Rumors of Grace: white masculinity in Pauline Hopkins's contending forces

African American Review, Winter, 2003 by Beth McCoy

The violent rise of this twisted meritocracy seems to be at least part of he cautionary "information" that Hopkins wishes her first readers to contemplate. Of course, the technological abilities and meritocratic drives that Davis and Sampson display were not possessed solely by white men, nor would such abilities and drives lead always to holocaust.

Nevertheless, Hopkins contends, they were qualities that would later--not least in the early twentieth century during which Hopkins wrote--become dangerously effective at terrorizing and thwarting, at least temporarily, black citizens' aspirations for a better life. Though Davis and Sampson vanish from the narrative, the effects of their theory and practice entangle the rest of the novel's plot. Even as Pollock apparently wins victory (he leaves with Grace, her children, and her sister/slave Lucy), the end of Contending Forces shows that his "line" fails. Later in the novel, John Langley, Pollock's son by Lucy, dies alone and penitent, having failed to replicate with light-complected Sappho Clark the violence of rumor that Sampson and Davis managed. Montfort's own children are resignified as "black" after Grace commits suicide, and, as the novel ends, the black sons and daughters of young Jesse achieve good character, financial justice, and domestic bliss, thus providing readers at last with the "pleasurable self-affirmation that reflected their racial and gender aspirations to live in a world where such stories were possible" (Tate 6). Demonstrating a critical ambivalence about democratization, Hopkins suggests, then, that Davis's and Sampson's technologized, discursive violenCe appears to represent a form of white masculine power posing grave consequences for black people (and, indeed, all humanity) in the twentieth century.