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Speculating backward: speculative rewritings of the past as anti-colonial protest

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Speculating backward: speculative rewritings of the past as anti-colonial protest

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Content Speculating Backward:
Speculative Rewritings of the Past as Anti-Colonial Protest
By
Katie Googe
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)
May 2024

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Copyright 2024 Katie Googe

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Dedication:
To everyone who’s made me laugh over the last seven years. I needed it.

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Acknowledgements:
I would like to begin by thanking my committee, without whom this project would never
have been completed, and certainly would never have taken this shape. First, thank you to John
Carlos Rowe for his support through every step of this process. The inspiration for this
dissertation began in his nineteenth century American literature class and grew under his
guidance through complete revisions of the argument, numerous drafts and revisions, and many
many emails. His thoughtful and clear advice has not only made this project stronger and
clearer but helped me better understand my own research and argument. Thank you also to
Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus, for the long conversations about this dissertation and my own goals
and for your warmth and encouragement throughout the process. Thank you to Karen Tongson
for helping me hone my understanding of theory in classes and continuing to bring that rigor and
sense of justice to my committee.
Within the department, I am also grateful to Emily Anderson, Joseph Boone, Zakiyyah
Jackson, and Elda María Román for helping me through the exam process before I arrived at
the dissertation. The ideas for this dissertation also owe a great deal to the classes I took with
Bill Handley and Lan Duong. Many thanks to Devin Griffiths for his feedback on this project as
part of my job application process and his support as I applied for jobs and worked to finish this
dissertation. Thank you also to Flora Ruiz, Javier Franco, Jeanne Weiss, Janalynn Bliss and the
staff of the English Department who helped me through the many deadlines and paperwork of
the PhD process.
Thank you also to my fellow graduate students (and new PhDs!) Khaliah, Allison, Tisha,
Krishna, Sam, Nick, Eli, and Zach for their support and company in the dissertation process.
This really is easier to do with a community. Others in that community include the students I
have taught both in the Writing Program and Thematic Option. I am so grateful for the energy,
insight, and generosity they extended to me during our time together. My chapter on Pauline

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Hopkins in particular is informed by the discussions I had with my Spring 2021 CORE 112 class
about Of One Blood, Ethiopianism, and utopias.
I would also like to thank Mike, Bud, Loni, Joseph, Lexi, Beth, and all the other staff and
researchers at ONE Archives for giving me a place to do meaningful work and be in an
academic community that was not all about my own research. Working with you has truly been
one of the highlights of the last seven years.
Finally, thank you to my friends and family for supporting, encouraging, and putting up
with me throughout this long process. Thank you especially to my father, Kaylah, Megan,
Allison, and Khaliah for proofreading and giving feedback on various pieces of this dissertation.
Thank you for catching my spelling mistakes and making sure that I’m actually saying what I
mean. I am also extremely grateful to my mother, my grandparents, Nicole, Jen, Monica, Traci,
Ben, Colleen, Wallace, Senna, Sage, Sarah, Joffre, Erin, Morrison, and everyone else who
listened to me talk about this, sent encouraging messages, and helped me keep going. I could
not have done it without all of you.

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Abstract:
Despite its long association with the future, many authors of newly emerging forms of
speculative fiction at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century turned to
the past as the site of their imagined narratives. Whether through time travel, alternate history,
or the rediscovery of hidden societies, entire genres of fiction arose that considered how
changing the past might impact the present and the future. In this project, I take up works by
American authors from the 1880s to the 1930s who use these past-oriented forms of
speculative fiction to resist the racism and imperialism of their contemporary political and
popular culture. Many of the reimaginings of history written at this time reinforce Hegelian
theories of progress, where societies “evolve” over time into more rational and scientifically
oriented civilizations. I build on the work of scholars such as John Rieder to explore how these
works function as colonialist propaganda, before to authors whose own perspectives on history
undermine the racist and sexist narratives that underpin this teleological model of history.
This project focuses on four works by authors of different genres and subject positions
that serve as case studies in anti-colonial revisions of time: Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee
in King Arthur’s Court (1889), Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood (1903), C.L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry
and Northwest Smith stories, and Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939). I
consider the speculative strategies these authors employ as what Christopher Castiglia calls
“practices of hope,” in which critique is used to imagine possibilities outside of normative
systems. I take these authors as models for how to turn to the past as a source of inspiration
and activist energy in our present. Just as these texts revise the past to discuss issues of
imperialism, racism, and authoritarianism, I seek to incorporate their imaginative works into a
more capacious history of American literature and speculative fiction.

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Table of Contents
Dedication......................................................................................................................................ii
Acknowledgements.......................................................................................................................iii
Abstract..........................................................................................................................................v
Introduction....................................................................................................................................1
Chapter 1: A Colonialist Yankee in King Arthur’s Court..............................................................23
Chapter 2: The Recovered Worlds of Pauline Hopkins...............................................................67
Chapter 3: Weird Genders, Genres, and Times in C.L. Moore.................................................110
Chapter 4: Nation, Hierarchy, and Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses..............................................150
Epilogue.....................................................................................................................................194
Bibliography...............................................................................................................................198

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Introduction
How we talk about the past is the subject of fierce debate in the United States in 2024.
The 1619 Project and the Advanced Placement African American Studies curriculum have
become topics of national conversation, as have the efforts by politicians in states such as
Florida and Texas to ban or restrict these efforts at teaching students about slavery,
imperialism, and other shameful parts of the country’s history. This conflict is making headlines,
impacting elections, and disrupting school board meetings across the country. It is raising
fundamental questions about whose history deserves to be taught and shared and
remembered. It asks what stories are we telling about our past? What perspectives are we
missing? And how do our historical narratives shape our understanding of the present?
These debates show the power and the political possibilities that come from attempts by
both ends of the political spectrum to change the public’s conception of history. However, these
conversations about our perceptions of the past have never been exclusively the province of
historians. Fiction has long offered authors the ability to imagine history otherwise, to tell
different stories about the past without the constraints of veracity, and to help us reconsider our
own time by imagining worlds that never were. These fictional revisions of history can center the
experiences of people of color, give women new kinds of power, and open up queer
temporalities. While speculative fiction is often associated with future-oriented genres such as
science fiction, it provides a wide variety of tools, from time travel to hidden civilizations to
alternate histories, that can broaden our understanding of the past to include more diverse
racialized and gendered perspectives. And in reimagining history, these authors can make their
voices heard in our present and even our future.
Speculative works create complex temporalities and deploy them for a range of
ideological ends, from a convoluted justification of colonial atrocities to a deliberate effort to
undermine popular models of time as a challenge to colonial power. At the end of the nineteenth

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and beginning of the twentieth century, as genres such as science fiction, fantasy, and horror
began to gain popularity and establish themselves as a form of literary production, many of the
most popular speculative works echoed and perpetuated the racist and imperialist narratives
that dominated politics and science. But in this dissertation, I focus on a handful of texts from
this period that approached history from an anti-colonial perspective. I consider A Connecticut
Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) by Mark Twain, Of One Blood (1902-1903) by Pauline
Hopkins, the Northwest Smith (1933-1938) and Jirel of Joiry stories (1934-1939) by C.L. Moore,
and Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) by Zora Neale Hurston, each of which incorporates
different forms of speculation to reimagine history in ways that push back against the racist and
colonialist narratives that have dominated both literature and culture for the last 150 years.
These authors also lived at a time in which the norms of history were changing and the
question of who had a right to history was important not just for academics, but for politics and
popular culture. The emergence of anthropology and archeology, the popularization of Darwin’s
theory of evolution, and the professionalization of history as a scientific endeavor all changed
how people at the turn of the twentieth century thought about the past. Many in this period clung
to reactionary histories that justified European colonialism or lionized the slaveholding architects
of the Confederate States of America. The authors I discuss in this dissertation stepped into this
debate about history not with concrete answers, but with provocations. They imagined worlds
from a variety of different perspectives, none of which proposed a fact about history, but all of
which offered truths about historical narratives. Unlike the reactionary revisionists, these authors
rejected the growing confidence in rational history, and offered new temporal models that
centered the experiences of African Americans, colonized people, and women. While these
authors wrote at different times in this period, each of them uses the tools of speculative fiction
to create a narrative that offers new theories of history, not just revisions of historical events.
They present a past that is more capacious and less bound by temporal norms. By considering
the forms that this critique took at the beginning of the formation of our current system of

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genres, we can learn new strategies of resistance to the oppressive historical narratives that still
hold power in our own time and context.
I am considering all of these texts as works of speculative fiction, a term which has its
own complicated and contested history. It was not widely adopted until the mid-twentieth
century, when it was often used as a synonym for science fiction (Prucher 200). However, for
this project, I follow Alexis Lothian’s definition of speculative fiction as a “term that is roomier,
more evocative, and also more specific,” since it focuses on writing that is an “act of
speculation: of imagining things otherwise than they are, and of creating stories from that
impulse” (15). Instead of thinking of speculative fiction as a specific and neatly defined genre, I
consider it a literary category that can include a variety of genres that engage in different forms
of speculative thought. The most acclaimed of the speculative genres is science fiction, which
generally includes works that imagine the social and technological conditions of the future, such
as Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot (1950) or Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The
equally popular fantasy genre tends to offer magic and mythical creatures, either in an alternate
world, such as Middle Earth in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1949), or in a
supernatural version of our own world, as in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight (2005). Horror,
meanwhile, is primarily defined by its intention to induce fear in the audience, and it can
incorporate elements of fantasy, like the protagonist's psychic powers in Stephen King’s Carrie
(1974), or science fiction, such as the setting of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979). Utopian fiction
authors usually have a political goal to their depiction of an ideal society, but this genre has
largely fallen out of fashion since its heyday in the wake of Edward Bellamy’s Looking
Backward: 2000-1887 (1888). Dystopia, utopia’s pessimistic counterpart, remains popular both
as literature, including George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and in mainstream works
like Susan Collins’s The Hunger Games (2008). Alternate history is less common than many
other speculative genres, but it is one of the most central to this particular project. It focuses on
versions of history that differ from real events, such as Germany winning World War II in Philip

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K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962). While these genres have distinct conventions, they
can each be applied by authors who are writing about the past. In this dissertation, I examine
some examples from the period in which these genres began to crystalize in order to learn more
about approaches to history that open new spaces for transformative narratives.
Colonial Space and Time
Each of the speculative genres has its own relationship to time and history, but they all
reflect changes in conceptions of temporality that took place during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries in Europe and places colonized by Europeans. To understand the
emergence of these kinds of writing and the context of my specific case studies, I will take a
moment in this introduction to discuss this changing understanding of time and its relationship to
both colonialism and genre. According to Bliss Cua Lim, this shift began with mechanization of
time and the invention of the mechanical clock. From there Europeans began to develop
modern homogeneous time, gradually replacing traditional, unequal hourly divisions
handed down since antiquity with abstract, uniform periods… [as] a means of exercising
social, political, and economic control over periods of work and leisure; it obscures the
ceaselessly changing plurality of our existence in time; and it underwrites a linear,
developmental notion of progress. (10-11)
Mechanized timekeeping and the related ideas of uniform time and progress came to permeate
the worldview of Europeans and their American heirs during the Enlightenment and Industrial
Revolution. The printing press expanded access to historical and scientific information, while
also spreading homogenous time and an awareness of one’s place in history. These radical
intellectual shifts combined with industrialization to make mechanized time a greater part of
more people’s lives until much of the population of Europe and the United States lived by the
factory whistle or the railroad schedule.

