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The Single Architecture of Contending Forces: Lodging Independent Women in Pauline E. Hopkins’s “Little Romance”

Late nineteenth-century African American communities claimed and defended an image of respectable black womanhood tied to accounts of marital home ownership and anchored in a familiar sentimental marriage plot. Such advocacy, however, left unmarried black women vulnerable in the face of disapproval from progressive reformers, the popular press, and their own communities. With the publication of Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South in 1900, Pauline E. Hopkins entered this debate by portraying a respectable Boston lodging community and advancing an alternative narrative for urban working women. In the novel’s central lodging house, a widowed proprietress and her tenants build a sustainable home. Hopkins’s literary architecture provides single women with private rental rooms and a shared parlor— sanctioning narrative and material spaces outside the family. Hopkins’s architecture of singleness presents a celebratory portrait of the turn-of-century lodging house as a new home in which unmarried black women could explore friendship, independence, and their own political capital. In Hopkins’s Boston social world, black clubwomen and civic leaders were busy establishing black “True Womanhood” with images of married women in domestic roles. The broader fin-de-siècle literary history suggests that a narrative built explicitly on an architecture of singleness was a racial and social privilege, a luxury that the black novel could not afford. Indeed, critics count Hopkins among the many black writers who strategically adopted white Victorian models of womanhood and marriage. But although she employed a familiar sentimental plot, Hopkins added to it portraits of independent women living and working outside of marital and maternal imperatives. In Contending Forces, she writes, “after all, our surroundings influence our lives and characters as much as fate, destiny, or any supernatural agency” (282). She plots a single rental space at the heart of the novel, and the private rooms and shared parlors of the lodging house provide space for Hopkins’s careful navigation between single advocacy and the novel’s other political imperatives. Hopkins thus mounts a sentimental marriage-plot