The Unruly Voice: Rediscovering Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins.

John Cullen Gruesser, ed. Champaign: U of Illinois P, 1996. 248 pp. $39.95 cloth/$16.95 paper.

Emory University

Oxford University Press's republishing of Pauline Hopkins's works has helped to sustain the already growing critical rediscovery of this prolific writer. Continuing this effort, John Cullen Gruesser offers the first collection of essays devoted entirely to her works. The Unruly Voice: Rediscovering Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins explores two central questions: Who was Pauline Hopkins, and what significance does this black woman writer have for contemporary scholars? The book includes seven essays, enclosed by Nellie McKay's largely biographical introduction and an afterward by Elizabeth Ammons.

The collection offers a wide range of interpretive strategies, with studies ranging from consideration of "racial pornography" to "new psychology." While such a diversity of methodological approaches and interpretative strategies might suggest a loosely connected work, the result is quite the opposite. The essays are well-suited to achieving the book's comprehensive goal of exploring the life and works of this editor, playwright, orator, novelist, journalist, short story writer, and biographer.

The collection offers fresh perspectives that contextualize Hopkins's works within a political, historical, and social framework. Among the essays, Kristina Brooks's "Mammies, Bucks, and Wenches: Minstrelsy, Racial Pornography, and Racial Politics in Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood" typifies the collection's exploration of how Hopkins's works intersect with her world. Framing her discussion of minstrelsy with an historical examination of how black and white audiences viewed minstrels, Brooks demonstrates Hopkins's use of both the ridicule and irony of the minstrel figure, "whose effect depends upon readers' (sometimes simultaneous) responses of distancing and or identification." In addition, she argues that the basic tenets of sexual pornography, objectification, and the hierarchical relation between the viewer and the viewed object are present in representations of blacks that Hopkins evokes. Notably, Brooks suspends judgments of representations as good or bad and opts to focus on the pleasure between subject and object.

The effectiveness of black women writers' use of the sentimental form as a literary and political vehicle has been a topic of debate among critics, with some dismissing these writers and others insisting on their veiled political voices. This volume continues to explore these issues with essays by Kate McCullough and Lois Lamphere, who probe Hopkins's use of the sentimental form in relation to cultural representation in Contending Forces. McCullough argues that Hopkins creates a new model of African-American womanhood by rejecting the white, passionless archetype of true womanhood that characterizes most sentimental fiction, and eliminating the stereotype of the lascivious black woman, to create a space for a new virtue that does not meet conventional white standards. Lois Lamphere Brown argues that, through both the female and male narrative, Hopkins modifies conventional codes of race and sexuality. According to Brown, Hopkins modifies the sentimental form by allowing race and gender to become pliable entities. Both arguments offer thoughtful readings of Hopkins's sexually redeemed heroine and carefully consider the cultural implications of such a character.

For those interested in Hopkins's works that have received little attention, C. K. Doreski's "Inherited Rhetoric and Authentic History: Pauline Hopkins at the Colored American Magazine" fills a much needed void in scholarship on Hopkins. Doreski explores Hopkins as a biographer, concluding that, while Hopkins used the traditional elements of biography to chronicle the lives of African-American leaders, her intent was not to celebrate the individual, as traditional biography did, but to "celebrate an evolving sense of historical integrity and community."

Other essays in the volume build on the foundations that scholars such as Hazel Carby and Claudia Tare have laid in considering how Hopkins's works interface with politics, history, and cultural identity. Jennie Kassonoff's reading of Of One Blood argues that Hopkins's use of the term blood introduces the New Negro debate and its competing voices that considered the significance of amalgamation, black nationalism, genealogical origins, and gender difference. Cynthia Schrager also addresses identity issues, contending that William James's "new psychology" and its tenet of the "hidden-self" influenced Hopkins's portrayal of black and white identities in Of One Blood. In addition, Gruesser's essay examines Hopkins's rendition of the Creole Rebellion in "A Dash for Liberty," arguing that Hopkins uses the past to discuss black issues at the turn of the century.

While the collection raises a variety of issues, its overall intent to demonstrate the interplay between Hopkins's works and her social, political, and historical concerns unifies this much needed book. The seven essays are previously unpublished and all by a new generation of critics that lends fresh insights as well as interpretations that expand on earlier scholarship. But as McKay points out in her introduction, much is left to be said about Hopkins. There are still major gaps in her biography that need to be filled if we ever hope fully to reclaim this writer. This volume of essays certainly takes a step in that direction and is sure to spark additional scholarship on Hopkins.