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The impact of this changing understanding of time can be seen in the new literary forms
that emerged in the nineteenth century. According to György Lukács in The Historical Novel, the
wide spread of news, the broad enactment of Enlightenment principles in the French Revolution,
and the turmoil that resulted from both developments, “for the first time made history a mass
experience” (23). This allowed the common people to see themselves as part of a historical
narrative. Lukács argues that this is the impetus for the historical novel, whose task is “bringing
the past to life as the prehistory of the present, in giving poetic lie to those historical, social and
human forces which, in the long course of evolution, have made our present day life what it is”
(53). Once people saw themselves as part of history, they came to understand the past as
fundamentally different from their lives and became correspondingly interested in how the
human experience had changed across time. Authors began writing the historical novel, which
uses research and extrapolation from known information about the past, and the futuristic novel,
which “transforms the present into the pre-history of the future” through extrapolation (Beaumont
37). Once the population understood themselves as a part of a historical trajectory, they could
imagine both backward and forward across time. This explains the emergence of time travel
fiction in particular at the end of the nineteenth century. If the past becomes a foreign country,
then it also becomes a space that can be explored. Time travel is a device that allows an author
to portray both past and future unknown worlds through the eyes of a character who
(presumably) has more in common with the readers than the inhabitants of the other time.
The public in the nineteenth century also began to express an interest in both alternate
pasts and the scientific innovations that were “making history” at the time. Ben Carver explains
that speculative writing “appeared where new knowledge disciplines were being formed, and…
alternate history was a means to reflect on how scientific, cultural, and historical discoveries
altered the understanding of the past” (1). This is true not only for the white men in colonial
centers, but also for women, African Americans, and colonized peoples whose experiences
gave them a very different relationship to both science and history. Many of the earliest writers

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from a variety of positionalities whose works are now considered speculative fiction, did not
focus on the temporal future, but on the possibilities of recent technological innovation. Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and The Last Man (1826), and some of E.T.A. Hoffman’s stories,
including “The Sandman” (1817) and “The Automata” (1819), were responding to both the new
perception of history and new scientific knowledge. Science had been an object of increasing
fascination for Europeans since the Enlightenment, and it began to exert an important influence
on fiction even in the early nineteenth century. Luigi Galvani’s experimentation with electricity
famously inspired Frankenstein, while Hoffmann’s titular automata reflect the late eighteenthcentury clockwork craze.
This popular interest in science was a powerful cultural force throughout this period. As
Peter Novick explains in his book about the rise of objectivity in the study of history, “[s]cience
(‘objective science,’ the ‘scientific fact’) was never more highly regarded in the United States,
was never more of a cult, than in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (31). In
researching the changes that took place over the course of the Enlightenment, Michel Foucault
was especially struck by “the suddenness and thoroughness with which certain sciences were
sometimes reorganized; and the fact that at the same time similar changes occurred in
apparently very different disciplines” (xii). With the Enlightenment, even the study of history lost
its traditional emphasis on narrative. While Romantics of the late eighteenth century retained an
interest in the artistry of history, by the end of the nineteenth century positivist history’s scientific
and rational methodologies became the standard. This changed the historian’s task, since it was
no longer the goal to “restore to language all the words that had been buried,” instead they
should be “undertaking a meticulous examination of things themselves for the first time, and
then of transcribing what it has gathered in smooth, neutralized, and faithful words” (Foucault
142). The empirical study of history emerged at the same time as botany and zoology became
systematized and new horizons of physics and chemistry emerged. The rise of objectivity was

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part of the same movement that emphasized the sciences and the primacy of rationality and
progress.
In this period, science, rationality, and progress became intertwined and central to the
identity of Europeans and Americans, especially white men. The emphasis on reason in
European thought only increased the general prestige of scientific ways of thinking because
science was “presented as an objective and therefore apolitical mode of thought, ontologically
distinct from the subjective, variable, and fanciful methodologies taken up by the humanities,
[which] gave a veneer of objectivity to what might otherwise have appeared a paranoid spread
of suspicion” (Castiglia 157-158). This system of beliefs began to identify rationality as the only
path to significant scientific and cultural achievement, which meant that reason-based societies
were inherently more “mature” and “civilized” than those who held to “superstition.” Of course,
the white men who devised this system held themselves to be the pinnacle of rationality.
Women were considered hysterical and religions other than Christianity were dismissed as
superstitious, which relegated people outside of Europe to “irrationality.” Even before Darwin
introduced the model of evolution by natural selection, many within Europe’s sphere of influence
came to believe that whole societies could evolve to become fitter, more rational, and more
technologically advanced—that is, more like Europe. As Lukács explains:
Progress is no longer seen as an essentially unhistorical struggle between humanist
reason and feudal-absolutist unreason. According to the new interpretation the
reasonableness of human progress develops ever increasingly out of the inner conflict of
social forces in history itself; according to this interpretation history itself is the bearer
and realizer of human progress. (27)
This model of social evolution only makes sense to a population that has a strong sense of
history, because to see how much “progress” a society has made, it has to reflect on the past.
The Enlightenment gave Europeans and their American intellectual descendants an image of
history as linear and the past and the present as totally distinct.

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This separation between the past and the present was heightened by the extent to which
peoples’ lives changed radically over the course of a few generations. Until the nineteenth
century, “it was theoretically and generally assumed that nothing fundamentally new could occur
until the end of the world. Within the Christian doctrine of ages, all chronological datings
belonged to the last epoch of world history” (Koselleck 161). Instead of a consistent existence
until doomsday, people could no longer expect that their lives would look like that of their
parents or that their children’s lives would look anything like theirs. This belief in progress
combined with earlier religious conceptions of time to form a new teleological view of history.
Philosophers such as Georg Friedrich Hegel theorized rapid change as a good and necessary
part of human existence and a step in the path toward cultural perfection. Hegel believed that
human societies went through successive stages of civilization that manifested in increasingly
“mature” artistic production and political structure. He specifically condemned Asian cultures as
less “evolved” than European “civilization,” and he often ignored the achievements of African
and indigenous American societies altogether. He understood this progress in a specifically
Christian context, in part because he believed that Christianity was the highest form of religion
yet developed. But he also asserted that Christian belief in God “supplies us with the key to
world history. For we have here a definite knowledge of providence and its plan. It is one of the
central doctrines of Christianity that providence has ruled and continues to rule the world, and
that everything which happens in the world is determined by and commensurate with the divine
government” (41). By putting all of human history into this framework, Hegel suggested both that
the European civilization from which he was writing was the current peak of human existence,
but also that there was progress still to make toward the full manifestation of the divine plan.
This perspective would be adopted by the Social Darwinists at the end of the nineteenth
century as they applied the idea of evolution through natural selection to entire cultures. The
concept of “survival of the fittest” gave a scientific veneer to the racist and Eurocentric
ideologies that already sought to distinguish white men from racialized and gendered others.

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The belief in the evolution of societies remained important in anthropology and literary theory
well into the twentieth century. Hegel’s ideas were taken up by the anthropologist James
George Frazer in his writings about world mythology in his influential text The Golden Bough.
Frazer published the first edition in 1890, but he continued to revise and supplement his work
until a twelve-volume edition that he completed in 1915. Frazer posits the existence of
“universal Ages of Magic, Religion, and Science which could not have been ordered differently
and which must necessarily culminate in the rational scientific habit of thought” (Vickery 22). As
these various theories of social evolution built on each other and permeated the European
cultural sphere, both philosophers and the public began to place less “rational” cultures earlier
on the timeline of “progress.” Anyone who practiced magic or a non-Christian religion, especially
traditional African religions, came to be understood as belonging to a past time and therefore
their culture was considered a relic that no longer had a place in the modern scientific world.
It is difficult to say to what extent increased European exploration and conquest
contributed to a belief in progress and to what extent a belief in progress prompted and justified
exploration and colonization. By the nineteenth century, however, they were clearly mutually
reinforcing and well-established. Chattel slavery in the Americas had fully adopted its racialized
dynamic, and anyone outside of the realm of “whiteness” was deemed “primitive” enough to be
colonized. This colonization even resulted in more rigid gender roles as a way to enforce
European difference from societies in which women had more political or religious power. It is
notable that European “[n]atural philosophy had always made universal claims, but by the
eighteenth century, the practical basis for these claims was increasingly global, fostering new
confidence in the universal validity of such knowledge” (Delbourgo and Dew 7). Gathering
knowledge from around the world became increasingly important to the major scientific
discoveries of the nineteenth century. Darwin, for example, developed his theory of evolution
through European exploration, and the disciplines of archeology and anthropology both
emerged out of a desire to scientifically study the people and historical sites of non-European

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cultures. The development of historical time and the importance of rational scientific study are
inextricable from the origins of European colonialism.
Once this temporal classification began, Europeans and later white Americans began to
place themselves at the peak of a hierarchy that they believed could categorize the entire world.
Hegel is explicit about this, claiming that
The Orientals do not know that the spirit or man as such are free in themselves…. They
only know that One is free; but for this very reason, such freedom is mere arbitrariness,
savagery, and brutal passion…. The consciousness of freedom first awoke among the
Greeks, and they were accordingly free; but, like the Romans, they only knew that
Some, and not all men as such, are free…. The Germanic nations, with the rise of
Christianity, were the first to realise that man is by nature free, and that freedom of the
spirit is his very essence” (54-55).
Of course, this meant that any society that had not industrialized or had not done so to
European standards was considered “primitive” and belonging to an earlier stage of human
development. This system was usually explained in terms of culture, but it reified sexist and
racist norms by devaluing the accomplishments of women and non-white peoples.
Schema such as Hegel’s, or even to some extent Darwin’s, which placed beings into a
developmental chronology provided a new way of thinking about the past, geography, and
people from other cultures. Koselleck discusses the nineteenth-century development of the
theory “of the nonsimultaneity of diverse but, in a chronological sense, simultaneous histories.
With the opening up of the world, the most different but coexisting cultural levels were brought
into view spatially and, by way of synchronic comparison, were diachronically classified” (166).
This conflation of the spatial and the temporal allowed Europeans to place the people they
encountered in colonial spaces on a spectrum from most to least “civilized” in a worldview that
Anne McClintock calls “anachronistic space.” This popular conceptualization of space and time

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both relies on and reinforces a very specific view of history. McClintock defines anachronistic
space as the view of the world in which:
movement through space becomes analogous to movement through time. History
becomes shaped around two opposing directions: the progress forward of humanity from
slouching deprivation to erect, enlightened reason. The other movement presents the
reverse: regression backward to what I call anachronistic space… from white, male
adulthood to a primordial, black degeneracy usually incarnated in women. (9-10)
This perspective made traveling from Europe or the United States to other geographic locations
into a form of time travel that claimed to teach “civilized” “explorers” about the development of
cultures at different “stages” of progress. This model is closely related to Hegel’s view of human
history, and it reflects a belief that there is a “progress” toward an ideal, rational, scientific
society and away from the “backward” and “superstitious” past that came to be represented by
colonized peoples. Anachronistic space theoretically implies that the people of the colony could
achieve “civilization” like that of Europe, but it rests on a fundamentally racist and sexist view of
the world. Therefore, those who believed in this model often refused to acknowledge the
accomplishments of even those people of color who did meet European standards of
“civilization.”
In this worldview, Europe and the United States were seen as the most “advanced”
places in the world and that the rest of the globe was, in some way, the past of these “civilized”
nations. “The heart of Africa,” Pacific Islands, and the jungles and plateaus of Central and South
America that were inhabited by racialized others, were not just different locations but
represented the “primitive” past relative to Europe’s and the United States’ “futures.” After
several centuries of European exploration, these distant places became both better known and
more accessible to Europeans and Americans. A new wave of travelers, scientists, and
colonizers made their way to these “primitive” locations, and they often shared the same racial
prejudices as their predecessors. As a result, “colonial expansion and the European encounter

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with radically heterogeneous worlds were temporalized. Though intractable differences divulged
by culture contact always threatened to expose the fiction of a single homogeneous present,
such differences were temporally managed by distancing the indigene from the colonizer’s
present” (Lim 45). As is often the case, increased contact between colonizers and those who
they considered Other led to more strict distinctions between “us” and “them.” Race and gender
became increasingly important means of defining and organizing society. Europeans created
classification systems and theories of time specifically to remove themselves from the same
ontological category as indigenous Americans, Africans, and others.
Johannes Fabian identifies this tendency in anthropology as the “denial of coevalness,”
which he defines as “a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of
anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse”
(31). Theoretically it is more difficult to dismiss people with whom one is regularly interacting as
completely Other; they are present and in conversation and therefore clearly have some degree
of common humanity. However, by mentally placing people of different races and genders into
the past, they no longer have to be considered contemporaries and treated as full human
beings. This practice serves to “insert a gap between the observer and the observed, to deny
the lived experience that binds the observer to the belief, practice, or person she or he is
presently observing” (Lim 89). This then provides an excuse for the mistreatment of the Other,
since this view of the world can never allow for a genuine human relationship between, for
example, a European and an African.
The changing perception of history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the
mechanization of time, and the emergence of the myth of progress are all inextricable from
Europeans’ increased contact with peoples in other parts of the world and the subjugation and
mistreatment of those peoples. All these forces combined to produce a framework in which
“relationships between parts of the world (in the widest sense of both natural and sociocultural
entities) can be understood as temporal relations. Dispersal in space reflects directly, which is

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not to say simply or in obvious ways, sequence in Time” (Fabian 11-12). The contortions of
space and time needed to accommodate this flawed philosophy is visible, for example in the
writings of Hegel. In the early nineteenth-century context that Hegel wrote, the trans-Atlantic
slave trade—but not chattel slavery itself—was outlawed by Great Britain and the United States.
In his discussion of world history, Hegel objects to slavery as “primitive” and asserts that it
prevents societies from achieving greater freedom and civilization. At the same time, he does
not seem to notice how this contradicts his assertation that the most “civilized” nation, “whose
concept of the spirit is highest is in tune with the times and rules over the others. It may well be
that nations whose concepts are less advanced survive, but they exist only on the periphery of
world history” (60). Hegel believed that cultures that were more “advanced” would by right
dominate those who had not yet “progressed,” and in Hegel’s cultural context, that advancement
was measured by the standards of Enlightenment rationality and European scientific
achievements.
This insistence on measuring everyone by the normative standards of European
progress was one of the most powerful claims that colonizers could offer to other “civilized” to
explain the atrocities they committed against peoples around the globe. As Lim observes, “a
view of time as homogeneous, epitomized by the ideology of progress, served as a temporal
justification for imperialist expansion” (12). Imperialists did not all deploy the same strategies in
their treatment of the Other, but they shared a fundamental belief in the “primitivism” of nonEuropean cultures and even of women and people of color living in European cultures. In some
instances, imperialists believed that “progress” demanded a eugenic plan to eradicate everyone
who was insufficiently “evolved.” Others used it as a justification to extract resources from
colonized nations for the “greater good” of European progress. For some this manifested as a
“civilizing mission” to bring the rest of the world to European standards of science and
rationality.

