Contending Forces by Pauline Hopkins

First published: 1900

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Social criticism

Time of work: 1790’s and 1890’s

Locale: Bermuda; North Carolina; Boston, Massachusetts; New Orleans, Louisiana

Principal Characters:

• Sappho Clark, a beautiful mulatto woman
• Will Smith, a black civil rights activist
• Dora Smith, a spirited, independent black woman
• John Langley, an ambitious black lawyer
• Arthur Lewis, the president of a technical college for African Americans

The Novel

The novel is divided into two distinct parts. The first part traces the fate of the family of a Bermuda planter, Charles Montfort, who leaves Bermuda in the 1790’s with his wife, children, and slaves to avoid compliance with a British law ordering him to free his slaves. He moves to North Carolina, where he soon incurs the jealousy of Anson Pollack, who has Montfort murdered after spreading the rumor that Montfort’s wife is black. She commits suicide, and the Montfort children are remanded into slavery; one son, Charles, Jr., is purchased and taken to England by a British visitor, and the other, Jesse, escapes to New Hampshire, where he grows up and eventually marries a black woman.

The second and main part of the novel traces the fate of one strand of Jesse’s family, the Smiths, a hundred years later. Mrs. Smith, a widow, runs a boardinghouse in Boston. Her son, Will, and daughter, Dora, live with her. Her house is a center for the social and political meetings of the young friends of her children. The plot traces them in their efforts to fulfill their goals in marriage and career. Will Smith is an African American civil rights activist. He is a philosopher whose views on politics and education resemble those of W. E. B. Du Bois. Will is a well-known and highly respected black leader in his community. He falls in love with Sappho Clark, one of the boarders in his mother’s roominghouse. When she leaves him rather than expose him to marriage with a woman of her background, he continues to think of her and seeks her until they are accidentally reunited in New Orleans. His love and devotion finally overcome her hesitation, and they are married.

Sappho Clark is a beautiful mulatto woman. Sappho had been born Mabelle Beaubean to a wealthy New Orleans family of multiracial ancestry. At the age of fifteen, Mabelle is abducted by a white uncle and brought to a house of prostitution. She is rescued by her father, who accosts his brother and threatens to press charges. The next day, Monsieur Beaubean’s house is burned by a mob and Mabelle is carried to a convent by a servant. There she gives birth to a son, and several years later she appears in Boston in search of a new life. Her son is placed in the custody of an aunt, and Mabelle, under the name of Sappho Clark, supports herself as a typist. She lives at the Smith’s boardinghouse, where she befriends Mrs. Smith, Dora, and Will. She and Will fall in love, but she feels herself unworthy of the love of an honorable man because of her unfortunate past. Nevertheless, she finally succumbs to her desire for happiness, until John Langley threatens her. Without telling anyone, she flees to New Orleans with her son. At the end of the novel, Sappho and Will are reunited and married.

Dora Smith is a spirited, independent Northern black woman. Dora is engaged to John Langley and is looking forward to a happy future with him. He betrays her, however, and she turns her attention to a childhood friend, Arthur Lewis, who has long loved her and whom she eventually marries. She also befriends Sappho, and the two become devoted companions.

John Langley is an ambitious black lawyer. He is the direct descendant of Anson Pollack (the murderer of Will’s ancestor) and, like Pollack, has a jealous and vicious nature. He is intelligent and aware of the racial problems in his society. He could do great things for his people, but he is too consumed by lust and greed. He betrays his fiancé, Dora, his good friend Will, and the object of his lust, Sappho. He wants to marry Dora because of her respectable position in the community and at the same time maintain an affair with Sappho. He accidentally discovers the truth about Sappho’s past and threatens to expose her if she refuses to give in to him. In the course of the novel, all find out his true nature and reject him. Greedy to the last, he ends his life on an expedition to find gold in the Klondike, where he freezes to death.

Arthur Lewis, Dora’s friend, is the president of an esteemed technical college for African Americans in the South. He believes that African Americans must first learn manual skills and work their way up. Lewis is a patient and devoted lover of Dora, whom he eventually marries.

The end of the novel finds the Smiths reunited with the British strand of the Montfort family and also finds them the recipients of a considerable inheritance from that side.

The Characters

Hopkins has made excellent use of the social and historical climate of her day in delineating her characters. In her effort to portray the “contending forces” (“conservatism, lack of brotherly affiliation, lack of energy for the right and the power of the almighty dollar”) that pull African Americans away from their focus on bettering the situation of their people, Hopkins has created characters that are rooted in history and developed by her imagination.

