Morality In Sappho Clark

In an argument developed further through heroine Sappho Clark, Hopkins uses Grace’s rape to demonstrate that sexual morality is not governed by race. Each woman responds to the loss of her virtue according to the dominant gender codes of her time. Grace, the Victorian fallen women, kills herself following her violation. The narrator tells us that “shortly after these events [the raid of the Montfort estate and the violation of her body], Grace Montfort disappeared and was never seen again. The waters of Pamlico Sound tell of sweet oblivion for the broken hearted found within their soft embraces” (71). The loss of reputation leaves Grace, as a Victorian fallen woman, with suicide as the only proper response. In this opening episode, Hopkins

On the holy day, Sunday, before the Montforts are set to leave Bermuda, the narrator mentions that Grace is away from her home visiting friends, and when Mr. Montfort’s pastor questions how him about his wife’s feelings regarding the move, Mr. Montfort boastfully replies “[s]he has had her choice but prefers hardships with me to life without me” (29). According to the cult of true womanhood, it is essential for women to create the ideal domestic space, a realm of virtue perfected, so that their husbands and sons carry this morality into the public with them. Grace’s conspicuous absence during what the text represents as a moral crisis marks the beginning of her fall. And her inability to keep her home securely located among the honor and civility of the British Empire suggests that she has not exercised upon her husband the virtuous influence of a true woman. When the family arrives in North Carolina, Montfort becomes the envy of his neighbors for his beautiful and gracious wife. But the avariciousness that the economic system of slavery breeds alongside the routine commodification of human beings turns Grace’s attractiveness into her greatest vulnerability. Anson Pollock’s relentless acquisitiveness, alongside Pollock and Charles Montfort’s willingness to subordinate feeling to profit, brings about Grace’s death. While Hopkins critique of the

Instead of the “selfish” attributes of the white New Woman—sexual freedom and individual accomplishment—Hopkins’ expression of New Womanhood emphasizes community accomplishment and race progress. Hopkins further rejects the undergirding patriarchal ideology of Washington’s New Negro Woman in addition to the capitalistic individualism and consumption of the white New Woman. Instead, the New Women of Contending Forces contend with the legacy of slavery and work to heal this history of violence through local, collective action and a cultural identity that bases itself in this activism instead of warped conceptions of virtuousness and submission to male