"Raising the Stigma": Black Womanhood and the Marked Body in Pauline Hopkins's Contending Forces

College Literature, Spring 2004 by Putzi, Jennifer

In the Preface to her novel, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900), Pauline Hopkins claims that she writes in order to "raise the stigma of degradation from [her] race" (1988, 13). The use of the word "stigma" here in Hopkins s declaration of her commitment to racial uplift is anything but incidental. The physical stigmata of slavery-the result of brutal abuse and debilitating labor-were frequently used to attract support for the abolitionist cause in antebellum America, but also, paradoxically, to support racist beliefs about the physical, mental, and emotional inferiority of blacks to whites.1 The slave marked with scars could be seen as a victim in need of assistance, but very rarely a man or woman capable of agency. As Frederick Douglass explained, "human nature is so constituted that it cannot honor a helpless man, although it can pity him; and even that it cannot do long, if the signs of power do not arise" (Patterson 1982, 13). Scars or brands evoked pity but were rarely seen as marks of power. Therefore these stigmata could be seen in the post-emancipation era as representing the "degradation" of slavery and somehow shameful.

At first glance, then, Hopkins's intention seems to be to remove the stigma, the mark of shame, from the collective flesh of her race. Yet in "raising the stigma" it is possible that she also recalls it for her late nineteenth-century readers, forcing them to confront the marked black body and its legacy; in doing so, she negates the shame associated with such marks for African Americans and places the responsibility for the marked body on the white community. It is only by "raising the stigma" in both of these ways, however paradoxical that might seem, that the mark can be redeemed and African Americans empowered.

Hopkins is particularly interested in the relationship between African American women and the marked body. Indeed, throughout the first chapters of Contending Forces, Hopkins looks to history to explore black women's embodied subjectivity; she then returns to the contemporary period to examine the ways in which black women in the post-Reconstruction years deal with this legacy.Yet Hopkins does not, as so many critics have claimed, focus solely on rape and its impact on black women, although this issue is, in fact, central to Contending Forces? Rather, Hopkins anticipates Hortense Spillers's argument about the importance of physical violence as well as sexual violence in the history of the black female slave. In her article, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," Spillers notes the failure of many critics to recognize that the female slave "is not only the target of rape-in one sense, an interiorized violation of body and mind-but also the topic of specifically externalized acts of torture and prostration that we imagine as the peculiar province of male brutality and torture inflicted by other males." She goes on to claim that such scenes emphasize the fact that black "female flesh" is "unprotected" within the institution of slavery, and ultimately then "ungendered" by the violence inherent to the institution (1987, 68).

In this essay, I trace Hopkins's effort to "raise the stigma" by raising the issue of the black female body in terms consistent with and in anticipation of Spillers's theory about physical violence. Using the rhetoric of the stigma, or the marked body, Hopkins considers the intertwined but distinctly different natures of physical and sexual violence in Contending Forces, ultimately arguing that both contribute to black women's embodied subjectivity. In doing so, she radically critiques and revises the portrayal of the black woman in abolitionist fiction, making embodiment, rather than transcendence of the body, key to African American survival. Ultimately, I argue, by using the rhetoric of Christianity, Hopkins transforms her heroine, Sappho Clark, into a magnificent female Christ-figure who bridges the corporeal and the spiritual, rather than transcending one for the other.

The "Unprotected Flesh" of the Female Slave

In order to make this argument, I will begin where Hopkins herself does-with the black woman's experience of violence and slavery in the antebellum period. In "Doers of the Word": African American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830-1880), Carla L. Peterson notes the conceptualization of the nineteenth-century black woman in bodily terms, "in contrast to middle-class white women whose femininity, as defined by the cult of true womanhood, cohered around notions of the self-effacing body.""[T]he black woman's body," Peterson insists, "was always envisioned as public and exposed" (1995, 20). Denied the protection of home and family, as well as the culturally condoned femininity of their white counterparts, black women were perceived solely as laboring bodies, available for public use and public viewing. This perception facilitated the enslavement and exploitation of black women. It also made the abuse of female slaves acceptable in that a public, laboring body was the antithesis of white womanhood and was not, therefore, considered a gendered body.