14
While thinkers in both Europe and the United States broadly agreed on their societies as
the pinnacle of civilization, the United States was acknowledged to have a different relationship
to progress. Carver notes that “[a]ssigning America and Europe different positions on the
historical arc from ascendency to decline was common on both sides of the Atlantic” (207-208).
The most popular understanding of this was that the United States was younger, more vigorous,
and therefore a stronger nation than those in Europe. Following Hegel, many believed that
Europe was close to completing the process in which “[a] nation makes internal advances; it
develops further and is ultimately destroyed” and replaced by a new nation to whom the world
spirit has passed (56). This allowed the people of the United States to maintain the “AngloSaxon” identity that had justified their treatment of enslaved Africans and indigenous Americans.
They could then distinguish themselves from “savagery” of racialized people from certain parts
of South America, Asia, and, above all, Africa. At the same time, this ideology let them hold
themselves apart from the decadence and stagnation they perceived in Europe.
As a result, authors in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century wrote from a
unique perspective on the relationship between temporality, rationality, and colonialism. The
dominant ideology believed that the United States was unique because by the end of the
nineteenth century it contained within its national boundaries what was perceived to be the full
range of human development. The western part of the continent was still “wild” and “savage,”
while eastern cities like New York and Boston were centers of art, science, and “civilization.”
The “winning” of the “untamed” parts of the continent was seen as a proving ground for
American vitality that kept the nation from falling victim to European decadence. In what Carver
considers the first alternate history novel written in the United States, Castello Holford’s
Aristopia (1895), the author “selects the most productive mercantile and political elements of
European identity, liberates them from their ‘courtly’ restraints, and transplants them to the New
World where they could be properly fulfilled” (Carver 220). Holford and others like him believed

15
that the promises of both the Enlightenment and Biblical prophecy could become realities in this
new nation.
Practically, nineteenth-century American colonization of the continent provided a
convenient source for the raw materials required by “civilization.” Europeans had to go to Africa
for their timber or gold, while Americans could claim that the resources of the frontier west were
already theirs by right of Manifest Destiny. The transcontinental railroad moved “from the past of
their ‘backward’ locations to the present of an industrial, capitalist economy…. Temporalizations
expressed as passage from savagery to civilization, from peasant to industrial society, have
long served an ideology whose ultimate purpose has been to justify the procurement of
commodities for our markets” (Fabian 95). The United States first used this ideology to justify
their own mistreatment of the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas and then claimed that their
ability to span the entire course of civilization set them apart even from their European
counterparts.
This belief that the people of the United States were chosen to take up Europe’s role as
the pinnacle of culture is visible in the ideology of Manifest Destiny and the justification for the
Spanish-American War. It also appears in conversations about imperialism, where expansion
overseas was considered to be “America as not acting American at all, but… representing
imperialism as a foreign activity, an aberration from the national commitment to freeing the
captive,” which re-frames American imperialism as “a narrative of rescue… from the tyranny of
an Old World empire on the one hand, and from the anarchy of revolution and self-rule on the
other” (Kaplan 92). This ideology was present even at the founding of the nation, since “the
sense of unique national destiny and purpose that pervaded the Revolutionary generation had
its roots deep in colonial America and in Europe” (Horsman 82). The voters and leaders of this
nation, for better and for worse, often acted accordingly. These beliefs justified American
intervention in other nations and also contributed to the wave of interest in science and
innovation in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

16
Speculating Backward
The interest in science, the new perspective on history, and the increased pace of
colonialism all influenced the formation of genres during this period. From Edgar Allan Poe’s
chilling horror stories to Jules Verne’s proto-science fiction to the fantasies of Lord Dunsany that
inspired Tolkien these texts and the genres that they helped define reflect the cultural
preoccupations of the authors’ societies. Works of fantasy imagined contact with strange worlds
that were explicitly not like our own, but their reliance on magic and other irrational elements
generally aligned them with the past. If they otherwise touched on current events, they did so
primarily through allegory. Meanwhile, genres such as utopian fiction often applied rational and
scientific methods to solve specific contemporary political questions. As a wide range of
speculative genres emerged, they each offered specific ways of imagining the past, the future,
and the relationship between time and progress.
Science fiction and other more explicitly future-oriented genres tended to be the most
overt in their embrace of the myth of progress. They are often associated with the archetype of
a white male scientist who is attempting to improve humanity through scientific innovation.
These works share a common perspective on time with the historical novel, which is aware of
“the strangeness of engaging with imaginary work which strives to explain something that is
other than one’s contemporary knowledge and experience: the past. In this a cognate genre is
science fiction, which involves a conscious interaction with a clearly unfamiliar set of
landscapes, technologies and circumstances” (De Groot 4). These similarities help explain
many of the sexist and colonialist ideologies of future-oriented speculative fiction. The common
science fiction plots of exploration and contact between different societies often draw directly
from colonialist nonfiction and its gendered perspective on intercultural contact. Meanwhile,
science fiction’s obsession with new technologies perpetuates the cult of rationality. Lothian
argues that it is no surprise that many of these imagined futures are Eurocentric and even

17
eugenicist, since “[l]inear, literal articulations of utopian visions, dystopian fears, and futuristic
extrapolations are inextricably entangled with the reproduction of racialized heteronormativity,
with spatial and cultural colonization” (19). The emphasis on rationality and hierarchy in this
period created a powerful association between science, whiteness, and the European norms of
gender and sexuality. Colonialist propaganda encouraged reproductive heterosexuality among
white populations so that they would have “the best ye breed” to maintain control over the
empire (Kipling). This intersection of these rigid ideas about race and gender created white
women as pure domestic angels who were contrasted with the lustful and even “mannish”
women of other races. This perspective led to uncountable instances of sexual violence, where
non-white women either in colonial situations or within chattel slavery were considered sexually
available or dehumanized too much for their objections to be taken seriously. It also reinforced
the idea that men of color must be kept “in check” so that they could not threaten white women,
either physically, or with the “danger” of interracial sexual contact that might result in white
women having mixed race children rather than propagating the white race.
However, the myth of progress did not just permeate speculative fiction about the future.
Alternate histories, lost worlds, and stories of time travel to the past all promoted colonialist
ideas, often by literalizing the temporal dimension of anachronistic space in some way. Lost
world novels are particularly prone to this plot, since they allow the protagonist’s journey through
space to function as time travel to a society whose geographic isolation has resulted in stasis
rather than progress. Time travel narratives accomplish the reverse by turning time into a space
that can be traversed. Alternate history novels like Aristopia or H.G. Wells’s Men Like Gods
(1923) tend to be less literal, but they often incorporate someone who has the author’s
contemporary knowledge of science and history into the narrative. Even in these past-oriented
speculative texts, authors created narratives that reflected the popular obsession with science
and progress and thereby reinforced Hegel’s spatial and temporal schema.

18
However, in the face of pervasive ideologies of rationality, authors such as Twain,
Hopkins, Moore and Hurston offer a vision of the world that does not accord with anachronistic
space. They introduce irrational elements to a rationally presented history, blur the boundaries
of race, gender, and time that uphold cultural hierarchies, and challenge the idea of a linear path
toward rationality. By considering these texts in the context of late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century speculative fiction, we can gain new insights into the relationship between
speculative fiction, time, and colonialism. We can better understand how these genres upheld
racist, sexist, and colonialist attitudes and how authors challenged these norms. In going
against the prevailing current of both mainstream literature and speculative fiction specifically,
these authors create new theories of history that undermine the ideological foundations of the
colonial project.
This project focuses on four case studies of this anti-colonial speculative fiction, which
challenge the dominant cultural forces of their time by pointing out the irrationality of nineteenthcentury American society, putting different times into contact with each other, and lifting up a
wider variety of racialized and gendered perspectives. In her 2018 book Old Futures, Lothian
examines alternate temporalities in futuristic works from the past century. She looks at historical
images of the future because “one of the things that both queer theory and fictional speculation
can do is question the structures around which we base our valuations of what progress
signifies, who benefits from which forms of demand for social change, and what it means to
‘have’ a future or be denied one” (16). Informed by Lothian’s project, this dissertation turns to
authors who raise these questions in speculative pasts rather than speculative futures. I argue
that it is not only important to consider who can have a future, but who has access to the past
and how our images of the past shape our understandings of history and progress. In our
current moment of reactionary forces that want to preserve a historical narrative that centers
white men, it is essential to consider how feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial writers have
imagined their own history. The authors I examine use the tools of speculative fiction to rewrite

19
history because speculation provides “a starting point for temporal critique, one that is
enmeshed in the very idiom of homogeneous time yet strains against it, producing a quality of
uncanniness” (Lim 26). Each of my case studies trouble the idea of a homogenous time that
progresses from barbarism to civilization, and they thereby challenge their readers to imagine
ways to implement alternative formulations of time.
The first chapter discusses the innovative use of time travel to the past in Mark Twain’s
1889 novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Published only a year after Looking
Backward, Twain set his decidedly pessimistic novel about progress in the distant past. By
sending protagonist Hank Morgan back in to sixth-century England, Twain reverses accepted
ideas of time and geography in ways that prefigure Twain’s later anti-imperialist activism. Hank’s
attempt to colonize Arthurian England literalizes the concept of anachronistic space by placing
the site of colonization in the past. At the same time, it prefigures later science fictional anticolonialism such as H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1897) by showing the horrors of
colonization unleashed on a white European population. This meeting of times allows Twain to
criticize both nostalgia for the feudal past and the conviction that industrialization would lead to
a utopian future. He demonstrates how both of these beliefs perpetuate systems that specifically
oppress people of color around the world. I argue that Twain depicts Hank’s downfall as the
result of the same greediness, short-sightedness, and cruelty that Hank criticizes in the
“barbarous” feudal society of Camelot. Instead of seeing technology as the savior of humanity,
Twain suggests that his society’s belief in their own rationality and the moral correctness of
progress is not only inhumane but self-destructive.
In the second chapter, I consider how Pauline Hopkins revises the enormously popular
lost world plot in her novel Of One Blood; or The Hidden Self. The chapter begins with a
discussion of the lost world genre, in which European or American explorers “discover” a
location previously unknown to European science. These discoveries not only change history by
revealing a new part of it, but the lost worlds themselves are often portrayed as remnants of a

20
past time, complete with ancient civilizations or even prehistoric animals. These texts are mostly
propagandistic rewritings of early colonialism, where a singular white man is able to conquer a
“primitive” land through his superior technology and scientific knowledge. With this context, I
then turn to Hopkins’s novel, which revises this plot by focusing on the experience of a young
African American man who is passing as white. He journeys to Ethiopia, where he discovers a
hidden utopia that represents both the past and the future of African greatness. I argue that this
particular lost world portrays a divine time that Hopkins believes supersedes the human
constructions of progress and rationality. Hopkins offers her readers a hopeful future that gives
them a reason to keep the faith in the face of racism and colonialism so that they can achieve
the egalitarian world that God intends for them.
The third chapter turns to queer temporalities in the two most popular series written by
the influential pulp magazine author C. L. (Catherine Lucille) Moore. I discuss two series that
seem to have very different protagonists: Northwest Smith is a space cowboy wandering
through an inhabited solar system, while Jirel of Joiry is a powerful medieval warrior who often
crosses into other dimensions to protect her lands and people. However, these series share a
fascination with the weird and a rejection of strict categorizations of gender, genre, and time. In
this chapter I build on the existing feminist interpretations of Moore’s work to consider how the
fluid and undefinable genders of her protagonists are only one element of her broader project of
proposing a new queer temporality that cannot fit easily into Hegelian narratives of progress.
Moore’s stories do not offer a stable universe, but one in which time can stop, slow down, or
double back on itself, which undermines the evolutionary model of time. The future in these
stories is not more rational, so it cannot condemn the past for its irrationality. Instead, this
instability renders people of all times vulnerable to forces that they cannot understand or control.
In Moore’s world, it is dangerous to deny someone’s personhood because of their race or
gender because they may have knowledge or resources that will become necessary to survive
in an unpredictable universe. As a result, Jirel and Northwest both demonstrate a remarkable

21
degree of openness, and their comfort with instability and irrationality provides a model for
readers as we navigate our own temporal landscapes that are not as orderly as homogenous
time suggests.
The final chapter takes up Zora Neale Hurston’s alternate history of the Exodus in
Moses, Man of the Mountain. This radical historical revision draws on both Hurston’s
anthropological training and her personal experience with Black folk traditions to create a hybrid
text that criticizes oppressive notions of cultural purity. Hurston references European and
African American interpretations of Moses throughout the novel, and she challenges the
supremacy of the Christian tradition by incorporating versions of Moses from other African
diasporic religious traditions. Hurston’s portrayal of the Exodus also prefigures twentieth-century
texts like Martin Bernal’s Black Athena (1987) and Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993),
which emphasize the importance of Africans in the formation of European and American
civilizations. Hurston goes even further by refusing to clearly mark her characters as any
specific race, thus demonstrating the absurdity of racial construct. She uses this hybrid text to
criticize twentieth-century nationalist movements that relied on strict notions of racial purity,
including the Black nationalist movements of Marcus Garvey and Elijah Muhammed. In the face
of rising nationalism in her own time, Hurston offers this text as an example of how wellmeaning people can fail to build a folkloric, hybrid, and human-centered community when they
center a group identity over the welfare of individuals.
Over the course of this dissertation, I consider these four works in the context of the
reciprocal relationship that many speculative fiction texts have with racism and colonialism. I
use my case studies as counterexamples to demonstrate the ways in which these genres can
be deployed to undermine popular belief in progress. Each of these texts issues this challenge
from a different social perspective and uses a different speculative strategy to reimagine history.
However, I argue that the ways in which all of these authors present the past complicate simple
notions of linear time and suggest alternatives to Hegel’s teleological view of human history.

