The Motherless Child in Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood

Abstract

[T]he desire of the mother is the origin of everything (283). Jacques Lacan, "Antigone Between Two Deaths," 1960. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, A long ways from home; A long ways from home. (581) --African American spiritual As quoted in Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature In Pauline Hopkins's final novel, Of One Bloody her protagonist, Reuel Briggs, is a mixed-race man passing for white. When confronted with the racial identity he has inherited from his slave mother, Reuel responds emotionally: "[Apparently struggling for words ... [he] ... fell on his knees in a passion of sobs agonizing to witness. 'You know then ... that I am Mira's son?'" (593). By acknowledging his racial heritage and family history, Briggs reclaims his biological and national mother. This scene highlights a central theme in Hopkins's work: the restoration of the mother as a means of personal and national redemption. Hopkins anticipates Stuart Hall's delineation of a text's ability to impose "an imaginary coherence on the experience of dispersal and fragmentation, which is the history of all enforced diasporas." As Hall explains,"[B]y representing or 'figuring' Africa as the mother of these different civilizations," texts seek to "restore an imaginary fullness or plentitude, to set against the broken rubric of our past" (224-25). In Of One Blood, Hopkins imagines just such a restorative as she casts the African American community as motherless and counters the "broken rubric" of the African American past and present with a story of proud racial heritage and national entitlement made possible by the restoration of the national mother. We can understand Hopkins's focus on the community's relationship to the mother more fully through the lens of psychoanalytic theory. Treating the post-Reconstruction African American community--the community to which Pauline Hopkins belonged and for whom she primarily wrote--as the subject in Sigmund Freud's Oedipal model clarifies the position occupied by that group. In Hopkins's work, the rejected or absent mother figures as the cause of African Americans' alienation in the post-Reconstruction United States, but also, as we shall see, as a potential source of power. In what follows, I outline the trop of motherlessness as Hopkins appropriated and extended it, exploring its resonance via psychoanalytic models. I then read Of One Blood using these models, examining the motherlessness that signified national alienation and powerlessness and identifying how the mother is able to restore national identity and unity. THE MOTHERLESS CHILD Numerous scholars have detailed the nineteenth-century domestic ideology that placed mothers in an exalted position in both home ad society. (1) The popular domestic novel typically placed the mother at the center of its protagonist's development, often paradoxically highlighting the importance of her presence with her absence. Motherlessness posed a significant obstacle to overcome and constituted a lack that would prompt a powerful emotional response from readers. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, for example, Harriet Beecher Stowe made some of her most poignant appeals to readers through characters such as young Harry, about to be torn from his adoring mother, Topsy, raised by a speculator and thus bereft of motherly guidance and love, and Eva, who learns to care for others despite the selfish neglect of her anti-mother, satirically named Marie. Stowe's strategy was for from idiosyncratic: Susan Warner's Ellen, Maria Susanna Cummins's Gerty, E. D. E. N. Southworth's Capitola, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Avis, and even Edith Wharton's Lily all experience the effects of motherlessness. If this trope appealed to a white, middle-class readership in the nineteenth-century United States, it may have resonated still more powerfully for African Americans, who had extensive experience with motherlessness. …