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

African American Review, Winter, 2003 by Beth McCoy

   Suddenly an evil smile lighted up his
   countenance. Now was his time. This
   woman's husband had flogged him--he
   would have a sweet revenge. Those
   lily-like limbs, the tender flesh that had
   never known aught but the touch of
   love, should feel the lash as he had. (67-68)

Hopkins emphasizes this last phrase herself, signaling it as something more than merely the petulant sentiments of an individual who feels he has been wronged intolerably. For what Davis constructs here is a complicated equation encompassing revenge, democracy, and inequality. From his point of view, the violent revenge he seeks to enjoy constitutes an intraracially democratizing act through which he may both claim the role of punishing agent and gain access to Grace, she who had been held heretofore in reserve by both Montfort (as his wife) and Pollock (as the spoils of conquest). What may have been understood especially by Montfort and Pollock as a polarized contest solely between two white aristocratic antagonists (albeit featuring Sampson and Davis as bit players) is in this moment revealed as having become a polygonal contest among a larger, increasingly equivalent population of white men. At the same time, however, Davis's revenge, wreaked as it will be across the body of a woman now constructed as "black," is also an act that reinforces hierarchies of interracial inequality, hierarchies that Davis perceives to be endangered by the same forces (i.e., the decline of aristocratic efficacy) that make the longed-for intraracial democratization possible. And, indeed, as Davis and Sampson brutally bind and then whip Grace Montfort, they mark her body with whip-weals that might be understood as emblematizing the very crossroads between desire and resistance at which they stand.

For critics, understandably, the whipping itself is overdetermined, Carby, for instance, reads it as a metaphorically communicated rape, suggested especially by the rather phallic whip (132); in turn, Sawaya builds on this interpretation and factors in Davis as well, who, she asserts, "is also figured here as a vengeful slave . meting out revenge on the 'lily-like limbs' of a master" (87). And Lisa Marcus reads the flogging as an act of "writ[ing] race upon [Grace's] body as if it were a blank page" (124).

For me, however, what is most provocative about this wrenching, graphic scene is its close attention to the technological aspects of the men's attack--or, more precisely, its close attention to the men's pride in the technological aspects of their attack. After the first blow, for instance, Hopkins emphasizes that "Hank gazed at the cut with critical satisfaction, as he compared its depth with the skin and blood that encased the long tapering lash," while Sampson vows to "go [Davis] one better" and proceeds to "sight the distance and exact place to make his mark with mathematical precision" (69). Indisputably, the scene is brutal, gory, inhuman. But it is also profoundly methodological: Sampson and Davis wield the whip clinically, and they take a critical satisfaction in their method. This critical ability and precise, technological affinity are characteristics unlike any of those that either Montfort (drawn mostly in terms of faintly liberal na'ivete) or Pollock (sketched largely in terms of lusts and obsessions) possess. The fact that Davis and Sampson are able to lash crossroads into Grace's back constitutes Hopkins's most vivid imagining that, by 1800, the balance of power within white masculinity was already shifting as these up-and-coming white men brought something different from the old plantation violences to the table: an independent ability to disseminate narrative efficiently and publicly; a technologically enabled, methodological precision; and a keen drive to determine the competitive standards by which such precision night be measured as economically and politically advantageous merit.