22
They undertake this project in the vocabulary of speculation because history “must make do
with thought experiments because it is, by its very nature, a record of unusual and unique
occurrences, each… situated in a singular, nonreplicable spatiotemporal configuration,” and
these authors seek to use this form to highlight “the ordinary, unrecorded progression of human
affairs and the actions of unremarkable or at least forgotten people” (Gallagher 7). This is a
mode that is especially valuable for telling the stories of those who have been excluded from the
history of great men. By examining these rewritings of the past, we can better understand the
ways in which speculative techniques can undermine the very ideologies that have produced
them and lift up marginalized narratives of history.
In the course of my analysis, I hope to highlight the ways in which these four authors
theorize alternative formulations of history. In particular, I am interested in how authors use
speculative fiction not “to prescribe a particular course of action or belief (a mode of instruction
oriented toward those predisposed to agree) but, addressing the disposition of consciousness,
to encourage an imaginative openness to possibilities of otherwiseness that, being flexible and
contingent, may take multiple and unpredictable forms” (Castiglia 177). These texts provide
models for new orientations toward history that can facilitate the work of resisting the
homogenizing narratives of progress. I want to consider how these authors are doing “queer
work within the bends and twists of normative temporalities… toward the production of futures
out of time that take the raw material of dominant futurities and transport it to entirely different
affective terrain” (Lothian 24). And I believe that any journey to a more just future must begin
with a recognition and reconsideration of how we approach the past.

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Chapter 1: A Colonialist Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
In 1888, the novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887 made its relatively obscure author
Edward Bellamy an overnight sensation. Looking Backward was so uniquely popular that
“during the 1890s it was surpassed only by the Bible in book sales…. Three hundred thousand
copies were sold in the first two years” (Pfaelzer 48). This time travel novel imagines a
contemporary man who wakes up in a socialist future where the state is perfectly run by
technology. He even describes the government as a “machine” that is “so logical in its principles
and direct and simple in its workings, that it all but runs itself,” relying on precise statistics of
production and consumption to plan the national economy (Bellamy 181). Looking Backward
sparked a fascination with utopias that persisted in both literary and political circles into the first
years of the twentieth century, in part because it presented a future that appealed to the public’s
belief that science and industry would allow the United States to someday achieve a utopia.
In this environment of technological optimism, bolstered by “[t]he zipper, the sewing
machine, packaged meats, and canned foods[, which] had already demonstrated the laborsaving possibilities of the new machinery,” Mark Twain published his own time travel novel
(Pfaelzer 47). While Twain was fascinated with technology and science throughout his life, he
did not write about fantastical balloon voyages or technocratic governmental reforms. Instead,
his 1889 novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court sends a contemporary industrialist
named Hank Morgan back to Arthurian England and thereby turns the present of his own
nineteenth century into a distant future. When Hank begins to industrialize and modernize this
past, he reverses a number of accepted truths about history. Instead of the English settling in
the Americas, an American colonizes England; time moves backward not forward; and
nineteenth-century “progress” fails to defeat medieval stasis. In these reversals, Twain
separates himself from the mainstream currents of both science fiction and other popular
literatures of the time. He understands that “dispositions change, often en masse, [which]
suggests that they are historically grounded,” and he is deeply concerned about the

24
contemporary belief that progress will lead to utopia (Castiglia 11). He suggests that Hank’s
efforts, and therefore all imperialist endeavors, are not based on a progressive desire to
improve the world but are manifestations of humanity’s “primitive” desire to conquer and
oppress. Twain sees this imperial impulse as both the root of nineteenth-century European and
American civilization and the reason that it will ultimately destroy itself.
While this may seem pessimistic in contrast to the utopian narratives of contemporary
texts like Looking Backward or Aristopia, Twain’s condemnation of his own society also offers a
path toward a future that is not centered on progress. This novel demonstrates that “every
critique is a determined affirmation, an inverted expression of idealism. In offering critiques, we
measure the present or the past against ideals, in comparison to which what is or has been
seems inadequate and unjust” (Castiglia 2-3). Twain uses the speculative technique of time
travel to show the failings of his contemporaries’ view of time as a way to encourage his readers
to find more reparative ideologies. He condemns those who romanticize the past and those who
believe that technology will bring a utopian future. Connecticut Yankee portrays both “supposed
utopias—the idyllic Camelot and the modern industrialized vision of the Yankee—as
undesirable, unpleasant, and indeed truly dystopian,” so that humanity can neither “look back
nostalgically to a lost ‘golden age’ of simplicity and innocence, or look forward to a better future
for mankind” (Shanley and Stillman 274). Both Hegelian progress and Social Darwinism posit
that non-Europeans are static and “backward” in contrast to the progressive and future-oriented
societies of Europe and the United States.
Twain refuses this dichotomy and reverses the conventional order of time, which
exposes the self-destructive desire to conquer at the heart of “progress.” Unlike Bellamy, the
world that Twain presents is not “governed by an ultimate design… a rational process—whose
rationality is not that of a particular subject, but a divine and absolute reason;” instead Hank and
the people of Camelot alike are “at the mercy of contingency” and human fallibility (Hegel 28).
Twain’s encounter between past and present does not result in greater mutual understanding or

25
any “improvements” in history. Instead, he shows how these narratives of history are
constructed in ways that justify the atrocities that people commit in the present. His own
obviously fictional history paints both medieval feudalism and nineteenth-century capitalism as
systems that allow people in power to destroy human life out of their own self-interest.
In an era of both optimism and uneasiness about American imperial projects abroad,
Twain offers an alternate history—both in the literary and historical senses of the term—that
focuses on the inherent cruelty of imperialism. He is not interested in either redeeming the past
or justifying the present, since both societies are built on the domination of others, and the
resulting human suffering cannot be excused. He diverges from the utopian tradition which
“usually separated their worlds by leaping forward into an already accomplished future
perfection, so the actual moment of change is only briefly described by a character rather than
narrated at the novel’s primary diegetic plane,” but he does incorporate two influential
“nineteenth-century subgenres: the historical novel, set in the past and dramatizing critical
events, and the utopian novel, often set in a future state where social conflict has been quelled”
(Gallagher 85). Utopias typically serve as social commentary, and by choosing to write about a
legendary time in his historical novel, Twain focuses his criticism on the way in which the
present imagines history.
Twain wrote in a context where historical romances often featured American archetypes
who would introduce energy and modernity to the narrative. Twain comments on this tradition in
Connecticut Yankee when he actually sends someone with nineteenth-century knowledge to an
earlier point in history where he could dramatically reshape past events. However, Twain denies
Hank the ability to make meaningful historical change. The world Hank leaves is not
fundamentally different from the one in which he arrived. Twain goes even further and includes
details that raise questions about the accuracy of Hank’s account. Twain is skeptical about
anyone’s ability to alter history, but he remains very aware of the stories we tell ourselves about
an unchangeable and unknowable past. Hank implicitly trusts scientific resources, even when

26
his memory of the date of the eclipse provided in an almanac proves to be false. In contrast,
Twain is much less confident in the reliability of totalizing historical narratives. Though Twain did
not have either the term or the established genre of alternate history, he had discussed the
concept long before Connecticut Yankee. In Roughing It (1872), Twain describes an old
secessionist who relies solely on “manufactured history,” such as the idea that the Civil War
began over an incident where northern clergymen tortured southern ladies. Another passenger
responds by manufacturing his own history that claims that the mistreatment of the southern
ladies was only retaliation for the even worse misdeeds of southern clergymen (529). This
incident shows that Twain was already aware of the instability of historical narratives.
Even as historians of the time turned to more empirical positivist history, earlier
Romantic historians’ work shows that the people of this time were familiar with different
approaches to writing about the past. Twain’s anecdote in Roughing It suggests that
misrepresentations of the past were so common that they could only be countered with other
misrepresentations. Amy Kaplan interprets this scene, saying, “by ridiculing these narratives of
historical causation, Twain implicitly calls attention to the omissions out of which such stories
are ‘manufactured’: the history of slavery and the struggle for emancipation” (76). However
distasteful they find history, neither the secessionist nor his interlocutor’s alternate accounts
actually affect past events. The stories serve different political ends, but they cannot change the
fact that hundreds of thousands of people died because Southerners refused to end the cruel
system that was the foundation of their society. Twain’s emphasis on both the destructive drive
to conquest at the heart of nineteenth-century civilization and the falseness of historical
narratives rejects progress that as both futile and treacherous.
As he exposes the unreliability of history, Twain draws attention to the relationship
between his contemporary United States and its pasts, both actual and manufactured. The
colonization of the legendary Camelot by a Yankee industrialist highlights what many at the time
perceived as the divide between the normalized present, the imagined past, and “primitive”

27
places outside of Europe. Twain questions the assumptions that led nineteenth-century
historians to write “chauvinistic declarations of technological determinism [that] naively
trumpeted the rise of allegedly transparent empirical and experimental methods, overlooking the
complex processes of mediation by which ‘modern’ knowledge inevitably continued to be made”
(Delbourgo and Dew 6). By European accounts, the past and non-industrial cultures of the world
could not access this complexity. They are seen as static and having passed into myth in
contrast to the ever-developing present. Even as Twain draws attention to this schema, he
suggests that the “practical” present already has a well-developed mythology of its own.
Camelot is a less immediate past than the Civil War, but it is the ideal setting for Twain’s
alternate history because it has been rewritten and mythologized for centuries. Each of these
revisions have their own political ends, but whether the tale of King Arthur’s downfall is Malory’s
or Tennyson’s or Twain’s, it is always the “tale of utopia thrice lost: lost because always out of
reach in the past, lost because never fully achieved, and lost too outside time because… [w]e
couldn't get there from here even if we had a time machine. Camelot has always been in mythic,
not historical, time” (Alkon 117-118). Arthur’s court is only one of the many pasts that Twain
considered in his career. His oeuvre is littered with “manufactured histories,” tall tales, and
unreliable narrators, all of which open up alternatives in history. Twain’s lack of fidelity to the
facts of history helps illuminate the circumstances, myths, and perceptions that create historical
narratives that are distinct from the actual past. Khouri suggests that though “Twain's works do
not offer an objective analysis of the situation in the economist's or the historian's sense, they
yet record a trauma of history without, however, an acceptance of it” (“From Eden” 54). Stories
like the secessionist’s or Walter Scott’s can rewrite the past, but that will not change the
oppressive systems upon which these societies are built, and therefore they cannot avert the
horrors and tragedies of either the past or the present.

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A Colonialist Yankee
Because Twain presents Connecticut Yankee’s as a first-person account, Hank is the
one ostensibly manufacturing this alternate history. He tells this story through the lens of his
belief that he is an enlightened man whose greater level of civilization justifies the conquest of
the “savage” citizens of Camelot. Hank claims that he must take advantage of the “opportunities
here for a man of knowledge, brains, pluck, and enterprise to sail in and grow up with the
country. The grandest field that ever was; and all my own; not a competitor; not a man who
wasn't a baby to me in acquirements and capacities” (Connecticut Yankee 64). Hank’s language
here echoes that of nineteenth-century colonizers, and it is clear that imperialism
inform[s] Morgan’s entire project of modernizing the sixth century through technological,
political, and behavioral transformations. From his conviction that this goal of progress
justifies his violent and deceptive methods to his attempts to refashion England’s knights
(whom he calls ‘white Indians’) into disciplined subjects, Morgan embodies both an
outlook and a set of strategies characteristic of imperial regimes. (Hsu 115)
Hank believes that it is his right and duty to bring the “primitives” of Camelot into the future
because the ideology of colonialism has permeated his own nineteenth-century culture. Twain
wrote Connecticut Yankee at a moment of mounting imperialist fervor in the United States. The
propaganda of the age suggested that Asia could “offer limitless commercial opportunity while
fulfilling the age-old dream of the westward movement of civilization…. What had so long been
prophesied was to come to pass: arts, sciences, religion, the whole of civilization were to return
to their original birthplace” (Horsman 287). These beliefs and the need for a common national
project in the wake of the Civil War added to the usual rationales of imperial expansion.
Though Twain had not yet developed his coherent anti-imperialist philosophy, Rowe
argues that the failure of Hank’s colonizing mission prefigures Twain’s later political stance.
Connecticut Yankee “relies on cynicism and fatality regarding the inevitability of colonialism, in
this case displacing it to a distant past that effectively universalizes the human susceptibility to

29
conquest and the equally powerful will to conquer” (Rowe 124). Twain’s own experiences of
slavery, war, and imperialism convinced him of both the “savagery” of conquest and its selfdefeating nature. In his youth in Missouri, Twain saw both the systems of violence that
destroyed the lives of millions of enslaved peoples and the apocalyptic conflict of the Civil War
that finally ended the society that fought to preserve slavery. Even after the destruction of the
legal slave system, in “California, Nevada, and Hawaiʻi, Twain witnessed and wrote about a new
post–Civil War system of racial inequality based on the policing of movement, the segregation of
public space, settler colonialism, overseas economic interests, and the production of uneven
vulnerabilities to premature death” (Hsu 4-5). In all these places, Twain would have seen both
the claims that the people of the United States brought civilization to “savages” and the violence
that this “civilization” brought with it.
By the 1880s, over a century of Enlightenment philosophy and the increasing influence
of Darwin’s theories had entrenched the belief that the past was socially and technologically
inferior to the more evolved future. It is no surprise that American literature of this time began to
think through overseas colonial endeavors with “the domestic analogies of Indian-white
relations, slavery, and immigration.… [T]he racialized analogies that empire deployed at home
and abroad created dissonance as well as resonance, as they mutually defined and destabilized
one another” (Kaplan 10). Twain uses these metaphors himself in Following the Equator (1897)
when he compares his experiences in Hawaiʻi and Australia to systems of slavery in the
Southern United States and the Western frontier. Twain locates Hank’s colonialism in the past
of England, but nonetheless intends it to resonate with both the Antebellum South and the
increasingly international imperialism of the United States.
Europe’s longer history of overseas colonization resulted in a more straightforward
version of what McClintock calls anachronistic space: Europe and the United States were the
most evolved nations, and travel to the rest of the world was effectively travel to Europe’s past.
In Connecticut Yankee Twain engages with a slightly different—and specifically American—

