Whose will be done?: self-determination in Pauline Hopkins's Hagar's daughter.

Pauline Hopkins concludes her serialized novel Hagar's Daughter (1901-1902) with an unattributed quote from Longfellow: "A boy's will is the wind's will, / And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts" (284). Although this line repeats one character's earlier advice, it seems inappropriate--"A boy's will" emphasizes youthful male decisions at the close of a novel dominated by independent women. In fact, gender is of secondary importance in Hopkins's conclusion; her focus in this colophon lies not on the boy but on his "will." With her final line, Hopkins sacrifices gender specificity in order to point the reader towards her characters' greatest struggle: self-determination in a stratified society. "Will," with its multiple meanings and implications, appears on every level of this novel: slavery subverts the human will; women assert their will in marriage; a forged will undermines financial security; and ultimately, personal human choice is surrendered to the will of God. In this way, Hagar's Daughter exposes how self-determination suffers in a society dominated by legal, racial, religious, and sexual determinants. My concern with the societal anxiety underlying Hopkins's work does not preclude its role as a novel of and about race; Hagar's Daughter is an unapologetic example of anti-racist propaganda in which the protagonists offer a very real depiction of stigma and prejudice. Nevertheless, Hopkins's plot mechanism builds on a representation of American culture that is not strictly racial; her plot also actively participates in an ideological debate over descent and consent as deterministic forces.

Hagar's Daughter is not Hopkins's first novel to address these issues. In Reconstructing Womanhood, Hazel V. Carby describes all of Hopkins's novels as "fictional histories," in which "the actions and destinies of ... characters were carefully related to the condition and actions of their ancestors" (128). Perhaps the best known of these "fictional histories" is Hopkins's novel Contending Forces (1900), which has been called a "manifesto on the value of fiction to social activism in black America" (Tate 170). Hopkins's first novel foregrounds her role as didactic author opposed to racist and segregationist policies, although that didacticism also serves to create somewhat simplistic formulas for the fates of the characters in Contending Forces. By allowing certain figures to embody types and paradigms, Hopkins creates a "fictional history" wherein individual outcomes are inevitable, fated by inheritance from the past. For example, the mixed-race antagonist Langley repeats the wrongs of his white paternal ancestors while showing no inheritance from his black maternal background. In this way, Contending Forces offers an uncomplicated but also unrealistic depiction of hereditary determinism even while it attempts to challenge the tenets of social Darwinism. (1)

Like a number of notable novels written at the turn of the century, both Contending Forces and Hagar's Daughter feature a racial discovery plot involving characters who learn of their racial heritages unexpectedly and reveal them to others unwillingly. (2) Unlike Contending Forces, Hagar's Daughter calls into question the extent to which hereditary determinism allows characters to exercise limited control over their biologically determined identities. Furthermore, in the later novel, the consequences of racial discovery are ultimately social, rather than political or even legal--characters lose their social status along with their singular racial identity. Hagar's Daughter unquestionably fits within Hopkins's didactic oeuvre, but the implications of social status in Hagar's Daughter broaden out from any indictment of racial prejudice. While Hagar's Daughter questions some racial stereotypes, it sometimes reinforces them rather than contradicts them. For example, Hopkins follows a direct authorial address at the end of Hagar's Daughter with a more provocative ventriloquistic conclusion: a black woman character quoting a mainstream white male poet. Furthermore, Hopkins relegates her dark-skinned characters to minor roles, then objectifies them in such stereotypes as the simple-minded old mammy and the rebellious young buck. (3) These depictions are double-edged, sometimes subversive and sometimes complicit, but the Black characters are nonetheless eclipsed by mixed-race protagonists.

In the "fictional history" of Hagar's Daughter, most of the major characters are identified (at one time or another) as white; the relations Hopkins presents in most detail are those within the white race, presumed or otherwise. Once the novel's history progresses past Emancipation, the legal and political boundaries between those who are white and those who merely appear to be white, vanish. (4) I will demonstrate how Hopkins conflates race and class in order to interrogate a range of social prejudices and restrictions. The separation of spouses, lovers, and parents extends beyond basic legal definitions of race: the force that ultimately separates them originates from a change in social, not racial, status.

This issue of status, acted out in the rise and fall of Hopkins's mixed-race characters, reflects the often-confused interaction of race and class in depictions of American society. Does skin color cause social status, or imply it? And do Hopkins's characters struggle as races, or over them? At the same time, these questions of status reiterate the historical contexts of the novel and its participation in a broader cultural exchange about heredity and individualism--the dichotomy between descent and consent, to use Werner Sollors's memorable terms. In Beyond Ethnicity, Sollors describes how descent and consent maintain a tension in American culture, and his terms prove particularly useful because they are both familiar and descriptive. He states: "The concepts of the self-made man and of Jim Crow had their origins in the same culture at about the same time, whereas aristocratic societies had no need for either. At the same time when consent language began to speak of the accident of one's birth, there were certain forms of descent that were considered to be of the greatest determining power. It was not the hereditary privilege of aristocratic blue blood but the culturally constructed supposed liability of black blood that mattered" (37). The American cultural double standard that makes African American ancestry more deterministic than white (that is, skin color doesn't matter as long as skin color is not black) has been discussed by a number of scholars. Sollors succinctly illustrates how that double standard coexists with another one: the contradiction between "rags-to-riches" expectations and actual economic and social prospects for most Americans. (5)

