Apart from such unusual instances as these, the less love in a detective- story, the better. . . . here is the whole diiculty about allowing real human beings into a detective- story.
—Dorothy Sayers, “The Omnibus of Crime”
Hagar’s Daughter uses kinship arrangements to address the late nineteenth- century alliance between North and South. Rohrbach calls attention to the prevalence of incest in Hopkins’s magazine iction more generally, ar-guing that these narratives juxtapose the dreadfulness of endogamy to the virtuous exogamy of race- mixing; this “analogy of oppositions” punctures the so- called horror of miscegenation (484). hough Rohrbach suggests that we can gauge the integrity of the accidentally estranged interracial En-son household (comprising Ellis EnEn-son [Detective HenEn-son], Hagar [now Estelle Bowen], and their daughter [ Jewel]) by the fact that their road to reunion is “never once threatened by incestuous desires” (488), this is not precisely the case. Jewel’s unenviable role as (Uncle) Benson’s romantic con-quest is fraught with incestuous overtones, since the genealogical proximity (of which neither is aware) is a source of dramatic irony. At some point in their irst tête- à- tête, in fact, Jewel addresses another form of kinship she shares with Benson: a familial bond brought about by the reconciliation be-tween the North and South only a few decades after the end of the Civil War. his solidarity surfaces in the language of a new white supremacist ideology, one that is a by- product of the nation’s reattachment. For instance, Jewel responds sympathetically to Benson’s ingratiating report that the di-sastrous war led him abroad “until the pain of recollection should be some-what dimmed”:
“Ah!” she said, with a gentle sigh of pity, “how dreadful that time must have been. hank heaven, ours is a united country once more. And you are mistaken, too, in your judgment: we have no foreigners here. We have efaced the word by assimilation; so, too, we have no Southerners— we are Americans.” (121)
Jewel’s use of the term “assimilation” designates a strictly regional rather than racial amalgamation. To the attentive reader (or any other in
hind-sight), however, the context of her comments stirs up a number of other po-tentially disconcerting family ties. he specter of an unthinkable endogamy and socially proscribed interracial relations materialize in Benson’s advances upon his niece, even as the pair discusses a diferent sort of union. Moreover, Jewel’s mixed blood is, in this scene, only an elusive subtext, and the authori-tative place from which she ofers solace to the dejected southerner is as a daughter of the West, “with all the independence that the term implies” (118).
Along these lines, Hopkins’s tongue- in- cheek take on turn- of- the- century political geography depicts the West of the middle to late nine-teenth century nearly as the historian Frederick Jackson Turner described it in his 1893 essay, “he Signiicance of the Frontier in American History.”
In this seminal essay, Turner summarized the West’s restorative features, both moral and material, “which could combat the debilitating inluences of class and sectional division,” unifying the nation around a set of exceptional traits— democracy, individualism, and so forth. Out West, where a distinc-tive set of American characteristics were on display, Turner wrote, “North and South met and mingled into a nation” (29). Hopkins presents Jewel as an exemplary western girl; her father, Zenas Bowen, too, is “an example of the possibilities of individual expansion under the rule of popular govern-ment” who embodies the strength of character and self- made quality associ-ated with the frontier (80).
It is crucial to point out, moreover, that Jewel’s image of sectional har-mony summons up the words of Jeferson Davis in the very irst install-ment of Hopkins’s novel. Speaking for the irst time as president of the Confederacy, Davis declares that “when our principles shall have been tri-umphantly established over the entire country— North, South, West— a long age of peace and prosperity will ensue for the entire country” (17). For Davis this national merger depends on the maintenance of slavery, which he describes as a iscally and biologically “necessary” institution, and one superior to what northerners call “free labor”: “What is it but a conglom-eration of greasy mechanics, ilthy operatives, small- isted farmers, and moonstruck Abolitionists?” (17).8
Without adding to the confusion, let us consider what purpose Hopkins serves by crediting Jeferson Davis with this triumph of political vision. As I have suggested above, Jewel’s multiple identities create an unexpected, new proximity between the West and the South. If we follow Davis’s pledge to extend southern rule across the continent, what emerges is an analogy be-tween the exploitation of nonwhite and near- white slaves in South and the
anticipated extraction of wealth from western land. his conclusion seems exceedingly plausible, given that Zenas Bowen has the “hair and skin of an Indian” and sports a suggestively “dark complexion” (76). Hopkins adds to this the somewhat ambiguous observation that Bowen is “one of those ge-nial men whom the West is constantly sending out to enrich society” (80, my italics). To corroborate this point, we only need return to the motives of General Benson and his associate, Major Henry Clay Madison (whose post-war alias is simultaneously indebted to the Father of the Constitution and that “Great Compromiser” whose most celebrated accomplishment was to temporarily postpone sectional crisis while strengthening the Fugitive Slave Act). hese men treat Zenas, Estelle, and Jewel Bowen as cash cattle. hey begin by slowly but resolutely siphoning Senator Bowen’s investments into a fraudulent enterprise, the Arrow- Head Mining Company of Colorado.
When the proceeds of this scheme fail to satisfy Benson’s “inancial dilem-ma,” he applies for a direct line to the old man’s bank account, announcing to his partner in crime, “I have taken a decided fancy to Miss Bowen,” whom the two identify as “the key to the old man’s cash- box” (94, 99, 203).