30
understanding of the relationship between geography and temporality. From the point of view of
a person like Twain living on the east coast of the United States, “[t]o travel west is to go toward
a cultural future. To travel east is to go toward the cultural past” (Alkon 120). This still
temporalizes physical space but focuses more on the potential of each location than its
achievements. This attitude was not entirely divorced from that of anachronistic space. For
many in the United States “the Old World… has used up its origin whereas the New World is
closer to the moment of creation. The Old World is then viewed as history worn out by millennia
of entropy” (Khouri, “From Eden” 157). Europe’s pastness was intimately tied to its history of
“civilization,” which had once been great, but now was in decline. The frontier West was
simultaneously the future of the United States as an Edenic world yet to be developed, and a
land where men proved themselves by bringing civilization to this “primitives” land.
Hank echoes these real-world imperialists when he approaches the sixth century as a
new frontier that he can tame to serve the larger goal of “progress.” He consistently “presents
history as an upwards trajectory towards the present, from superstition to modern pragmatism
and know-how,” and understands himself as an agent of that evolution (Carver 239). Hank’s
“rational” mind cannot grasp why the people of Camelot reject his attempts to bring them
“civilization.” He frequently complains about the irrationality of the sixth century. He grumbles
that “brains were not needed in a society like that, and indeed would have marred it, hindered it,
spoiled its symmetry—perhaps rendered its existence impossible” (Connecticut Yankee 18).
Hank blames the irrationality of the Catholic Church and the wizard Merlin for keeping the
people of the sixth century impoverished and oppressed. He fails to understand that in his own
society, progress and evolution had become “a kind of alternative to Christian millennialism. The
essence of this new rationalist faith was the belief that moral and political improvement would
necessarily follow the advancement of science and technology, by dispelling the ignorance and
relieving the poverty of traditional society” (Barrus 132). Hank’s project of modernization is also

31
one of rationalization. He sets up schools and newspapers, ostensibly to convince people to
think for themselves rather than obeying authority without question.
However, like the citizens of Camelot, Hank’s convictions are based entirely on faith.
Therefore, he cannot see either the ideology that propels his choices or the violence inherent in
his beliefs. His seemingly kindhearted educational efforts, for example, are still motivated by the
nineteenth-century association between education, rationality, and a particularly American
manifestation of Social Darwinism. Rather than an end unto itself, “[s]elf-betterment, especially
through education, was the way for the fit to survive and the fittest to continue to be the best
survivors” (Oliver 29). “Improvement” is not a neutral idea, but part of a conflict in which there
must be a victor who survives and a loser who perishes. Hank’s program of education is
inextricable from the violence he enacts on the people of the sixth century. Even without Hank’s
ulterior motives for founding schools, one cannot separate the “good” elements of progress from
the ones that created eugenics and justified colonization.
This continues to play out in Hank’s attempt to turn Camelot into a democracy. He
claims to want “a rounded and complete governmental revolution without bloodshed. The result
to be a republic,” though Hank will, of course, be its first president (Connecticut Yankee 442).
He says that the people will govern, but the system he actually enacts “seems to be not so
much rule by people's consent as rule for their good, and as long as he rules for their good, he
can assume their consent” (Barrus 135). In contrast to the professed values of the United
States, Hank is remarkably frank about his own despotic tendencies. He explains that
“despotism would be the absolutely perfect earthly government, if the conditions were the same,
namely, the despot the perfectest individual of the human race, and his lease of life perpetual”
(Connecticut Yankee 85). Hank believes that authoritarian rule only fails because it cannot find
a worthy successor, not because of the inherently limited perspective of the authoritarian. The
novel itself undermines this position when Hank treats the people of Camelot as “the means of
his great project [rather] than its intended beneficiaries…. His preferred means of rule is fraud,

32
although he can use force. He never even considers persuasion. A few individuals with natural
ability he educates; the remainder he leaves in their ignorance, the better to control and
manipulate them” (Barrus 136). Here Twain reveals democracy as a form of government that
will not prevent violence, but merely a change in who is able to decide how to enforce the
state’s will.
Hank takes this power entirely upon himself from the beginning of the novel. He does not
ever consider that the people of Camelot are his equals but always acts from the conviction of
his own rightness. Once again, he is a typical Yankee who embraces the white American belief
in his own superiority and the inherent inferiority of other people. He is what Hegel identifies as
“the son of his own nation at a specific stage in this nation's development. No one can escape
from the spirit of his nation, any more than he can escape from the earth itself” (81). However,
Hank’s society is a violent one that claims moral superiority even as it commits atrocities. So
Twain “dramatizes the violent effects of scientifically justified self-assurance…. We know that,
from the very beginning of the novel (or, at least as soon as he is able to confirm that he is
indeed in medieval Britain), Hank considers himself superior” (Youngberg 324). Because Hank
believes himself more rational and therefore better than the people of the past, he believes that
he should have the same ability to enact violence as the king does under a monarchy.
In this case, Hank directs his violence in exactly the direction that his own training and
education have taught him is appropriate: toward those that he understands as different from
himself. When he sends Hank to the past, Twain literalizes the metaphor of anachronistic
space, where contact between “primitive” people in the colonies and the “civilization” of Europe
or the United States is essentially time travel. Africa was already seen as a sort of preserved
moment of human evolution, so it is not surprising that Hank responds to the people of the sixth
century in much the same way as his contemporaries responded to non-European cultures.
Hank makes this comparison explicit at numerous points throughout the narratives. He
“reasons” that the people of Camelot’s “philosophical bearing is not an outcome of mental

33
training, intellectual fortitude, reasoning; it is mere animal training; they are white Indians”
(Connecticut Yankee 13). Later, he reflects on his efforts to change the government by saying
that the people are “poor material for a republic, because they had been debased so long by
monarchy” and references the real-world discussion about “this or that or the other nation as
possibly being ‘capable of self-government’” (Connecticut Yankee 260). He infantilizes and
dehumanizes the entire country with his claim that they are all “the quaintest and simplest and
trustingest race; why, they were nothing but rabbits” (Connecticut Yankee 64-65). Because
Hegelian progress creates a link between the past and non-European cultures, Hank conceives
of people from his own past in the same terms as colonialists did with their non-European
contemporaries.
Hank’s impressions of the sixth century reflect the hierarchies that nineteenth-century
scholars imposed on the globe. By Hegel’s stages of civilization, Camelot’s monarchy shows
that its people are like what he calls “Orientals,” who “only know that One is free…. This One is
therefore merely a despot” (54). Their belief in magic likewise places them at the earliest stages
of Frazer’s religious schema where they believe in “primitive mimetic rituals and misconceptions
about natural phenomena” (Vickery 25). Hank has internalized these beliefs and behaves
accordingly with the people of Camelot. He dismisses the stories of the knights errant because
they are “not persons to be believed—that is, measured by modern standards of veracity; yet,
measured by the standards of their own time, and scaled accordingly, you got the truth”
(Connecticut Yankee 145). Hank sees that they communicate according to the systems of their
time, but since it does not conform to his Enlightenment standards of rationality, he does not
have to seriously engage with them. Hank is consistently disdainful towards the sixth-century
people who express “non-western attitudes toward storytelling — even toward storytelling as
mere sound” (Morris 168). From a nineteenth-century perspective, after someone hears a story
about a damsel to be rescued, it would be logical to “ask for credentials—yes, and a pointer or
two as to locality of castle, best route to it, and so on” (Connecticut Yankee 91). The residents of

34
Camelot do none of these things, to Hank’s frustration. However, Hank never considers that
their goals in telling these stories and even in questing might be different from his conquestoriented and linear perspective.
Part of why Hank dismisses the narratives of the people of Camelot is that they are not
useful for his imperial project. He cannot market this worldview or use the stories he hears to
draw the maps that were essential to real world colonization. European expeditions to find the
source of the Nile and fill in the “blank areas of the map” often had explicitly imperialist goals
and the results of even “purely” scientific expeditions were used to aid colonial projects. Hank,
therefore, cannot understand or accept that among the residents of Camelot “[n]obody could tell
you how to find any place in the kingdom, for nobody ever went intentionally to any place, but
only struck it by accident in his wanderings, and then generally left it without thinking to inquire
what its name was (Connecticut Yankee 87). Twain demonstrates how geography and
navigation are bound up with colonialism. There is no such thing as pure scientific progress, just
as there is no such thing as impartial education. The society around Twain was based on a
desire to conquer, and therefore it will use any resource it has to make its conquest more likely.
Like many colonizers before him, Hank’s emphasis on verification leads him to disregard nonEuropean systems of knowledge and exclude them from his own understanding of history.
When Hank arrives in the sixth century, he brings with him knowledge of colonial
histories that privilege European conquest and ignore other perspectives. He is quite open
about his historical sources, and he even cites the colonization of the Americas, remembering
“how Columbus, or Cortez, or one of those people, played an eclipse as a saving trump once,
on some savages” just before he takes similar advantage of an eclipse (Connecticut Yankee
37). While Hank uses the eclipse partially to save his own life, he also threatens to leave the
world in darkness unless the king grants him absolute power. He tells Arthur: “whether I blot out
the sun for good, or restore it, shall rest with you. These are the terms, to wit: You shall…
receive all the glories and honors that belong to the kingship; but you shall appoint me your

35
perpetual minister and executive” (Connecticut Yankee 48). The mentality of conquest is so
central to Hank’s worldview that he uses his first advantage to turn Arthur into a figurehead in
his own land. Hank justifies his despotism by claiming to bring civilization to this “dark place” of
the Earth for the good of its inhabitants. Chapter ten is even called “Beginnings of Civilization,”
which echoes the language of the colonial “civilizing mission.” The implications of this
colonialism grow even darker when Hank plans “to send out an expedition to discover America,”
presumably to impose a brutal colonial regime on the indigenous peoples of the Americas
centuries early (Connecticut Yankee 441). He revels in the lack of oversight, and marvels at
“what a despot could do with the resources of a kingdom at his command. Unsuspected by this
dark land, I had the civilization of the nineteenth century booming under its very nose!”
(Connecticut Yankee 85). Because he is the only “colonizer” to arrive in the sixth century, he
lacks all the resources of the imperial state, but this also leaves him free of laws and debates
about the morality of his actions and allows him to enact colonial rule in its purest form.
The disastrous results of Hank’s unfettered colonialism reflect Twain’s cynicism about
imperialism and the societies that engaged in it. Twain’s time in both the frontier West and
Hawaiʻi showed him how the “civilizing mission” served as a front for commercial and political
interests. At this time, Twain did not fully reject the idea of progress. In his autobiography he
writes that Connecticut Yankee “was purposing to contrast… the English life of the whole of the
Middle Ages—with the life of modern Christendom and modern civilization—to the advantage of
the latter, of course” (306). However, both in this novel and in his other writing, Twain
complicates the assumption that the present is superior to the past. In Connecticut Yankee, he
shows how the presentist attitude that drives Hank’s projects in Camelot also leads to his
eventual downfall. In this novel Hank’s “mechanical acumen allows him to see beyond the
‘dreams and phantoms’ that he produces, but his faith in the absolute break between the
nineteenth century and the Middle Ages constitutes a… kind of ‘delirium’” wherein he believes
that his own society is inherently superior to that of the sixth century (Pasqualina 117). Hank’s

36
political failures rest on his nineteenth-century American belief that democracy, Protestantism,
and industrialization are inherently superior to monarchy, Catholicism, and agriculture.
According to the logic of progress, he is right to impose “civilization” on these “backward”
peoples. Hank believes, as did many of Twain’s contemporaries, in “a critical difference
between the few who know the direction of progress and the means for bringing it about, and
the many who do not, with the former having not only the right but also the duty to take the lead,
while the latter cannot claim the right even to be consulted, much less to give their consent”
(Barrus 143). While this attitude theoretically applied to all people, at the end of the nineteenth
century, it was primarily used to argue that the European and American bearers of “civilization”
were justified in destroying the cultures they came into contact with and remaking them in their
own image.
Hank is so completely indoctrinated by the myth of progress that he believes that his
society is completely superior. As soon as he escapes death, he complains that he has “no
soap, no matches, no looking-glass—except a metal one, about as powerful as a pail of water.
And not a chromo. I had been used to chromos for years…. [I]n our house in East Hartford, all
unpretending as it was, you couldn’t go into a room but you would find an insurance-chromo”
(Connecticut Yankee 53-54). He believes that the goods to which he is accustomed are
beneficial, right, and natural, even down to his preferred mass-produced art. Many of his
“improvements” in Camelot therefore center around the technology to produce these goods.
One of his first acts is to open schools that will train the populace to work in factories—owned
by Hank, of course—and build the inventions that he considers necessary to “civilized” life. He
brings to this past “the shared genealogy of mechanical clock, wireless telegraph, and railroad,”
all of which increase “the tendency toward the technical denaturalization, homogenization, and
standardization of time” (Lim 43). This organization time opens up a rift between the past and
the present, or in Hank’s case, between himself and the people around him.