This tension, at its heart a familiar one of cliched nature versus nurture, cannot be separated from the rising popularity of the myth of the self-made man. (6) Contemporary attitudes toward the beneficence of progress depended on the existence of the autonomous individual--the representative or self-made man. As literary depictions underscore, the chief agent for the creation of this ideal individual was the idealized Victorian family; portrayals of domestic harmony legitimized the capitalist structure in which individuals succeed or fail based on personal morals, and not extrinsic circumstance. Popular sentimental novels of this period provide unlimited evidence of this standard, which authors like Hopkins disrupt by distorting the essential elements of domesticity. An idealized and sheltered depiction of family life becomes impossible under the shadow of uncertain racial origins--mixed-race characters threaten the social order by tainting paternity and thereby shake the foundations of the family unit that would be a shelter from corruption and society. By these standards, stories of racial uncertainty interrupt a tranquilized portrait of domestic life, since the mixed-race protagonist acts to undercut that faith by refusing to participate in the cultural myth of self-determination. (7)

I will discuss how Hagar's Daughter poses a threat to this cultural myth on several different levels. Hopkins stretches the definitions of domestic fiction for her own purposes of social protest in a way that suggests a self-made model for a domestic heroine. However, that heroine ultimately brings about her own downfall by participating in the pattern of disguise and false identity that dominates the society into which she has risen. In my attempts to make plain how deception becomes a tool of self-determination in Hagar's Daughter, I use a theory of resistance offered by the social historian and cultural theorist Michel de Certeau. In The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), de Certeau analyzes the ways individuals use the terms of their society to attain a place within that society, even when those terms are structurally oppressive. He states that the "modes of operation" within a culture reveal ways that the dominated members of that culture gain power. These modes of operation are the practices of everyday life named in de Certeau's title; he explains that their examination "concerns an operational logic whose models may go as far back as the age-old ruses of fishes and insects that disguise or transform themselves in order to survive, and which has in any case been concealed by the form of rationality currently dominant in Western culture" (xi). Put simply, de Certeau suggests that members of an underprivileged class in society--in this discussion, the class of mixed race--disguise themselves using the social techniques and behaviors (or, de Certeau's "tactics") of the more privileged members of society. These tactics help them to maintain a comfortable place in society, and in Hopkins's novel, these tactics also result in increased social status and financial gains.

Yet tactics are an act of consent--a method of self-determination--and therefore cannot effect self-determination in the social atmosphere of Hagar's Daughter. Instead, individual descent will dominate the characters' ultimate choices and fates; it will interfere with whatever self-determination was promised by an open and democratic society, and ultimately thwart their "tactics" for success. In telling this story, Hopkins figures identity as both defined by and defining of social position; Hagar's Daughter tells a story about race in which race is not simply race. Because the novel's already twisted plot becomes further complicated by characters' frequent use of aliases, any discussion requires a brief plot summary. Set in both antebellum and postbellum America, Hagar's Daughter begins with the story of Hagar, a beautiful young woman with a slightly mysterious past. She marries a neighboring plantation owner, Ellis Enson, and gives birth to his daughter. When Ellis's cruel and jealous brother St. Clair learns of the marriage (and his resulting disinheritance), he befriends a slave trader named Walker, who provides evidence that Hagar's parents in fact own her: she is their slave. St. Clair (seemingly) murders his brother Ellis and attempts to sell his sister-in-law and niece, but Hagar jumps off a bridge to escape.

The narrative picks up 20 years later, with several characters reappearing in disguise: the wicked St. Clair appears now as a senator named General Benson, while the trader Walker has become his sidekick, Major Madison. "Benson," Walker, and Walker's ingenue daughter Aurelia now run a gambling house and a confidence scheme in Washington, DC. The same racial discovery plot is played out again, this time with Jewel, the beautiful daughter of California Senator Bowen and stepdaughter to his second wife, Estelle. This time, the wealthy and aristocratic Cuthbert Sumner plans to marry Jewel, but St. Clair/Benson is a rival for her affections. When his advances are refused, St. Clair/Benson sets in motion a plot against Sumner that involves murdering a secretary, kidnapping Jewel, and forging the will of Senator Bowen after his sudden death. The innocent Sumner is put on trial for the murder, and testimony eventually reveals that Estelle is Hagar disguised, and Jewel is her actual daughter. Jewel's birth father, Ellis Enson, also surfaces as "Henson," the detective who helps to solve the case.

The plot machinations of Hagar's Daughter build on and distort the stereotype of the tragic mulatta in a way that deserves some recognition. While the very definition of a tragic mulatta has been subject to critical debate, literary historians recognize the figure as one that highlights the plight of mixed-race characters as particularly miserable and sympathetic due to the uncertainty and seeming arbitrariness of their place in society. (8) Hagar, like other African American and white heroines before her, feels despair when she learns of her twin heritage. However, Hopkins's heroine defies the options laid out for her by the tragic mulatta tradition: she does not commit suicide, like the women of William Wells Brown's Clotel, nor does she passively embrace her "new" racial identity as a paragon of social virtue, as done most famously by Frances Harper's Iola Leroy. Instead, having survived her symbolic leap into the Potomac, Hagar decides to pass--a moral and social decision that marks her as both defiant of "tragic" status and as an agent of self-determination.

