Reconstructing Motherhood: Pauline Hopkins' Contending Forces

Abstract

In his foreword to the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. names Phillis Wheatley the symbolic mother of the black female literary tradition and suggests that all subsequent black writers have evolved in a matrilinear line of descent.(1) The forty-volume Schomburg collection does much to flesh out this genealogy, for it includes several volumes of fiction and nonfiction from the era, the period between 1890 and 1910 that saw an unprecedented flowering of African American women's writing.(2) Contemporary black feminist critics have identified the political concerns motivating this generation of writers who, as Hazel Carby demonstrates, saw the novel as a form of cultural and political intervention in the struggle for black liberation from oppression. Central to this struggle, Carby suggests, was the project of reconstructing womanhood, for black women's public voice depended upon confronting and revising dominant domestic ideologies and literary conventions of womanhood.(3) But how was black motherhood reconstructed in the fiction and feminism of the woman's era? Given the historical erasure of black mothers as speaking subjects, how could maternity be claimed as a site of literary intervention at the beginning of the twentieth century?(4) Pauline Hopkins' Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900) provides fertile ground for exploring such questions, for her romance functions in large part as a revisionary history of black motherhood; spanning from 1790 to 1900 and from Bermuda to Boston, Contending Forces juxtaposes the stories of slave mothers with those of early twentieth-century black mothers. While the novel's plot revolves as much around the reconciliation of a mother and her child as the union of star-crossed lovers, critics of Contending Forces have not examined in any detail its complicated representation of maternity.(5) Yet Hopkins' ambivalent, and sometimes contradictory, portrayal of motherhood could contribute much to our understanding of early black women's writing about motherhood, from the vilification of white mothers in Harriet Wilson's Our Nig (1859) to the valorization of black mothers in Frances E.W. Harper's Iola Leroy (1892).(6) Contending Forces could serve, as well, as a benchmark for examining twentieth-century depictions of black maternity, for it reflects the contested meanings of black motherhood at the turn of the century, when white theorists attributed the degeneracy of the black to the maternal failings of black women, while black intellectuals lauded the mother's vital role in progress. Hopkins' representation of maternity necessarily draws on ideologies of womanhood and motherhood current in the post-Reconstruction era: nineteenth-century, white notions of True Womanhood, which emphasized piety, purity, and domesticity, as well as early twentieth-century definitions of the black mother, which echoed the tenets of True Womanhood to extol the virtuous mother's role in racial uplift.(7) Yet as Hopkins shows, neither of these maternal ideals took into account the common experience of black mothers, who were victims of racially-motivated sexual violence both before and after Emancipation. Her intervention in these ideologies thus involves not only telling the real story of black mothers (she claims that incidents portrayed in the early chapters of the book actually occurred) but also interrogating contemporary racial and sexual discourses that contributed to black women's subjugation and limited their efficacy as mothers.(8) After a brief summary of the novel's rather complicated plot and a preliminary analysis of one paradigmatic scene, I will examine the ways Contending Forces as a whole employs racialized constructions of maternity--of white true mothers and black race mothers--even as it disrupts notions of racial determinism and gender essentialism on which these constructions depended. …