Hopkins’s depiction of familial, racial, and sectional identities introduc-es a new dimension to the late nineteenth- century culture of sentimental reconciliation between the North and the South. his culture translated political matters into novelistic tropes of romantic union that generally paired a white northern male with a white southern woman (Silber 116).
“Reunion discourse” depended on gender and power conigurations that ef-iciently communicated the economic primacy of the North over the South through its romance plots, but often included the business ventures that joined men from the North and South, typically inanced by northerners (107). his transfer of authority resembled the kind of gift giving that, in the blueprints of the sex- gender system Gayle Rubin supplies, “confers upon its participants a special relationship of trust, solidarity, and mutual aid” (778), and which, in its most typical manifestations, links the “men who give and take” women in valuable kinship structures (779). Eve Sedgwick’s discussion of asymmetrical sex/gender arrangements in Between Men helps expand on this point. To borrow the language of this framework, reunion discourse en-abled a pattern of passionate homosocial attachment that routed the ailia-tion of aggressively masculine white northern men with white southern men in erotic drag. his, of course, depended on a practical displacement: white men traicking in the commodiied bodies of erstwhile southern belles in order to sustain a partnership that inanced capitalist patriarchal structures.
As the rights of freedman evaporated from the Republican agenda in the North, reunion culture’s structure of sentimental attachment and plan-tation nostalgia increasingly disregard the injuries slavery had wrought. By the 1890s, afectionate representations of a romanticized South made the most lethal racisms suddenly digestible (Silber 125). Hagar’s Daughter per-forms a critical reappraisal of reunion culture as its complicated maze of regional and interracial relations illuminates the racial and economic stakes that invalidate any imagined reconciliation between North and South.
Hopkins grounds this iasco in the homosocial partnership between Gen-eral Benson and Cuthbert Sumner. Benson, a Lothario of the irst order, is
“voted” the most charming and the “most perfect lover imaginable” by the many women who have “sighed and wept at his defection” (93). Sumner has also played Casanova, having been “in love with the sex, more or less, since the day he left of knee- breeches” (84). Both Benson and Sumner romanced and discarded Aurelia Madison, the major’s quadroon daughter, even before Sumner’s industrialist father exercised inluence to obtain for his son a position as Benson’s private secretary (84). When Benson’s as-sistant, Elise Bradford, is murdered at the end of a night spent at the oice, it is not entirely surprising that the blame should be assigned to Cuthbert Sumner, with whom she has just shared an intimate conversation. Certain-ly Benson showered Bradford with promises of marriage— Aunt Henny bluntly explains that Benson “was jes’ makin’ dat po’ gal b’lieve de moon was made o’ green cheese an’ he’d got the fus’ slice” (254)— before he calculat-ingly poisoned her. But Sumner is also capable of such coldhearted cruelty.
Bradford, a southern working- class woman of white descent, reproaches his rough treatment of Aurelia (Sumner recoils with disgust when he dis-covers he has almost been “betrayed” into marrying a quadroon), calling his prejudice “a relic of barbarism”; it is this prejudice that will also destroy his afections for Jewel Bowen (160).
For most of the second half of Hagar’s Daughter, Benson and Cuthbert vie for Jewel’s hand in marriage. Jewel, the erotic plaything they toss back and forth, licenses a rivalry that shapes their professional associations, and, as Sedgwick demonstrates in her critique of Rene Girard’s Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, “the bond between rivals in an erotic triangles” is far stronger than “anything in the bond between either of the lovers and the beloved”
(21). One of the chief functions of their homosocial ailiation is, apparently, a prophylactic against interracial marriage. In the irst half of Hagar’s Daugh-ter, St. Clair Enson puts an end to his brother’s marriage to Hagar; in the second half, it is Cuthbert who addresses Ellis Enson (Detective Henson),
sputtering indignantly that the “wholesale union between whites and blacks”
must be prevented at all costs (270). he miscegenation taboo (encapsulated by Cuthbert Sumner’s rhetorical demand, “Ought we not, as Anglo- Saxons, keep the fountain head of our racial stream as unpolluted as possible?”) pre-vails (271). he more subtle point to be made, however (and one that can be made only by reading Hopkins backward and then forward again), is that the fraternal pact and collusion between Benson and Sumner is a system of misuse that opens the West for plunder, principally by taking advantage of Jewel and Zenas Bowen. he civil and social oppression of African Ameri-cans and expansion west of the Mississippi are coterminal ventures. But why use a detective story to make this case?
Detective iction begins, writes Dennis Porter, at “the deadest of dead ends”; immediately afterward, it enters into a process of retrieval that me-ticulously arranges fragments of evidence into a plausible account of events (16). John Cawelti calls this an ideologically conservative means of coping with modern complexities, since the abstract process of narrative recon-struction distances detection ictions from the social conlicts and forms of injustice that realistic works might address (Adventure 97). Indeed, in detection, the even tally between the evidence (the constituent parts) and a narrative whole (a puzzle pieced together from these constituent parts) ensures a perfect union of narrative materials. Hagar’s Daughter proposes, however, that this novelistic machine designed to suture what is splintered is also predisposed to distort or even to annul the historical record as part of its program of reconstruction. Nevertheless, Hopkins draws on detective iction’s devices to open up a history of racial caste, iscal hypocrisy, regional diference, and territorial conquest. In doing so, she points to the social func-tions of these particular convenfunc-tions, possibilities that otherwise recede in the face of what seem to be the genre’s depoliticized investments.