The Manmade and the Made Man

From the page, Hopkins suggests that she will consider status to be inextricable from racial questions; she subtitles her novel A Story of Southern Caste Prejudice. The choice of "caste" as a designation of prejudice walks a fine line between the biological determinism of racial prejudices and the arbitrary nature of class distinctions. Hopkins's subtitle indicates that her story will consider both the inescapable nature of racial heritage and the social challenges of an open society. Building on this ambivalence, the first chapter of Hagar's Daughter quickly establishes a setting of the early days of the Civil War. By setting her story in the past, Hopkins introduces the topic of raced chattel slavery, but she also opens the door to an interpretation of the consequences of past events on her present day, 1901-02, when nostalgic representations of slaveholding were gaining currency. (9)

Using heavy-handed rhetoric, Hopkins's opening pages make clear that the historical aspects of the novel will be told from an at least partially romanticized point of view: "The proslavery Democracy was drunk with rage at the prospect of losing control of the situation, which, up to that time, had needed scarcely an effort to bind in riveted chains impenetrable alike to the power of man or the frowns of the Godhead" (3). The complicated syntax glosses over the fact that Hopkins fails to name the actual object bound in "impenetrable chains." Despite the fact that her novel was appearing serially in an African American magazine, its perspective is in fact more "northern" than African American. This regionalized viewpoint becomes particularly clear in the overly generous statement that, although proslavery sentiment could be found in the North as well as in the South, this proslavery acceptance was "due more to the long-accustomed subservience of Northern people to the slaveholders than to a real, personal hatred of the Negro" (3). As a lifelong resident of Boston, Hopkins could not have been oblivious to pervasive racism in the northern states; she here establishes a narrative voice and an assumed audience, more forgiving than realistic.

Hagar's Daughter may begin with a forgiving attitude toward the society of the North, but the novel quickly establishes that some individual characters will prove unworthy of forgiveness. Hopkins pairs several key characters in contrast, highlighting her concern with consent and descent as means of social and financial success. By assigning these individuals vastly different moral codes and fates, the novel questions the self-made man as a reliable type in US society. For example, the slave trader Walker receives the first detailed character description: "Uncouth, ill-bred, nard-hearted, illiterate, Walker had started in St. Louis as a dray-driver, and now found himself a rich man. He was a repulsive-looking person, tall, lean and lank, with high cheekbones and face pitted with the small-pox, gray eyes, with red eyebrows and sandy whiskers" (8). Hopkins's characterization is in keeping with a literary tradition of depicting slave traders among the lowest classes of people. She gives him some traits within the realm of consent: he is "hard-hearted," and his illiteracy and work as a driver place him amongst the uneducated at a time when education was increasingly accessible to those born free in the US. But the harshest and most memorable of Walker's characteristics are those given to him by others--perhaps those inherited. Hopkins constructs him "ill-bred" and "repulsive-looking"--both traits out of his control. His red eyebrows and sandy whiskers suggest a Scot or Irish background, which carries some particular negative associations for a 19th-century audience. (10)

In case the reader still has any doubt about Walker's status in the scheme of the novel, a comparison to the novel's ultimate villain, St. Clair Enson, spells it out. The two sit side by side at a Confederate political convention, where "in the excitement of the moment all the prejudices of the Maryland aristocrat toward the vile dealer in human flesh were forgotten" (18). Hopkins calls our attention to "prejudices" between the two white men only to dismiss them as "forgotten." Her inscription of one man as a "dealer in human flesh" does not effectively justify the interpersonal conflict between the two, since St. Clair demonstrates no scruples concerning the slave trade: he owns slaves and is quick to gamble away his personal servant in a card game. Instead, only the aristocracy Hopkins assigns to St. Clair sets him apart from the "ill-bred" Walker; St. Clair holds "prejudices" against Walker based more on his low class status than on his morally bankrupt occupation. And the feeling of disdain proves mutual between them: the trader declares, "You d--d aristocrats carry things with a high hand; I'll be glad to take a reef in your sails" (26). Walker's chosen metaphor carries an interesting social implication; his desire to "take a reef" is in fact an appropriation of movement from St. Clair. Walker serves as an example of a financially self-made man whose money cannot endow the high social status that might otherwise attend wealth. Significantly, in a novel that unambiguously addresses the sociopolitical difficulties that African Americans faced at the end of the nineteenth century, the "caste prejudice" mirrored in these two white men is the first that the novelist outlines.

Each of Hopkins's white characters is constructed with a clear class designation. In the statements cited above, St. Clair Enson continually receives the designation of aristocrat, without any disclaimers and no elaboration on what that term might mean in a democratic society. While the opening pages of the novel clearly juxtapose Walker with St. Clair, St. Clair in turn provides a foil for his own more virtuous brother, Ellis. Ellis shares St. Clair's designation as an aristocrat, but with an "air of distinction" and "pride of caste" (31, 35). Hopkins applies labels of high social class to these white brothers of distinctive fortunes to demonstrate that such labels do not necessarily supply status. The novel chiefly distinguishes Ellis from his brother in character--he is neither hardhearted nor ruthless--and that character earns him social status denied to St. Clair, whose bad reputation proceeds from his reckless and inveterate gambling. But for the men themselves it proves at least as pertinent that Ellis not only comes from money, but also has plenty of it. The distance between the brothers undercuts the fact that they have exactly the same familial background--they share a biological inheritance, if not a financial one. Ellis stands apart from his brother because he holds wealth, while St. Clair's coveting of that wealth drives his cruelest behavior. In the case of the Enson brothers, a father's will has determined the fate of his sons.

The distinction between acquired and inherited wealth remains clear in the novel's postbellum group of characters. For example, Senator Bowen and his (presumed) daughter Jewel display notable differences despite separation by only one generation of wealth. The senator is a stereotypical westerner from California: "The Honorable Zenas was an example of the possibilities of individual expansion under the rule of popular government. Every characteristic of his was of the self-made pattern. In familiar conversation with intimate friends, it was his habit to fall into the use of ungrammatical phrases, and, in this, one might easily trace the rugged windings of a life of hardship among the great unwashed before success had crowned his labors and steered his bark into its present smooth harbor" (80). This portrayal of Bowen takes an unusually negative slant on his status as a "self-made" man. Rather than emphasizing Bowen's achievement despite humble origins, Hopkins describes him as uncouth and even uneducated (in stark contrast to the useless refinement and grace that Hopkins attributes to the young Hagar before her marriage). Further, Hopkins places that achievement in subtly passive terms, by awarding agency--and, once again, movement--to personified "success" who "steered his bark," rather than to Bowen himself.

