been covered much as one might handle a nineteenth-century topsy-turvy doll: (5) flip her upside down, and the Black doll becomes white. …