37
As archeology and geology in the nineteenth century gave specific time to the enormous
changes that had happened throughout history, people could now prove that the world did not
look the same as it had a century earlier. This rupture not only produces true historical fiction, as
Lukács discusses, but in Connecticut Yankee, it allows Hank to maintain his distance from the
inhabitants of the sixth century. Hank embodies “the naturalized relation between modern
technology and historical discourse that began to take hold in the second half of the nineteenth
century, one in which technological innovation signaled what many experienced as an absolute
break in historical time” (Pasqualina 104). The past has become so conceptually distant from
the present that even Hank’s physical presence in the sixth century cannot convince him that he
truly exists in the same time as the people he meets. He retains the anthropological separation
that Fabian refers to as the “denial of coevalness,” even of people with whom he is living and
interacting every day. The only way for Hank to treat a person as worthy of his respect and
consideration is for them to reach the impossible standard of nineteenth-century “civilization.”
Hank so insistently denies the coevalness of the people around him that he seeks out
justifications for their inferiority that echo the rhetoric of European colonizers. Hank believes that
“[w]hat lifts him above the rest is the power of his science and technology. He is so much more
powerful than the scientifically illiterate Arthurians that he has—or thinks he has—nothing in
common with them” (Barrus 142). Because the people around him do not share his view of the
world, their perspectives and beliefs have no value. He dismisses inhabitants of Camelot by
saying that “these animals didn’t reason; that they never put this and that together; that all their
talk showed that they didn’t know a discrepancy when they saw it” (Connecticut Yankee 37).
Hank believes that this lack of reason not only makes him superior but means that the people
around him should change their perspective to align more with his own. Even at the end of the
novel, “Morgan never corrects his illusions. At every step of the way, Morgan's companionship
with the king reveals that the ‘reality’ they encounter is an ever-shifting Protean mirage upon
which self-serving interpretations are cast” (Morris 175). Twain, with his experience of

38
manufactured histories, understands that Hank’s nineteenth-century exceptionalism is only a
story he tells himself. Hank has moments of clarity, such as when he admits that “[i]nherited
ideas are a curious thing…. I had mine, the king and his people had theirs. In both cases they
flowed in ruts worn deep by time and habit, and the man who should have proposed to divert
them by reason and argument would have had a long contract on his hands” (Connecticut
Yankee 66). Even while he admits that he is a product of his own inherited ideas, Hank refuses
to believe that anyone else’s ideas are equal to his.
By rationalizing his own superiority, Hank convinces himself that he is the only person
worthy of respect and consideration in the sixth century. He may want to help bring the people
of Camelot into the Enlightenment, but “he is remarkably unconcerned with them as individuals.
In the story he tells, only he stands out as a real person…. The Yankee is no more interested in
the common people who are the putative beneficiaries of his projects. He treats his most
dedicated followers as anonymous proles, even giving them his own names” (Barrus 142). He
renames both Clarence and his own wife and never again refers to them by their previous
names. He claims to care about “Sandy” and their child Hello-Central, but they barely appear
after the first quest on which he earns Sandy’s loyalty. Hank thinks of himself as one of Hegel’s
great men who “know the spirit of the nation and… lead it in accordance with the dictates of the
universal spirit. Thus, individuality falls outside our province, except in the case of those
individuals who translate the will of the national spirit into reality” (52). Except that Hank is a
representative of a “nineteenth-century spirit” that Twain understood as fundamentally focused
on conquest.
Hank’s belief in his own superiority allows him to deny the individuality of those who
most embody the time in which he actually lives. Even his acts of public service do not reckon
with the people’s lived realities. He claims that he wants to “set the slaves free, but that would
not do. I must not interfere too much…. If I lived and prospered I would be the death of slavery,
that I was resolved upon; but I would try to fix it so that when I became its executioner it should

39
be by command of the nation” (Connecticut Yankee 211). He postpones relief for those whose
suffering he ostensibly wants to alleviate until after he has personally prospered and set up his
ideal political system. He undertakes his tasks on the strength of his own will alone, since he
does not see even his allies as unique individuals. He rejects all opportunities for increased
intimacy and understanding. The closest he comes is when he acknowledges that Sandy is “as
sane a person as the kingdom could produce; and yet, from my point of view she was acting like
a crazy woman. My land, the power of training! of influence! of education! It can bring a body up
to believe anything. I had to put myself in Sandy’s place to realize that she was not a lunatic”
(Connecticut Yankee 201-202). He can see that the people around him are part of a different
epistemic tradition, but he is so unwilling to change his own perspective that he considers them
effectively insane. He refuses to move “towards that region where man’s Other must become
the Same as himself” (Foucault 358). Hank sees past and the present as irreconcilably different,
and therefore cannot put himself in a real relationship with the people of a different time.
Hank’s constant disdain for those around him is another way in which he treats the
people of the sixth century as colonial subjects. He claims to offer them a better future, but
[m]uch like European missionaries and other agents of colonialism, he
thinks of himself as a being of pure reason and altruism—a kind of god—living and
acting above the plane of the human, meaning that nothing he might do to accomplish
his purposes can possibly be bad. The poor, ignorant Arthurians he thinks of as existing
below the plane of the human…. For this reason, he never considers what they might be
able to contribute to his projects, beyond what he needs to use them for. (Barrus 145)
Hank enlists Clarence and some other unnamed young men in his project in a strictly limited
and subordinate capacity. They are his collaborators only because they have been educated to
think like him, not because they can translate between worlds or use their local knowledge to
inspire innovation. In one incident he meets a prisoner who “believed that men were about all
alike, and one man as good as another, barring clothes. He said he believed that if you were to

40
strip the nation naked and send a stranger through the crowd, he couldn’t tell the king from a
quack doctor” (Connecticut Yankee 176). This man shares Hank’s professed values, and yet
Hank still does not accept him as a companion or confidant. Instead, Hank sees him just as a
potential worker and “sent him to the Factory” (176). Hank dismisses anyone who is not
specifically trained by him because they represent a past that he refuses to see as anything but
static.
Hank’s rigid thinking only makes his own political ends more difficult. Because he
ignores local knowledge, he cannot accurately communicate or work with the inhabitants of
Camelot. Like Twain’s contemporaries who were surprised that indigenous peoples would fight
to preserve their traditional ways rather than integrate into American society, Hank expects
others to behave according to his logic rather than their own belief systems. At the end of the
novel Hank convinces himself that if he kills the nobility “the people would have nothing to do
but just step to the front with their republic” (Connecticut Yankee 477). He is immediately proven
wrong, however, when the peasantry rises up against him in support of the feudal system. Hank
does not even consider this possibility, despite his earlier observation that the people around
him are “hardened by lifelong everyday familiarity with slavery…. This was what slavery could
do, in the way of ossifying what one may call the superior lobe of human feeling” (211). He fails
to understand that the people of Camelot do not consider themselves slaves because he will not
listen to them. He notes how difficult it is to change people’s minds, and yet he still expects that
he can do so. He extrapolates their future behavior, not from an understanding of the time in
which he lives, but from a nineteenth-century belief in the inevitability of progress.
These reforms might have been more effective if Hank had spent more time among the
people of Camelot or taken more care to understand them, but the very ideology that drove him
to reform also prevented him from engaging with other people as equals. As Barrus explains,
the translation of a consummately modern man into the past allows the reader to “see what, for
better or worse, is distinctive about him. Twain is able to write his novel because he can do what

41
his character apparently cannot: think critically about modernity” (134). Hank critiques the flaws
he finds in the past, but he cannot admit to the flaws of his own time. This reflects his
Enlightenment belief in “a knowledge of Time which is a superior knowledge,” that actually has
since “become an integral part of anthropology's intellectual equipment” (Fabian 10). Though
he falls into many of the traps of nineteenth-century anthropology, Hank does not ever express
an interest in the habits and beliefs of the residents of Camelot. He refuses to extend them his
empathy or even his curiosity. When his future wife Sandy explains situations according to her
worldview, he treats her “as an intellectual child—the same as he does the rest of Arthurian
England. His obliviousness to any potential for irony in her conversations with him, and viceversa, is a measure of their permanent failure to understand each other” (Morris 168). Hank has
thrived under an exploitative system his entire life, so he is invested in perpetuating it.
Throughout his time in Camelot, Hank only seeks to preserve his own perspective and protect
his own sense of identity and therefore cannot ever open himself up to connection with others.
Hank’s willingness to recreate violent systems in Arthurian England claims reflects
nineteenth-century public discussions about anarchy. While Black intellectuals such as W.E.B.
Du Bois “saw empire itself as the prime cause of anarchy throughout its dominion, [Rudyard]
Kipling and other imperialists believed that the anarchic qualities of nonwhite peoples called
forth the need for imperial rule” (Kaplan 13). Hank believes that imperialist violence is rational
and necessary to control the “animals” and “white Indians” he encounters, but the novel
eventually shows how his actions sow chaos. Hank’s wholehearted commitment to imperialism
is interesting given his identity as the “Yankee of the Yankees” (Connecticut Yankee xxxv). At
the end of the nineteenth century, many progressive white Americans believed that the national
embrace of colonial practices was “not acting American at all, but as slavishly imitating the
European game of colonial conquest” (Kaplan 92). Therefore, Kaplan claims that Connecticut
Yankee’s “powerful condemnation of imperialism works here in part by disavowing its centrality
to U.S. identity, by representing imperialism as a foreign activity” (92). At least at the beginning

42
of writing Connecticut Yankee, Twain seemed to identify with this belief and argue that there
was a better and democratic American alternative to both European tyranny and pre-colonial
anarchy. However, over the course of the novel Twain emphasizes that Hank’s conquest is a
direct result of his uniquely American identity. Like the heroes that Lukács praises in Walter
Scott’s writing, Hank is portrayed as a “living human embodiment [of his] historical-social type.”
Scott’s heroes are “unsurpassed in their portrayal of the decent and attractive as well as narrowminded features of the English ‘middle class,’” and Hank is the equivalent figure for a middleclass white man from Connecticut (Lukács 35). As a result, Hank’s colonial project cannot be
reinterpreted as simply an imitation of European colonialism. As Driscoll notes, “Hank's project
of ‘elevating and civilizing’ the inhabitants of Camelot closely parallels the process of
‘Americanizing’ the country's indigenous tribes through education, the acquisition of literacy, and
the introduction of basic technological proficiency” (8). Twain does not absolve Europe of their
colonialism, but he also demonstrates that imperialism is just as central to American culture and
just as destructive.
Imagining the Past
Europe and the United States had different relationships to colonialism in part because
of their different understandings of history. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European
colonizers in the Americas believed that when they crossed the Atlantic they
stepped out of the ‘real’ world into one in which he had the power to will his dreams. But
the magic of the place was of a dual nature…. On the one hand, it led to the execution of
good designs; on the other, it stimulated a monstrous ambition against authority…. [that]
might woo man too far in spirit from the commonday world of human responsibility, the
European world. (Slotkin, Regeneration 35)
However, by Twain’s time, the perceived stasis of Europe relative to the youthful industry of the
United States had turned Europe into a mythologized past. Twain plays with both of these

43
manufactured histories in Connecticut Yankee when he sends Hank “from history to myth. He is
sent altogether outside calendric time into an imaginary universe that partly resembles ours…,
but that is free from the constraints of actual history” (Alkon 117-118). This means that Camelot
can embody the mythology of both the Edenic Americas and the fairy-tale Europe.
However, by combining these two myths, Twain draws attention to their inherent
falseness. Because England is a place of history, it cannot be, as the Americas were
understood to have been, “a primal world of nature, an unclaimed and timeless space occupied
by plants and creatures (some of them human), but not organized by societies and economies;
a world whose only history was the one about to begin” (M.L. Pratt 123). While Hank dismisses
the people of Camelot as “white Indians,” their whiteness and Englishness makes it harder for
Twain’s readers to understand them as “creatures.” White Americans have often disregarded
the history of non-Europeans, but their own sense of national identity requires the
acknowledgement of English history. By the middle of the nineteenth century, “even those
Congressmen who were most critical of the British government usually… respected [the
English] as fellow Anglo-Saxons” (Horsman 221). As a result, Hank’s conquest and the
resistance he encounters is more shocking for his contemporary readers. In Twain’s novel, the
American sense of superiority is so unconstrained that it will not stop its conquest even of fellow
Anglo-Saxons. To Hank the people of the sixth century are “primitive,” and he will use any
excuse to exert his power over others.
Hank’s confidence in his conquest is reinforced by both the United States’ contemporary
imperialism and the literature of the period. Only two years before the publication of Connecticut
Yankee, H. Rider Haggard’s massively successful novel She (1887) popularized the lost world
genre. I will discuss this trend at length in chapter two, but the central premise is that a
European or American “explorer” discovers a previously unknown world and colonizes it. Other
authors such as Charles Major and George Barr McCutcheon wrote two different types of what
Kaplan identifies as “romances of empire,” where dashing American heroes come into contact