In contrast to Bowen's nearly inadvertent success, Hopkins gives Hagar/ Estelle significant agency in her husband's accomplishments. Bowen is wealthy, and his money proves almost enough to make him accepted in high society--but not quite. In fact, Bowen's wife plays a key role in securing his acceptance, "being a well-educated woman, versed in the usages of polite society" (81). It is Hagar/Estelle Bowen who arranges a convent education for her stepdaughter Jewel, and who presses her popular husband into politics. Although Hagar/Estelle could not sufficiently use her refined ways to elevate herself in society, her skills can apparently aid those around her. Presumably because of the mollifying intercession of her stepmother, the senator's daughter Jewel lacks any of his rough and uncouth tendencies. The novel does not reveal Jewel's heritage as an upper-class Enson until the final pages, but her behavior and character have consistently been in perfect keeping with that cliched background. Hagar/Estelle's ability to affect positively the social standing of her husband and stepdaughter fits with her position as a subjective, and thereby defiant, character in an otherwise stultifying tradition. However, the need for her intercessions, particularly on the part of her self-made husband, raises questions about social mobility allowed by financial success.

While Hopkins overtly names Bowen as a man "of the self-made pattern," he is not the only character in the novel who can lay claim to that title: the former slave trader Walker/ Madison also demonstrates the characteristics of a self-made man. As his initial description makes clear, Walker comes from humble and unrefined origins. But when he resurfaces in the postbellum section of the novel as Major Madison, he seems considerably transformed. In conversation with St. Clair/Benson, his grammatical discourse suggests some education, and he even shows some polite manners. He gives no trace of his former class-conscious bitterness, and for most practical purposes, he now keeps company with the "d--d aristocrats" he formerly cursed. Walker/Madison has gained new status as the result of considerable deception, but also through his own type of hard work as a confidence man. On the surface, in short, Walker appears to have progressed and improved himself through capitalistic schemes. His self-improvement proves to be persuasive enough to allow him to keep company with Zenas Bowen, whom the reader knows to be self-made in earnest (with a little help from his wife). Hopkins's contrast of these two characters challenges the late-19th-century conflation of moral virtue and material progress.

Even as Hopkins contrasts Bowen with the dubious Walker/Madison, she further pairs him in relief with another character--his daughter's upper-class suitor, Cuthbert Sumner. As a representative of the social elite, Sumner fits into his own stereotypical mold: "Cuthbert Sumner, [Jewel's] acknowledged lover, was an only child of New England ancestry favored by fortune like herself. His father, a wealthy manufacturer, was the owner of a business that had been in the Sumner family for many generations. His mother had died while he was yet a lad. It was a dull home" (83). Sumner's "wealthy manufacturer" forefathers make him the northern equivalent of the Enson plantation aristocracy (while Hopkins's note that his was "a dull home" offers tacit assurance that no mixed-blood relatives will surface to disrupt the Sumner family structure). Hopkins suggests that Sumner holds some individuality and distinction when she describes him as uninterested in assuming his family's business. However, Sumner's father uses his influence to secure his son a position of employment in the Treasury for General Benson; thus, he denies Sumner the fulfillment of any personal volition he might possess to become a self-made hero.

As Jewel's suitor, Sumner forms an obvious rival to her father, who states as much when he warns Jewel, "not even Sumner shall part us for a good bit; your pa just can't lose you for a good spell, I reckon." Hopkins contrasts Bowen and Sumner in more subtle ways as well. In particular, she calls attention to the two men's differing aptitudes for recognizing a confidence man. Bowen is quick to extend a social invitation to Walker/Madison and his daughter, and soon becomes enmeshed in evenings of gambling at their home. Although Bowen is supposedly sharp enough to rise from nothing on his own business sense, he falls prey to a scheme selling investments in a fake mine. After his death, the attorney Cameron reveals that Bowen had lost a million dollars to the false mining company, despite the fact that "A child could see that it was a cheat and a sham" (201). That the ostensibly wily Bowen falls prey to a simple scheme by his foil Madison serves to advance the plot more than to define his character, but his victimization fits into the novel's overall pattern of an easy come, easy go economy where any financial height is as easily lost as gained.

In contrast to Bowen, Cuthbert Sumner and his elite associates fear the threats of interlopers and unknowns; they eschew "low" company and would like to avoid "certain types," regardless of skin color. Unfortunately for them, they are significantly less successful in enforcing this separation of classes: the high times of a booming economy make it difficult to recognize the financial wolf in aristocratic lamb's wool. Sumner and his friends suspect Walker/Madison of being "shady" and a "sharper" (130), but they take no action: "A good deal of money changed hands in the salon of the unpretentious house on New York Avenue: it was whispered also that the mine was a gigantic swindle. As yet these reports were but floating rumors; no one had made open complaint" (132). That so much money continues to "change hands" reveals that suspicions are not enough to interfere with greed and pleasure. Good food, frequent gaming, polite servants, and the charming and beautiful Aurelia suffice to persuade "the greatest intellects of the great Republic" (130) to cast aside their suspicions and continue associating with the Madisons. This failure to take action against the swindlers collapses the social class distinctions that Hopkins carefully establishes between Sumner and Bowen; Sumner's aristocratic background might make him capable of spotting a social interloper, but, like Bowen, he proves powerless to prevent the interloper's success in society.

