Worldview and the Use of the Near White Heroine in Pauline Hopkins's Contending Forces

Abstract

I first became aware of Pauline Hopkins in 1976 while researching my dissertation, The Mulatto Woman as Major Female Character in Novels by Black Women: 1892-1937 (Lewis, 1981), in American Studies at the University of Iowa. I found a disturbing trend of the exclusive depiction of women of African descent in the works of Hopkins, Frances Ellen Harper, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Nella Larsen-a trend that can now include Harriet Wilson's (1859/1983) Our Nig. The most difficult times in my research were with the novels of Hopkins. None of her four works depict a dark-skinned African American major female character, although in her last novel, Of One Blood, she gives considerable significance to an Ethiopian queen, but she is not recognizably African (Hopkins, November 1903-January 1904). Harper (1892/1969), her older contemporary, had contrasted the near-White image of Iola Leroy with a minor character who is a recognizable full-blooded African woman of great beauty and dignity. Major female characters in Fauset's novels are never more than bronze colored, but she presents as many females who cannot pass for White as she does those who can. Larsen's (1929/1969) Passing is clearly concerned solely with the passing phenomenon, and of necessity, major female characters look White; the tensions in life of the heroine in Larsen's (1928) Quicksand are a result of her being a recognizable Black woman, albeit exotic, in predominantly White communities.