44
with the decadent European past. Major’s When Knighthood Was In Flower (1898) and its ilk re
set in the medieval past, where the main character is temperamentally, though not actually,
American. McCutcheon’s Graustark series was a popular variation set in the author’s present in
which an actual American travels to a fictional stagnant European country. Like these romances
of empire, Connecticut Yankee is set in Europe rather than the African and South American
settings preferred by lost world stories. Twain also continues to literalize the temporal
metaphors of these texts by actually writing about a modern man in a historical setting. This
neatly positions Hank as the virile American who is striving against a decaying and decadent
European society.
However, Hank’s methods and attitudes more closely follow the lost world protagonist’s
explicitly colonial perspective. Hank responds to his new situation with the claim that he will
“boss the whole country inside of three months; for I judged I would have the start of the besteducated man in the kingdom by a matter of thirteen hundred years and upward” (Connecticut
Yankee 10). This is a contrast to the romances of empire, which portray Europe as a proving
ground for American masculinity but do not degrade a European country to the status of colony.
As he makes literal the implicit temporal distance of romances of empire, Twain shows that
Hank exploits the people of Camelot in the same way that lost world explorers extract gold from
their newly discovered lands. Connecticut Yankee incorporates elements from both of these
genres, which reveals the extent to which this literature reinforced colonialist ideology. Lost
world novels and romance of empire alike had a reputation as “a nostalgic escape from
modernity to the heartier life of the chivalric warrior; as a collective form of blowing off steam.
Reproducing the terms of imperialist discourse itself, this approach ignores how nostalgia can
abet modern imperial force” (Kaplan 95). While romances of empire looked to European
mythology and the lost worlds reimagined early colonialism, both genres served the same
function. After the closure of the western frontier, these manufactured pasts “imagined exotic
and premodern societies as ideal settings for the regeneration of U.S. manhood” (Hsu 113). In

45
these fictions American men proved that they still possessed the frontier spirit that could bring
progress and energy to a stagnant society.
Twain is clear about the influence of these texts, as Hank cites both historical colonizers
and specific literary traditions. His trick with the eclipse is not just inspired by the colonization of
the Americas, but also by a scene in Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885). Hank also aligns
himself with adventure fiction when he claims to be “just another Robinson Crusoe cast away on
an uninhabited island, with no society but some more or less tame animals, and if I wanted to
make life bearable I must do as he did — invent, contrive, create, reorganize” (Connecticut
Yankee 55). Throughout the novel Twain positions Hank as “a satirical counterpoint to the
popular romantic heroes of the 1880s. In an allegory of colonial administration and development
Morgan introduces modern technologies… to medieval England. However, these reforms give
rise to increasingly strident forms of resistance, to which Morgan responds with increasingly
violent measures” (Hsu 114). Twain’s emphasis on conquest and resistance sets him apart from
other literatures of the period. He subverts the order of lost worlds and romances of Empire by
showing that Hank’s “Yankee” ingenuity destroys both Camelot and his own “progress.” Twain
goes beyond the initial colonization and considers the instability of violent imperial rule.
Twain denies his readers the exotic locations of the nostalgic genres and the new
technologies of early science fiction, and instead focuses on the consequences of colonialism.
Unlike Jules Verne, Twain’s protagonist only has contemporary technology. The setting makes
this technology unusually powerful, but a Colt revolver was much more familiar to Twain’s
readers than Captain Nemo’s submarine. Early science fiction, lost worlds, and romances of
empire often contained lavish descriptions of strange settings, a form they inherited from
nonfiction writing by colonizers. In contrast, Twain borrows descriptions and plot from Thomas
Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485), and thereby refuses to give his reader the same novelty as
his contemporary adventure fiction. Twain alludes to this at the very beginning of Connecticut
Yankee, where Hank complains about the “poor, flat, worm-eaten jokes that had given me the

46
dry gripes when I was a boy thirteen hundred years afterwards” (Connecticut Yankee 28). This
is not a new and exciting land; this is a setting that is so well-known that Twain does not even
have to invent his own details. King Arthur has been a staple of literature for so long that there is
nothing new to say. As Morris notes, “[t]he effect is to reinforce the impression of his manuscript
as a construction from books, verifiable only by his gesture toward the bullet-hole…. Years
before Hayden White, Twain implies that history may be a subgenre of fiction” (165). There is no
recoverable or verifiable truth about Camelot, only the stories that have built up over the
centuries. Twain’s rejection of the literary conventions of his time help to reinforce his point that
history is constantly manufactured out of old materials to serve the author’s own ends.
Twain’s commentary on the construction of history takes place as the Romantic style of
history writing was declining in favor of the more scientific positivist school. As a result, scholars
increasingly sought concrete evidence of past events rather than accepting mythologized
accounts like Malory’s or even Geoffrey of Monmouth’s. The popularization of archeology,
anthropology, and colonial travel writing brought the idea of objective history to popular
audiences, even as they also enjoyed the romances of empire. However, in a society that
increasingly cared about facts, “it is considered tactless and discourteous to suggest that
someone's views are a reflection of his or her background, prejudices, or psychic needs”
(Novick 11). And yet, in Connecticut Yankee, Hank obviously manufactures the narrative based
on his own biases and preferences. As a positivist history, Hank’s story is a failure because it
“never breaks the vicious circle of individual self-confirmation. Hank at first refuses to accept this
situation and disparages the Arthurians for the credence that they give to unbacked assertions
and outrageous claims” (Mitchell 242). However, the only physical evidence that Hank offers for
his account is the bullet hole in the armor, which the museum itself had already concluded was
the result of a soldier from a later time shooting the breastplate. Despite repeatedly
“[d]enouncing Sandy and Merlin as ‘liars’ (both of whom speak in Malory's own words), Hank
nonetheless frequently acts as they do, ignoring the very ‘facts’ and ‘statistics’ that he

47
disdainfully invokes at Arthurian excesses…. Connecticut Yankee flouts the rules of evidence it
invokes [and] ridicules the verifiability it seeks” (Mitchell 243). Hank’s version of events is
equally as manufactured as Malory’s, and progress is as much a myth as the divine right of
kings. The narrative reveals Hank’s belief in his own exceptionalism as mere narcissism.
Twain’s disdain for this hypocrisy is the root of his argument that nineteenth-century civilization
is built on a “primitive” drive to conquer. The idea that the United States in the nineteenth
century is the pinnacle of human history is only another myth that will bring widespread
suffering.
Twain set his own manufactured history in medieval Europe as a critique of romances of
empire and specifically the literary and cultural influence of Walter Scott. Twain saw the dangers
of this nostalgia in the Antebellum South, which “received [Scott] with particular enthusiasm….
Scott's characters were memorialized in the names of steamboats, barges, and stagecoaches,
and… the small library on [one] Mississippi steamboat consisted mostly of Scott's novels”
(Horsman 161). Twain believed that these fictions enabled the elites of the Antebellum South to
delude themselves into thinking that they were noble lords and ladies despite the horrors that
were foundational to their lifestyle. In Life on the Mississippi Twain asserts that Walter Scott’s
writing “checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams
and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems
of government” (346). The Southerners who made these romantic myths central to their selfconception used them in an attempt to paper over both the historical reality of the Middle Ages
and the atrocities committed in their own society.
Twain finds this use of history abhorrent and, as the passenger did to the secessionist in
Roughing It, responds with an opposing manufactured history. Despite its distant setting,
Connecticut Yankee “is structured around the contrast between its Yankee protagonist and an
honor-based, feudal, and serf-holding society that would have resonated with contemporaneous
representations of the South” (Hsu 5). Twain denies his readers a glorious Camelot because he

48
wants them to confront what other histories have elided. Hank describes “a wretched cabin, with
a thatched roof… brawny men, with long, coarse, uncombed hair that hung down over their
faces and made them look like animals… and many wore an iron collar” (Connecticut Yankee
2). This grim history undermines the popular view of the chivalric Middle Ages and emphasizes
the cruelty of the past that Scott’s antebellum admirers ignored. Twain’s Camelot was
a synecdoche for everything that is worst about the past: slavery; arbitrary imprisonment
without trial; inequality before the law; rigid hierarchies in church and state that stifle
intellectual as well as political freedom; absence of democracy; wanton unpunished
killing of the defenseless by the powerful; exploitation of the poor by the rich; intolerance;
superstition; ignorance; and sheer hardship of daily life for most people. (Alkon 124)
Twain’s past directly contrasts with the nostalgic romances that slaveholders used to imagine
themselves as noble and heroic. He wants to show that there is nothing admirable about this
feudal past: it is violent, filthy, corrupt, and—perhaps most devastatingly for a humorist—banal.
Despite the Scott-fueled nostalgia, Twain was not the only nineteenth-century thinker to
condemn the past. What sets Twain apart is that he also criticizes the Hegelian and Social
Darwinist view of social evolution. He expresses “contempt for and disillusion with features of
the modern world he saw around him—which neither the myths of the renewing wilderness nor
of technological progress could assuage. The restaging of the literary-mythic past was intended
to demonstrate… the incoherence of such historical fantasies” (Carver 236). Twain revises the
nostalgic myth of Camelot to expose its inherent violence. However, he also uses medieval
England because it is “the very spring and source of the second great period of the world's
history,” which produced the nineteenth-century horrors of capitalism and colonialism
(Connecticut Yankee 64). To achieve this, Twain finds moments throughout the novel to draw
unflattering comparisons between the sixth century and his present.
Hank’s post-Enlightenment mindset allows him to believe that the nineteenth century is
completely distinct from the past even as his direct experience disproves this idea. He

49
expresses his shock at the ribaldry of King Arthur’s court, but then admits that he had “read
‘Tom Jones,’ and ‘Roderick Random,’ and other books of that kind, and knew that the highest
and first ladies and gentlemen in England had remained little or no cleaner in their talk, and in
the morals and conduct which such talk implies… clear into our own nineteenth century”
(Connecticut Yankee 29). This is one of many parallels Hank finds despite his claim that the
future is superior. He remarks that none of the knights “had any idea where the Holy Grail really
was, and I don't think any of them actually expected to find it…. You see, it was just the
Northwest Passage of that day” (Connecticut Yankee 80). He later compares Merlin to a
spiritualist, since “a crowd was as bad for a magician’s miracle in that day as it was for a
spiritualist’s miracle in mine; there was sure to be some skeptic on hand to turn up the gas at
the crucial moment and spoil everything” (219-220). These parallels are often asides in Hank’s
narration, but their repetition contradicts Hank’s insistence on the rupture between past and
present.
Because of his skepticism about historical truth, Twain never claims that his picture of
the past is accurate. In the preface, he asserts that “[t]he ungentle laws and customs touched
upon in this tale are historical,” but he is not overly concerned with details, since “[o]ne is quite
justified in inferring that whatever one of these laws or customs was lacking in that remote time,
its place was competently filled by a worse one” (Connecticut Yankee xxix). Twain insists that
the past does not have a monopoly on cruelty, though. Throughout the novel, he “questions
teleological models of history by noting troublesome continuities between past and present:
aristocrats are like capitalist robber barons, peasants are like southern freedmen, and the
nineteenth-century protagonist ends up committing its most lawless, violent acts” (Hsu 114).
While Hank draws some of these comparisons off-handedly, he also discusses at length the
persistence of the “backward” institution of slavery into his own lifetime. The residents of
Camelot remind him of “the ‘poor whites’ of our South… who owed their base condition simply
to the presence of slavery in their midst, were yet pusillanimously ready to side with the slave-

50
lords” (Connecticut Yankee 324). As much as Hank insists that his present is better, he
continues to find fault in his own society as he criticizes the past.
Twain condemns his society’s acceptance of slavery in the Antebellum South, but also
exploitation through imperialism and factory labor. In Twain’s autobiography he asserts that the
present is superior to the past only “if we leave out Russia and the royal palace of Belgium…. It
is curious that the most advanced and most enlightened century of all the centuries the sun has
looked upon, should have the ghastly distinction of having produced this mouldy and pietymouthing hypocrite” (306-307). In this passage, Twain first aligns himself with progress, but he
spends the rest of the paragraph viciously attacking the hypocrisy of the modern nations who
permit Russian serfdom and King Leopold’s treatment of the inhabitants of the Belgian Congo.
While Twain may have begun the novel intending to portray progress as beneficial, his
extrapolations about an encounter between the embodiment of nineteenth-century American
industry and a different culture reveal the violence that Twain sees as inherent in his society.
The universality of Twain’s criticism presents “self-consciously unachievable standards for
living, tested and refined in the context of an as-yet-unreal world, against which real conditions
inevitably come up short,” but his continued efforts to effect change demonstrate his hopeful
disposition, “without which social change is impossible.” (Castiglia 4).
Twain’s constant desire to improve his own society is why Hank is specifically a
“Yankee” industrialist, since American violence is not limited to the South. In consultation with
Twain, illustrator Daniel Beard chose to portray a sixth-century slave driver as Jay Gould, “an
unscrupulous financier and railroad speculator whose name became a byword for ruthless
greed” (Griffith and Smith, 364n19). This aligns sixth-century slavery with the exploitation of
workers in factories such as the one that Hank proudly supervises in his present. In Camelot he
calls himself “the Boss” and models his regime after what he learned from the factory, which
recreates the fundamental injustices in his own society. As Shanley and Stillman observe,
Hank’s military academy “closely resembles the medieval Church: it trains its students in skills