This disintegrating contrast between Bowen's and Sumner's perceptions and their actions becomes more acute in the case of another confidence game the men have in common: Hagar/Estelle's pose as a white woman, and Jewel's unwitting one. In this deception they share space with the first white male hero of the novel, Ellis Enson, who is both Bowen's twin as husband to Hagar/Estelle, and as already noted, Sumner's southern twin as an aristocrat. Class status makes no allowances in this case: all three men are equally unaware of African "racial" background in Hagar and her daughter. Hagar's ability to "pass" for white with each of these men, and--unknowingly--to train her daughter to do the same, amounts to more than a comment on her physical appearance or descent. The key to Hagar's success is the same element that occasions her second husband Bowen's success in politics: her knowledge of "usages of polite society." These "usages" are a learned skill (again, de Certeau's tactics) and the exercise of them makes Hagar something of a "self-made" woman. Since Hopkins's Washington society is a self-proclaimed open one, any scam that brings in money is scam enough to bring high status with it. Strangely enough, this development applies to Hagar's serendipitous marriage to the wealthy Bowen as much as to Walker's successful mining scheme. As one partygoer assures another, "We do not inquire too closely into one's antecedents in Washington, you know; be beautiful and rich and you will be happy here" (114). However, this equation--beauty plus wealth equals happiness--eventually fails the mixed-blood heroines of the novel, and thus Hopkins undercuts her own depiction of a land of opportunity. For Hagar, Jewel, and even Aurelia, beauty does lead to money, whether through honest marriage or through deception. However, money provides none of the women with lasting social status, a failure made evident by Hopkins's portrayals of various modes of mobility.

The Dark Angel in the House

As I have suggested in my earlier discussion of domestic fiction, part of Hopkins's commentary on American society lies in her exploitation of domestic fiction. In one way, Hopkins's novel resists containment by a conventional domestic fiction by complicating its portrayal of the heteronormative domestic sphere. More than once, Hopkins provides her readers with a portrait of a traditional marriage plot, only to vex that literary tradition with questions of identity and race. The reader's first introduction to the heroine Hagar Sargeant is a typically sentimental portrait of a beautiful only daughter, poised to relieve a wealthy neighboring plantation owner of his loneliness. However, even as Hopkins warns us that her heroine's life is "too tranquil and uneventful," she intimates that her character may stray from the norm by allowing her some self-awareness. Hopkins gives Hagar an idea of her own distinction: "she had a feeling that her own talents, if developed, would end in something far different from the calm routine, the housekeeping and churchgoing which stretched before her" (33). Of course, a novel in the fixed tradition of domesticity faces difficulty fulfilling such promise--how "far different" could a heroine's options be? From Hagar's dreaming days, it is not long before she marries Ellis Enson, thus presumably ensuring a life of "housekeeping" for her next-door neighbor. But the description foreshadows Hagar's losing the "calm" of her domestic life, since she is eventually overcome by shame, deception, and despair. More importantly, Hopkins's description of Hagar's dreams suggests that her heroine has the potential to be a subjective character.

In describing Hagar as subjective, I place her most specifically in opposition to what feminist criticism has assessed as the traditional position of the female: objectified, submissive, passive, acted upon rather than acting upon. The traditional white heroines of 19th-century US domestic fiction by both men and women, whether constructed as genuinely submissive and conformist or as subversively submissive and conformist, still must be described as submissive and conformist. (11) Unlike these (primarily white-authored) figures, Hagar demonstrates talents and makes decisions that allow her to determine her own future. In the first half of the novel, Hagar's escape from the slave traders after her racial discovery seems to give her complete control over her own fate and her daughter's: "She looked wildly and anxiously around to see if all hope were indeed gone; far below the ridge rolled the dark waters, sullen, angry, threatening. Before and behind were the voices of the profane, inhuman monsters into whose hands she must inevitably fall. Her resolution was taken.... Then ... with one bound [she] sprang over the railing of the bridge, and sank beneath the waters of the Potomac river" (74-75). With this act of defiance and desperation, Hagar severs her generic ties to the passive white females of domestic fiction, and joins ranks with literary African American mothers. (12) The conversion proves to be fleeting, however; the haunting voices Hagar tries to escape are "before and behind," and the passage warns readers that her "fall" is "inevitable." Hagar will resume her role as a wealthy white woman when she becomes Estelle Bowen, and by "passing" for white, she will invite her re-exposure at the hands of the same men. Critic Janet Gabler-Hover has recently described Hagar/Estelle's conscious decision to pass as a "betrayal within the terms of tragic mulatta fiction" (134), but this active deception is one more aspect of Hagar's subjectivity: she determines her own identity instead of embracing the fate determined for her by her racial background, as would the typical tragic mulatta heroine. (13)

Who's Who and Who's True

So many characters in Hopkins's novel define their own identity that self-definition threatens to take over the themes of the novel. The major characters have already been noted: Hagar "becomes" Estelle Bowen, Walker "becomes" Major Madison, and St. Clair "becomes" General Benson. But less prominent characters also assume disguises, as when Ellis "becomes" the detective Henson, while the servant Venus daringly disguises herself as a boy. For Hopkins, both heroic and villainous characters can determine their own identity and corresponding social status, even if only briefly. Carby analyzes the ongoing questions of identity in her introduction to the 1988 reissue of The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins, pointing out that while conventional use of double identity indicates a disruption in moral order that is restored with the revelation of truth, Hopkins's novel does not contain such a restoration. She explains, "The capture and imprisonment of the villains do not return Hopkins's fictional society to happiness. Nor are the heroes and heroines secured in their social positions when threats to expose them cease. Blackness is the source of their vulnerability" (xli). While Carby's analysis proves accurate, her diction is ironic. The characters who lose their social positions in Hagar's Daughter do not have any "blackness" to speak of--the supposed "source of their vulnerability" is an intangible social understanding of difference.

