"With All the Fire and the Romance": The (Super)Natural Climate of Literature & Performance in Pauline Hopkins

“With All the Fire and the Romance”: The (Super)Natural Climate of Literature & Performance in Pauline Hopkins Mariel Rodney (Purchase College-SUNY) In her oft-quoted opening to Contending Forces, Pauline Hopkins... [ view full abstract ]

“With All the Fire and the Romance”: The (Super)Natural Climate of Literature & Performance in Pauline Hopkins

Mariel Rodney (Purchase College-SUNY) 

In her oft-quoted opening to Contending Forces, Pauline Hopkins highlights the uses of fiction in challenging systematic erasure and social exclusion. I turn to Hopkins in this paper to examine her attention to “climate” and “force.” Climate becomes a useful trope for analyzing the methods of survival levied by characters who persist despite the overwhelming anti-black postbellum climate. Beyond simply noting “the setting,” Hopkins’ attention to weather fuses historical detail with natural and supernatural force in her novels Of One Blood and Contending Forces. Thus, I explore Hopkins’ creative manipulation of natural and supernatural elements as a response to postbellum violence and imperialist regimes. What forms of alternative power become imperative to a reading of survival in the postbellum literature of Black women? I posit that Pauline Hopkins’ literary and extraliterary performances provide a method for reading and preserving tools of survival that critique pervading “climates” of oppression.