Two of her major characters are based on two of the most famous African Americans of the period, W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. Like Du Bois, Will Smith is a highly educated and respected philosopher whose lifetime dedication is to helping his people achieve intellectual equality with whites. He is outspoken and forthright and does not hesitate to get involved in philosophical debates with his brother-in-law, Arthur Lewis, who is modeled on Washington. Like Washington, Lewis is the president of an agricultural and technical school in the South, and he hopes to better the situation of his people by providing them with practical education. Through the dialogue between the two men, Hopkins illustrates the importance of both philosophies of education; she portrays them as complementing rather than confronting each other. She demonstrates through her characters’ dialogue that the farsighted views of Smith would not have had a chance for implementation in the Deep South of the late nineteenth century. Lewis recognizes this, and rather than throwing his hands up in despair, he does what he can. Hopkins shows that both views were important and worthy of respect.

Hopkins was also concerned about the African American who had no interest in anything but self-advancement. Such an individual, she believed, was a detriment to the race. To illustrate this point she created the brilliant lawyer John Langley, whose mind could have been a great asset to his people; his desire for self-advancement, however, was so great that he had tunnel vision. Langley’s selfishness almost destroys the two women with whom he is involved, but in the end he succeeds only in destroying himself. In contrast to Langley, Smith and Lewis both thrive (each, interestingly, with one of the women whom Langley almost destroyed).

The inclusion of a love interest was almost a prerequisite for Hopkins’s audience, and Hopkins used it to illustrate the independence of the African American female. Unlike her European counterpart, the African woman was never encouraged to live entirely within the home nor to be “idle” if finances permitted. Black women came to America as slaves and laborers. The two major heroines, Sappho Clark and Dora Smith, are strong, self-supporting women; Sappho is a typist, and Dora helps her mother run a boardinghouse. Sappho also serves to illustrate the horrors of sexual exploitation to which many African American women were exposed. Sappho suffers the horror of rape and as a result gives birth to a son. Hopkins shows Sappho’s struggle to deal with this horror and the “stain” she feels it has left on her personality. She feels herself unworthy of marriage with Will, whom she loves and by whom she is loved. Dora is a fine wife for Lewis, whom she learns to love after being rejected by Langley; he, in turn, is rejected by Sappho. Langley wants Dora as a suitable wife and Sappho as an exciting mistress. Through his greed, he loses them both. Both women are portrayed as loving, supportive mates who are strong in their own right. They illustrate that women can survive on their own and that the men with whom they become involved love their independent spirit.

Critical Context

Like Hopkins’s other works, most of which were published in Colored American Magazine between 1899 and 1904, Contending Forces had as its initial audience mainly African Americans, who praised her work highly. The president of the Colored Women’s Business Club in Chicago, for example, wrote of Contending Forces that “it is undoubtedly the book of the century.”

Hopkins was among the few nineteenth century African American writers to receive recognition in her lifetime. In her works, she realized the purpose that she stated clearly in the preface to Contending Forces: “We must ourselves develop the men and women who will faithfully portray the inmost thoughts and feelings of the Negro with all the fire and romance which lie dormant in our history, and, as yet, unrecognized by writers of the Anglo-Saxon race.”

Bibliography

Brooks, Daphne A. Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006. Analyzes the relationship between racial activism and gender politics in Hopkins’s work, especially her representations and acts of performance.

Brooks, Gwendolyn. Afterword to Contending Forces, by Pauline Hopkins. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978. Praises Hopkins’s efforts to write an honest novel in which she urges African Americans to cherish, champion, and trust themselves rather than whites. Brooks recognizes Hopkins’s angry moods and depictions and feels Hopkins would be saddened by events of the latter twentieth century. Brooks believes, however, that Hopkins in style and content proves herself a “continuing slave” by imitating white writers. Hopkins’s mulatto heroes and heroines and their use of the English language say little to Brooks of the lives of nineteenth century African Americans.

Du Bois, W. E. B. “The Colored Magazine in America.” The Crisis 5 (November, 1912): 33-35. Notes that Hopkins was dismissed as literary editor of Colored American Magazine in 1904 because her tone was not conciliatory enough for the new management.

Johnson, Abby, and Ronald M. Johnson. “Away from Accommodation: Radical Editors and Protest Journalism, 1900-1910.” Journal of Negro History 62, no. 4 (October, 1977): 325-328. Praises Hopkins for her honest and outspoken approach to her stories and essays. In Contending Forces and other works, she “examined topics widely considered taboo and usually excluded from conciliatory journals.”

Shockley, Ann. “Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: A Biographical Excursion into Obscurity.” Phylon 33 (Spring, 1972): 22-26. Discusses the facts surrounding Hopkins’s life and literary efforts. Notes that Hopkins did much public speaking, for which she received favorable press. Most of Shockley’s observations are factual rather than evaluative, but she recognizes the merits of Contending Forces, even though it is told “in the genteel and romantic fashion of its time.”

Tate, Claudia. “Allegories of Black Female Desire: Or, Rereading Nineteenth-Century Sentimental Narratives of Black Female Authority.” In Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women, edited by Cheryl Wall. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989. Examines nineteenth century African American attitudes toward marriage and freedom and concludes that Hopkins’s texts are liberating.

Wallinger, Hanna. Pauline E. Hopkins: A Literary Biography. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. Extended work of biographically based literary criticism; includes a full chapter on Contending Forces.