Because Hopkins denies the easy resolution of social disorder through revealing "true" identities, the sustained uncertainty of identity invites examination through the window of resistance theory. Her characters create new identities out of existing standards of the social order, using de Certeau's "tactics" that "belong to the other." De Certeau defines tactics as a subversion of codes from within. A tactic "insinuates itself into the other's place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance" (De Certeau xix). (14) At the center of Hagar's Daughter, Hagar/ Estelle appropriates what Hopkins calls the "usages of polite society" (81) in order to infiltrate white social space--in this case, the place of the other. In so doing, she successfully transforms her husband and her stepdaughter/daughter Jewel, so that they, too, appear in the novel as impostors into a higher class of Washington society. Gabler-Hover has argued that Hagar's passing for white borders on a betrayal of her race in the context of the tragic mulatta tradition; however, Hopkins also risks her character's falling into a pattern of subversion that intertwines with complicity. This pattern has been exposed most clearly by deconstruction, for which Derrida warns, "by repeating what is implicit in the founding concept, by using against the edifice the instruments or stones available in the house ... one risks ceaselessly confirming, consolidating ... that which one allegedly deconstructs" (135). (15) Hagar's "disguise" as Estelle Bowen involves more than the fair skin that compels others to assume hers a white racial background. Her appropriated social behaviors and education prove to be complex aspects of race and class that defy easy description as merely performative cultural constructs. By lending her social skills to husband and daughter, Hagar effectively constructs the same "house" that the revelation of her true identity will destroy.

While I have already cited some evidence of Hagar/Estelle's influence over Jewel, an illustrative single passage demonstrates the extent to which she extends her performance to dominate the status of her daughter. In a scene describing the Bowen family interaction, the Senator, his wife, and daughter all prepare for dinner and the theater. Hagar instructs, "Jewel, dear, have Venus be particular with your toilet tonight; I will overlook you when she is finished" (89). With no explanation given as to why this evening's activities should require "particular" attention, Hagar's request answers her own unstated concern for an impression to be made. Her announcement that she will "overlook" the dressing performed by the maid not only implies a distrust of the aesthetic and social capabilities of Venus (who is unquestionably black), but moreover, it infantilizes the 20-year-old Jewel, who might not dress herself but should certainly be able to determine that it is done well. The statement reveals Hagar's dominion over Jewel's social appearance, and by extension her role in the determination of the family's social status.

This role promises to be important when Aurelia Madison comes to call on Jewel, under somewhat false pretenses (since she, Major Madison, and St. Clair/Benson have already decided to separate Jewel and Sumner for their own marriages). Hagar meets the girl, and finds her "grace and beauty" gratifying, but senses something is amiss: "She conversed freely and pleasantly with the unexpected guest, although after the first feeling of wonder and satisfaction at too much loveliness, she was surprised and puzzled at the vague feeling of distrust and dislike that personal contact with her young guest brought to her. It was intangible. She shook it off, however, the beautiful face and voice were so enchanting that she could not resist them, and felt ashamed of her distrust" (106-07).

This moment of uncertainty signals the beginning of the end of Hagar/ Estelle's control over not only her own social status, but also over her daughter's. Her sense of something amiss confuses any easy alignment of (black) race and (lower) class; like Cuthbert Sumner and the upper-class elite, she can recognize a social impostor. But also like them, she fails to take action, undermining the power she had claimed for herself in determining her own status and race. Aurelia escapes discovery by Hagar/Estelle by means of the same deception that has concealed Hagar's race from others: beauty and "usages" of society.

This failure on Hagar/Estelle's part is ultimately a failure of tactic. De Certeau warns that a tactic must be "always on the watch for opportunities.... Whatever it wins, it does not keep. It must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into 'opportunities'" (de Certeau xix). In the most basic of ways, Hagar's encounter with, and eventual acceptance of, Aurelia is a failure to recognize opportunity, and begins her descent into powerlessness in the society she has infiltrated. Hopkins renders her character's manifest weakness when, soon afterwards, Jewel confronts Hagar/Estelle with the news that Sumner has been charged with murder. Rather than taking charge of the difficult situation, Hagar/Estelle is struck with incredulity and helplessness: "What can we do to help him? It is unfortunate that your father is away" (181). Strange enough that she should turn now to her unconforming husband for advice on a social situation, but Hagar/Estelle's most excited exclamation seems even more out of character. Told that Jewel plans to visit Sumner in jail, Hagar/Estelle protests, "Jewel! What will the General think?" Since the novel has already established not just dislike but distrust of the General's character, it is hard to imagine why his opinion should be of concern to either mother or daughter. In fact, Hagar/Estelle's mention of him only cements for us the extent to which she has become complicit in the society she wished to subvert. Although Jewel herself marries Sumner in secret, thus preventing a forced (incestuous) marriage to St. Clair/Benson (her uncle), Hagar/Estelle takes no action to prevent the marriage that would allow Benson to take Jewel's fortune. Hagar's use of Derrida's "stones available in the house" has led her to construct that which she would "allegedly deconstruct" (Derrida 135). In other words, while Hagar successfully exploits white society by disguising herself in it, her actions toward her daughter (in keeping with that disguise) are themselves exploitative. As a result she has lost her ability to tell a confidence man from an upstanding citizen, and with it, her ability to protect her daughter's high social status and the wealth that attends it.

