Whose will be done?: self-determination in Pauline Hopkins's Hagar's daughter

African American Review, Fall, 2005 by Susan Hays Bussey

Pauline Hopkins concludes her serialized novel Hagar's Daughter (1901-1902) with an unattributed quote from Longfellow: "A boy's will is the wind's will, / And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts" (284). Although this line repeats one character's earlier advice, it seems inappropriate--"A boy's will" emphasizes youthful male decisions at the close of a novel dominated by independent women. In fact, gender is of secondary importance in Hopkins's conclusion; her focus in this colophon lies not on the boy but on his "will." With her final line, Hopkins sacrifices gender specificity in order to point the reader towards her characters' greatest struggle: self-determination in a stratified society. "Will," with its multiple meanings and implications, appears on every level of this novel: slavery subverts the human will; women assert their will in marriage; a forged will undermines financial security; and ultimately, personal human choice is surrendered to the will of God. In this way, Hagar's Daughter exposes how self-determination suffers in a society dominated by legal, racial, religious, and sexual determinants. My concern with the societal anxiety underlying Hopkins's work does not preclude its role as a novel of and about race; Hagar's Daughter is an unapologetic example of anti-racist propaganda in which the protagonists offer a very real depiction of stigma and prejudice. Nevertheless, Hopkins's plot mechanism builds on a representation of American culture that is not strictly racial; her plot also actively participates in an ideological debate over descent and consent as deterministic forces.

Hagar's Daughter is not Hopkins's first novel to address these issues. In Reconstructing Womanhood, Hazel V. Carby describes all of Hopkins's novels as "fictional histories," in which "the actions and destinies of ... characters were carefully related to the condition and actions of their ancestors" (128). Perhaps the best known of these "fictional histories" is Hopkins's novel Contending Forces (1900), which has been called a "manifesto on the value of fiction to social activism in black America" (Tate 170). Hopkins's first novel foregrounds her role as didactic author opposed to racist and segregationist policies, although that didacticism also serves to create somewhat simplistic formulas for the fates of the characters in Contending Forces. By allowing certain figures to embody types and paradigms, Hopkins creates a "fictional history" wherein individual outcomes are inevitable, fated by inheritance from the past. For example, the mixed-race antagonist Langley repeats the wrongs of his white paternal ancestors while showing no inheritance from his black maternal background. In this way, Contending Forces offers an uncomplicated but also unrealistic depiction of hereditary determinism even while it attempts to challenge the tenets of social Darwinism. (1)

Like a number of notable novels written at the turn of the century, both Contending Forces and Hagar's Daughter feature a racial discovery plot involving characters who learn of their racial heritages unexpectedly and reveal them to others unwillingly. (2) Unlike Contending Forces, Hagar's Daughter calls into question the extent to which hereditary determinism allows characters to exercise limited control over their biologically determined identities. Furthermore, in the later novel, the consequences of racial discovery are ultimately social, rather than political or even legal--characters lose their social status along with their singular racial identity. Hagar's Daughter unquestionably fits within Hopkins's didactic oeuvre, but the implications of social status in Hagar's Daughter broaden out from any indictment of racial prejudice. While Hagar's Daughter questions some racial stereotypes, it sometimes reinforces them rather than contradicts them. For example, Hopkins follows a direct authorial address at the end of Hagar's Daughter with a more provocative ventriloquistic conclusion: a black woman character quoting a mainstream white male poet. Furthermore, Hopkins relegates her dark-skinned characters to minor roles, then objectifies them in such stereotypes as the simple-minded old mammy and the rebellious young buck. (3) These depictions are double-edged, sometimes subversive and sometimes complicit, but the Black characters are nonetheless eclipsed by mixed-race protagonists.

In the "fictional history" of Hagar's Daughter, most of the major characters are identified (at one time or another) as white; the relations Hopkins presents in most detail are those within the white race, presumed or otherwise. Once the novel's history progresses past Emancipation, the legal and political boundaries between those who are white and those who merely appear to be white, vanish. (4) I will demonstrate how Hopkins conflates race and class in order to interrogate a range of social prejudices and restrictions. The separation of spouses, lovers, and parents extends beyond basic legal definitions of race: the force that ultimately separates them originates from a change in social, not racial, status.