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

African American Review, Winter, 2003 by Beth McCoy

Montfort's lack of critical acumen here is significant, for it serves to intensify Hopkins's implicit historical claim that, as the United States struggled openly at the beginning of the nineteenth century with desires to both preserve and dismantle the new nation's system of race and class privilege, Anglo and American aristocratic houses began to wane. The mutuality of this decline becomes evident as Montfort and Pollock witness each other's imminent fiscal, moral, and genealogical dissolution without being able consciously to register what is happening to them. As a prominent member of one of Newbern's oldest families, for instance, Pollock commands respect and money. Montfort's arrival, however, weakens that command, for not only does the Bermudan symbolize the abolitionist sentiments (however gradual) that would jeopardize the North Carolinian's way of life, but, in purchasing the ancestral Pollock homestead, he represents a more immediate threat, that of encroaching older money, higher status, and greater potential for establishing patrimonial lineage on Pollock's terrain. Hopkins emblematizes this complex threat in the scene in which Pollock watches young Jesse Montfort building little houses with his father's gold coin. "'Golden eagles given to a child to play with,'" Pollock muses enviously as Hopkins notes dryly that such a thing is "a little beyond" both Pollock's material means and his intellectual comprehension (49). In fact, dazzled by and envious of this carelessly used wealth that promises to unman him, Pollock overlooks Jesse's bleat of plaintive, ironic clairvoyance as the little boy's building efforts fail: "'See, papa, all my houses tumble down'" (48). Similarly blind, Montfort's own predilection for "ingenuousness" causes him to labor under the genteel delusion that no man is his enemy; thus even as he fails to understand the threat posed by Davis, he begins a friendship with Pollock, the man who has himself resolved to demolish him.

Each blind to the precariousness of the other's position, Montfort and Pollock also share what Hopkins articulates as a management strategy that, though it may once have been effective, was becoming increasingly unpredictable: Both aristocrats use gendered tactics not only to maintain white supremacy but also to preserve and mask differences within white masculinity. Struggling, for instance, to maintain his fragile rule over his lower-status white men even as he attempts to distance himself from their activity, Pollock attempts to feminize his cohorts. When Montfort nervously asks Pollock if he has heard the rumors of Grace "being of African descent," Pollock replies, " 'I have heard the rumors about Mrs. Montfort, but that is nothing--nothing but the malice of some malicious, jealous woman'" (52). Knowing quite well, of course, that the rumor's source is Sampson, Pollock reveals clearly his sentiments about the men to whom he gifts little luxuries and trinkets in order to have them do his dirty work. Ultimately, however, the joke is on Pollock. Rumor, as the narrator asserts two pages previously, may be "a lying jade" (itself a feminized epithet), but it is a lying jade that nevertheless carries substantial power to construct perceptions of material reality in ways that exceed those that Pollock's limited intelligence allows him to imagine. Within Hopkins's complex representation of this historical moment, Sampson and Davis respectively symbolize threats that the likes of Pollock and Montfort neither understand nor fear sufficiently. And well ought Montfort to be frightened, for the narrator reports that Davis reads Montfort's attack as "personal violence of a character that was most galling to the spirit of any free-born Southern man--an ordinary cowhiding, such as he would mete out to his slave" (58). What Davis understands to be a feminizing (and racializing) assault galvanizes him and causes the disenfranchised white man to grow "more and more filled with a desire for vengeance,--not the ordinary kind, but something extraordinary" (59). By the end of the fourth chapter, Davis's desire will come to fruition, and Grace will be there again at the physical exercise of his agency as she was there at its discursive inception.