When the novel reveals that Estelle Bowen is the former slave Hagar disguised, the legal consequences of African blood have altered since the Civil War, but the social ramifications remain unchanged. Jewel reads a newspaper account that summarizes the cultural attitude towards the discovery: "This story, showing, as it does, the ease with which beautiful half-breeds may enter our best society without detection, is a source of anxiety to the white citizens of our country. At this rate the effects of slavery can never be eradicated, and our most distinguished families are not immune from contact with this mongrel race. Mrs. Bowen has our sympathy, but we cannot, even for such a leader as she has been, unlock the gates of caste and bid her enter" (266-67). Represented as they are in the evening paper, these attitudes provide insight into the social opinions held outside the rarefied and sometimes fantastic lives of Hopkins's main characters. Several points made in the article deserve examination. First, the writer remarks the ease for "beautiful half-breeds" to gain social status [emphasis mine]. The assumption here is that pale skin and a good heart are not enough to overcome a low birth; however, when these traits are combined with unusual (European-defined) beauty, even a waitress can hope to enter the upper classes. When the newspaper states that the "effects of slavery can never be eradicated," Hopkins underscores that the intended subject is the progeny of slavery--its true effects (including poverty and racism) might very well be eradicated with an encroachment of "mongrels" into upper classes. Perhaps most striking is the fictional editor's refusal to "unlock the gates of caste and bid her enter." The metaphor implies that the gates are indeed locked--an implication antithetical to the popular myth of democratic self-improvement. This myth is continuously questioned in events of the novel, where characters from all walks move conspiratorially in and out of social classes, only to have their social disguises eventually removed and their social status ultimately denied. The newspaper writer overlooks the reality that the society must in fact unlock those gates to bid Mrs. Bowen leave: Hagar can shift classes easily so long as she moves down and not up.

Obviously, Hopkins's novel was not written as an endorsement of capitalism, or as an expose of social immobility. But the fact that Hagar's Daughter offers elements of both reflects the extent to which the tension between them was a defining aspect of 19th-century American society. As a central figure, Hagar exploits a capitalist system but ultimately cannot overcome the social relations she has adopted for her own purposes. The mixed ancestry of Hopkins's characters gives particular emphasis to the societal prevarication that distinguishes class by heredity even while proclaiming the potential for self-determination. Sollors has discussed the particular implications of mixed-race, or partial, ancestry in American society in Neither Black Nor White Yet Both (1997):

   This way of ... defining identity on
   the basis of only partial ancestry ...
   seems at particular odds with a social
   system that otherwise cherishes social
   mobility and espouses the right of
   individuals to make themselves anew
   by changing name, place, and fortune,
   and that has produced famous parvenus
   and confidence men. The paradoxical
   coexistence of the cult of the
   social upstart as "self-made man" and
   the permanent racial identification and
   moral condemnation of the racial passer
   as "impostor" constitute the frame
   within which the phenomenon of passing
   took place. (249-50)

Sollors's study of the literature of passing calls attention to the way Hagar's Daughter questions individual control over social status, thereby anticipating much African American literature that furthers the ability of the individual to control status--and race--through deception. Novels of passing are a prominent genre in early 20th-century US fiction; Hopkins's racial discovery plot anticipates much of this work, with the important distinction that, like other earlier works, she partially removes volition from the deception practiced by her protagonists. While Hagar actively seeks to control her racial classification as well as her social status, she does so only after being deceived herself.

Like most other characters in the novel, Hagar's fate lies outside her own realm of influence, in a refracted objective reality with strict limitations on both racial and social mobility. The practical result in Hagar's Daughter is a group of characters whose fortunes rise and fall and rise again over the course of 20 or so years. The Sargeants fall on hard times, earn more money, and return to their estate, and Hagar follows in this pattern by marrying into money--twice. St. Clair loses everything more than once, only to win a fortune back through one ill deed or another. All of these reversals stretch the limits of economic verisimilitude, even while they participate in the cultural mythology of economic boom times and easy money in the developing US economy. Statistical samplings reveal that there was not any significant increase in the number of property holders per capita during the last half of the nineteenth century, and those property holders fit into a certain socioeconomic description. (16) These statistics present a nation where wealth remains relatively fixed and predictable in its holders: older white men who owned land, whether in the city or the country, whose fortunes passed between generations without significant loss or turnover--men like Ellis Enson or Cuthbert Sumner. There is little room here for the get-rich-quick schemes and successes of Hopkins's self-made characters.

Hopkins probably did not have access to a sociological survey that helped her maintain a realistic portrait of wealth for her novel, nor would she have wanted one. Hagar's Daughter might not predict the reality of wealth distribution, but it accurately displays contemporary attitudes towards acquiring that wealth, just as it depicts attitudes about the very material circumstances of race, even if those circumstances are spurious. Popular mythology of the period espoused it entirely feasible that anyone in the US could attain great wealth with effort, a mythology circulated in the popular Horatio Alger novels. Hopkins also addresses an idea equally mythical if less popular--the assimilationist claim that proper education and manners would overcome racist tendencies in society. In 1856, the early social scientist Francis Bowen wrote, "Neither theoretically nor practically, in this country, is there any obstacle to any individual's becoming rich, if he will, and almost to any amount that he will" (122). Bowen's usage of the verb "will" is nearly obsolete, but it strangely anticipates the noun form of the word carved onto Jewel's gravestone ("Not my will, but Thine be done!") and Longfellow lines with which Hopkins concludes her novel ("A boy's will is the wind's will, / And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts"). Each of the uses calls up the idea of self-determination; for Bowen, it is a foregone conclusion, but for Hopkins, it is a complex and uncertain promise held out by capitalist rhetoric and assimilationist propaganda alike.

Works Cited

Bowen, Francis. The Principles of Political Economy Applied to the Condition, the Resources, and the Institutions of the American People. Boston: Little, Brown, 1863.

Brooks, Kristina. "Mammies, Bucks, and Wenches: Minstrelsy, Racial Pornography, and Racial Politics in Pauline Hopkins's Hagar's Daughter." Gruesser, 119-57.

Brown, Sterling. The Negro in American Fiction. 1937. New York: Arno P, 1969.

Bullock, Penelope. The Afro-American Periodical Press, 1838-1909. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1981.

Carby, Hazel V. "Introduction." The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.

--. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

Carlson, Marvin. Performance: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge, 1996.

de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. 1974. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.

Derrida, Jacques. "The Ends of Man." 1968. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. 109-36.

Douglas, Ann, The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Knopf, 1977.

Gabler-Hover, Janet. Dreaming Black/Writing White: The Hagar Myth in American Cultural History. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2000.

Glazener, Nancy. Reading for Realism: The History of a U.S. Literary Institution 1850-1910. Durham: Duke UP, 1997.

Gregory, Frances W., and Irene D. Neu. "The Industrial Elite of the 1870s: Their Social Origins." Pessen 175-88.

Gruesser, John Cullen, ed. The Unruly Voice: Rediscovering Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1996.

Harper, Frances E. W. Minnie's Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, and Trial and Triumph: Three Rediscovered Novels. 1869, 1876-77, 1888-89. Ed. Frances Smith Foster. Boston: Beacon, 1994.

Hopkins, Pauline. Hagar's Daughter: A Story of Southern Caste Prejudice. 1901-02. The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. 1-284.

Kaplan, Amy. The Social Construction of American Realism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.

Lears, T. J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture 1880-1920. New York: Pantheon, 1987.

Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.

Luria, Daniel D. "Trends in the Determinants Underlying the Process of Social Stratification: Boston 1880-1920." Social Structure and Social Mobility. Ed. Neil Larry Shumsky. New York: Garland, 1996. 86-105.

Pessen, Edward, ed. Three Centuries of Social Mobility in America. Lexington, MA: Heath, 1974.

Saxton, Alexander. The Rise and Fall of the White Republic. London: Verso, 1990.

Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.

--. Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.

Soltow, Lee. Men and Wealth in the United States 1850-1870. New Haven: Yale UP, 1975.

Takaki, Ronald. Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Knopf, 1979.

Tate, Claudia. "Contending Forces." Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Eds. William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. 170-71.

Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1800. New York: Oxford UP, 1985.

Zafar, Rafia. We Wear the Mask: African Americans Write American Literature, 1760-1870. New York: Columbia UP, 1997.

Notes

(1.) For Carby, these contradictions are outweighed by the novel's "detailed exploration of the parameters of black womanhood and of the patriarchal limitations of black manhood" (144).

(2.) Some noteworthy examples of this popular plot are William Dean Howells's An Imperative Duty (1891), Frances Harper's Iola Leroy (1892), and Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894).

(3.) See Brooks's discussion of Hopkins's troubled use of racial caricatures.

(4.) The novel notably lacks any incidents of enforced segregation.

(5.) Sollors is not the first to notice this tension, and in fact significant sociological research attempts to document the comparative importance of heredity (or "ascriptive traits," such as sex, race, nationality or religion) and economic performance. A good overview of this research can be found in Pessen.

(6.) Lears provides more background on this myth and its pervasive effects. In a forthcoming chapter of Disturbing and Convenient: Progressive Era Social Status Anxiety and the Racial Discovery Plot, I describe in more detail how Lears's portrait of a fictionalized "domestic banality" (17) depicts the cultural hegemony that Hopkins's work resists. My discussion here of the domestic novel is indebted to his analysis.

(7.) This refusal could be read as a precursor to realism and its portrayal of the difficulties of American life. For further discussion of the role of sentimental fiction in the development of realism and naturalism literary movements, see Kaplan and Glazener.

(8.) Sterling Brown was probably the first to discuss the tragic mulatto as a fictional stereotype in The Negro in American Fiction; subsequent criticism often builds on his extensive definitions. See Brown 31-48 and 131-50.

(9.) This rise in a romanticized remembrance of the slaveholding past has been widely documented by literary and social historians, and evidences itself in the popularity of southern romance novels, including those by Thomas Nelson Page. The more generous, if naive, critics have explained this phenomenon as a forgiving mood intended to promote the healing of a war-torn nation, but it must be acknowledged that the "forgiveness" of the South corresponded with an increased rate of lynchings of Blacks. For historical overviews, see Saxton and Takaki.

(10.) While the Scottish did not suffer the great stigma of the Irish immigrant class, they also did not obtain the success of English or Welsh immigrants, and certainly did not fare as well as US-born white men and their sons. For information on nativity and economic success, see Luria. For a discussion of difficulties faced by the Irish immigrant class, see Lott. For research on the paternal family origin and birthplace of American industrial leaders, see Gregory.

(11.) The debate over the aesthetic and historical value of sentimental fiction in general and Uncle Tom's Cabin in particular has been so well-documented elsewhere that there is no need to summarize it here. The most frequently cited (and perhaps the most compelling) arguments are those of Douglas and Tompkins.

(12.) This description obviously echoes William Wells Brown's portrait of the eponymous heroine of Clotel, but Hagar's eventual success in saving herself and her daughter also recalls events in Uncle Tom's Cabin. For a discussion of how Uncle Tom's Cabin functions as precursor to later African American novels, see Zafar.

(13.) Gabler-Hover reads Hopkins's novel as one in a tradition that draws on the biblical Hagar story.

(14.) For a discussion of de Certeau's theories in the context of performance theory, see Carlson, particularly Chapter 8, "Resistant Performance," 165-86.

(15.) I credit Carlson for calling my attention to this clarifying passage.

(16.) For a detailed examination of wealth and population, see Soltow. Soltow acknowledges an increase in the number of millionaires during the "Gilded Age," an increase which led to what he calls a "millionaire mirage" caused by people not understanding how "economic growth and population growth affected the number of rich" (113).

Susan Hays Bussey is currently Visiting Assistant Professor at Wake Forest University, where she is working on a book-length manuscript about the Racial Discovery Plot.