51
not available to the rest of the population…. Like the Church also, all his educational facilities
take boys at their most impressionable ages and inculcate them with the Yankee’s ideology”
(273). While Twain may have intended a selective comparison between the past and the
present in Connecticut Yankee, the text itself is much broader in its criticisms, and shows that
what Hank claims is the peak of civilization is inextricably linked to a “primitive” impulse to
violence.
Hank’s fervent belief in the rupture between past and present does not make it true. He
claims moral superiority in his statements about abolition, but Hank’s behavior reveals his
Yankee optimism as little more than the inverted image of the South's neo-feudalism….
[The North] believed too much in the progressive fiction of rupture, motored as that
fiction often was by labor-saving machinery, one of the material foundations of a
postbellum vision of historical progress that promised (however tenuously) to liberate the
United States from its feudal ties. (Pasqualina 106)
Hank expects that his progress and technology will destroy the feudal system because it is
regressive and static. Hegel and the Social Darwinists alike agreed that this stasis could not
resist the spirit or the age and that it would fall to the more fit society. But in Twain’s narrative,
feudalism persists against all odds. When he kills Camelot’s knights, the only real effect is that
the “progressive” society he has created destroys itself in its eagerness to undertake the very
conquest that Hank projects onto the Church and the king.
Imperialist Violence
Because Social Darwinism and Manifest Destiny were products of the rationalist
Enlightenment mindset, they were often seen as inherently progressive. Twain, however, uses
the parallels between the past and the present to suggest that colonialism is ultimately part of a
regressive desire to conquer. While Hank does not explicitly argue that he is more “evolved,” his
insistence on the greatness of his present implies that “his own superior intellect is a natural

52
cause that justifies such claims to authority,” an argument that “the best Social Darwinists of the
nineteenth century could be proud of” (Youngberg 324-325). Supposed markers of intellectual
superiority, such as educational institutions, writing, and mechanization, became essential to
Social Darwinists’ understanding of their own supremacy. This changed the tenor of the
discussion around Manifest Destiny, whose proponents “wholeheartedly embraced the scientific
justification of Social Darwinism for the superiority of America and its consequent attempts to
maintain its superior position among the races of the world” (Oliver 30). By the time Twain wrote
Connecticut Yankee, the United States did indeed claim land from “coast to coast,” but Twain’s
personal experiences in Hawaiʻi showed that the ideology of conquest had not disappeared.
The colonization of Hawaiʻi likely informed Twain’s portrayal of the relationship between
capitalism and colonialism. The owners of sugar plantations did the work of American
imperialism in Hawaiʻi, and Hank identifies with this extractive mindset. He describes learning
his “real trade” over at the “great arms factory,” that produced “guns, revolvers, cannon, boilers,
engines, all sorts of labor-saving machinery” (Connecticut Yankee xxxv). This echoes the
rhetoric of colonial business interests that appears in nonfiction. Under colonialism, it was often
the task of the advance scouts for capitalist “improvement” to encode what they
encounter as “unimproved” and, in keeping with the terms of the anti-conquest, as
disponible, available for improvement…. The European improving eye produces
subsistence habitats as “empty” landscapes, meaningful only in terms of a capitalist
future and of their potential for producing a marketable surplus. (M.L. Pratt 60).
This explains Hank’s insistence that the serfs move from the fields to the factories. He sees
people as “cogs in a machine. His schools and ‘man-factories’ are to turn out technically
competent individuals (or automatons) to run his industries. Hank is as concerned to manage
demand as are the executives of a corporation” (Shanley and Stillman 278). When Hank meets
a hermit who bows continually, he says little about the man’s faith, but calls it “a pity to have all
this power going to waste… so I made a note in my memorandum book, purposing some day to

53
apply a system of elastic cords to him and run a sewing machine with it” Connecticut Yankee
(227). He transforms this man into a piece of machinery for profit. In the capitalist mindset, there
is no room for individuals, only producers and consumers of goods. As a result, “human life has
no intrinsic power; it is more like a commodity to be sold or traded in exchange for power” (Zurlo
60). Like other colonialists, Hank casts aside anyone who does not create economic value.
However, Hank’s commitment to capitalism contributes to his downfall. He refuses to
consider the citizens of the sixth century as real people; therefore, he cannot incorporate them
into his plans as democratic citizens. As Lothian observes, “[l]inear, literal articulations of
utopian visions, dystopian fears, and futuristic extrapolations are inextricably entangled with the
reproduction of racialized heteronormativity, with spatial and cultural colonization, and… with
capital’s fetishization of commodified newness” (19). Hank’s conception of time as linear and
progressive is both produced by and continually reinforcing the capitalist system that he forces
on Camelot. Hank’s attitude has tragic results that point to the discrepancy between Hank’s
actions in the novel and Twain’s perspective as author. Hank claims to be working for the best
interests of everyone, but “[t]he incongruity between the Yankee’s stated goals and the
wholesale slaughter wrought in service” to his ideas causes his downfall when “he does not see
and act on the implications of his ideals” (Shanley and Stillman 278). He treats his subjects as
cogs in a machine and then at the end of the novel expects them to think for themselves. These
two perspectives are fundamentally incompatible and Hank’s failure to recognize this
discrepancy forms the basis of Twain’s criticism of Hank’s imperialist perspective.
Because Twain does not find the spirit of this age admirable, he paints its representative
as cruel and despotic. In this novel he demonstrates that “[o]ne becomes ‘political’ not only by
adopting or refusing an ideological structure,” but in the orientation of one’s interests and
attention (Castiglia 120). Twain was a keen observer of humanity’s flaws, and long before he
openly denounced imperialism, he had already extrapolated the logical and horrific outcomes of
his contemporaneous imperialist rhetoric. In Connecticut Yankee, “Twain adopts the missionary

54
narrative of the civilizing process, but also reveals the way that narrative is intertwined with the
needs of business and colonialism to regulate the movement of bodies and labor” (Kaplan 67).
Twain criticized missionaries in his 1901 anti-imperialist essay “To the Person Sitting in
Darkness,” where he notes that the colonized people “have become suspicious of the Blessings
of Civilization. More—they have begun to examine them. This is not well. The Blessings of
Civilization are all right, and a good commercial property; there could not be a better, in a dim
light” (165). The “Blessings of Civilization” that Hank and his real-world contemporaries bring is
viewed skeptically by those not indoctrinated into homogenous time in part because they are
never truly an altruistic gift. Connecticut Yankee even extrapolates future methods of control
and propaganda. As Rowe observes, “[i]n exposing the ways that the usual tyrants would learn
to disguise themselves as bearers of enlightenment and thus emancipation both from despotic
rule and the drudgery of everyday labor, Twain anticipates… the sort of neoimperialism we
associate with today’s multinational corporations” (125-126). While Twain could not have
foreseen the full extent of imperialism’s development over the course of the twentieth century,
he was already skeptical of the relationship between capitalism and colonialism.
Twain saw the destruction caused by the myth of progress, so he considers true
believers like Hank to be deluded. Their faith in the capitalist system that would destroy them is
just as absurd as the trust of Camelot’s residents in the feudal system that keeps them in
poverty. Hank tries to justify his actions, but his “progressivism is less interested in the
improvement of British culture for its own sake than in the improvement of British culture for
Hank's sake” (Youngberg 326). He prizes the familiarity of chromos, teaches knights to play
baseball, and reorganizes the entire society around his own personal whims and biases. He
brags that “the very first official thing I did, in my administration… was to start a patent office”
(Connecticut Yankee 73). People are still enslaved and lack access to scientific medical care,
but Hank prioritizes a system for people to profit off their inventions, which demonstrates the
limitations of his perspective. He works in a factory, so he does not even consider “one of the

55
most effective tools of Euro-expansionism, western medicine. At a time when medicine was
proving to be one of Europe’s points of leverage” in colonial projects (M.L. Pratt 81). Instead,
Hank confidently establishes a capitalist economy, only to be told in the end that King Arthur
would never have learned of Launcelot and Guenever’s affair “but for one of your modern
improvements—the stock-board” (Connecticut Yankee 460). A war breaks out when the knights
tell Arthur about the affair because they lost money in Launcelot’s speculation. Hank believes so
strongly in the power of the progressive present that he ignores the risks of building a society
around ruthless competition and the accumulation of wealth.
Hank professes his belief in the cult of rationality so fervently that he fails to recognize
his own irrationality. As a result, Hank’s genuinely useful knowledge of the future “is helpless to
vindicate Morgan's selfhood: his death in delusion exposes as futile the Enlightenment
measures of self-preservation his irony encouraged him to adopt” (Morris 162). Hank wrongly
believes that his nineteenth-century rational outlook and accompanying technology will protect
him, but they actually cause his destruction. Hank does not build a beautiful new society; he
only amplifies the most destructive tendencies of his own. As a result, he
has simply replaced the divine right of kings with an equally sacrosanct but unfounded
sovereignty of the Cartesian self, whose hollowness is shown by Morgan's incapacity to
universalize its laws. For example, he objects to laws giving the nobility the power of life
and death over their subjects but supports the legitimacy of the sovereign's power of
pardon, which he then exercises himself.” (Morris 170)
Saving a life may seem admirable, no matter the hypocrisy. However, Hank’s commitment to
Darwinian individualism causes him to take the power of life and death upon himself, since he is
the only person he considers capable of rationality. Under Enlightenment principles, the power
of life and death should only be given to the state. In this case, the state is as deluded by a
belief in its own superiority as Hank is, and it also becomes cruel and arbitrary.

56
This delusion may take many forms. Hank condemns slavery, saying “[t]he blunting
effects of slavery upon the slaveholder’s moral perceptions are known and conceded, the world
over; and a privileged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another
name…. They are the result of the same cause in both cases: the possessor’s old and inbred
custom of regarding himself as a superior being” (Connecticut Yankee 258). Yet throughout the
novel Hank believes that he is inherently fit to rule over the “animals” and “savages” of Camelot.
He constructs this hierarchy from the beginning, when he realizes that “a superior man like me
ought to be shrewd enough to contrive some way to take advantage of such a state of things”
(Connecticut Yankee 35). Hank fails to recognize that “democracy simply substitutes one set of
arbitrary power-relations, based on discourses of money and influence, for slavery and the
hereditary hegemony of aristocracies” (Morris 166). Hank believes himself to be so selfevidently superior, that he does not consider that the hierarchy he sets up is driven by its own
myths. However, Twain seems to agree with Hank’s stated belief that this kind of oppression
corrupts the morality of even the most benevolent despot.
Twain’s own experience of the Civil War and colonialism showed him the cruelty
possible in an “enlightened” democratic society. Both medieval nobility and their descendants in
Twain’s time are driven by a desire to conquer and exploit, and Hank does recognize the
inevitable failure of these systems in other societies. He describes Merlin’s precarious position
as court wizard, saying “[b]ut that men fear him for that he hath the storms and the lightnings
and all the devils that be in hell at his beck and call, they would have dug his entrails out these
many years ago, (Connecticut Yankee 20). But Hank still fails to recognize that he has taken on
the power of both Merlin and the King. He combines their political power and ability to wield
miracles, and he rules through fear from the moment where he threatens to permanently blot
out the sun.
However, the myths of his own society allow him to pretend that he is a benevolent ruler.
Though he calls himself “the Boss,” he maintains that he could not “have felt really and

57
satisfactorily fine and proud and set-up over any title except one that should come from the
nation itself, the only legitimate source” (Connecticut Yankee 69). Like other colonizers, he
claims to prepare the citizens for democracy, but he refuses to believe that they will reject his
values once they have been indoctrinated. This proved as ineffective for Hank as it did for most
colonial powers. Hank fails because his “vision of democracy requires citizens who are at least
minimally competent, [but] Hank plays on, rather than remedies, the ignorance and superstition
of the inhabitants of Arthurian England. Only if they remain ignorant and superstitious can his
technical expertise bring him political power” (Shanley and Stillman 281). Hank claims that he
wants to educate the residents of Camelot into democratic citizens, but he does not take any of
the opportunities to do so. Hank uses his knowledge in the same way as other colonizers: to
further his desire for conquest. When the monks’ well is dry, he does not teach them to fix the
problem themselves. He secretly sends for his own trusted aides and then organizes a fireworks
display to convince the pilgrims that he is a great wizard. He seeks to replace Merlin, Arthur,
and the Church with his own institutions and manufacture a history founded on myths whose
progressive veneer exposes what Twain sees as a “primitive” will to power.
Hank’s turn to despotism echoes the initial colonization of the Americas. The Spanish
monarchy sought to impose a divinely appointed order on the world, but for early colonists the
Americas offered a “relative absence of social restraints on human behavior, the relative ease
with which a strong man could… impose his personal dream of self-aggrandizement on reality.
In Europe all men were under authority; in America all men dreamed they had the power to
become authority” (Slotkin, Regeneration 34). Twain highlights the regressive nature of this
desire to conquer by sending Hank back in time to engage with the eventual colonizers of his
own country. Hank condemns the feudal system, but unlike Camelot’s nobility “Hank does not
kill only those who have offended him. In his eagerness to reform the sixth century and impose
his utopian vision on it, Hank goes out looking for knights to kill” (Shanley and Stillman’s 283).
He challenges the knights to the joust, invites them to charge him, and then begins shooting.

58
The past as Twain presents it is cruel, but sustainable. In contrast, Hank does change
the system, but those changes only cause more destruction. Hank Morgan may prevent some of
the violence of nobles like Morgan Le Fay, but once he decides to commit violence himself,
nothing can stop him. Nineteenth-century technology means that Hank’s violence is “subject to
few natural or physical limits and is blithely impersonal. When Hank wishes to be rid of
someone, he blows them up with dynamite bombs (two at a time); he shoots them with dragoon
revolvers (ten in a moment); and (as the number killed goes into the thousands) mows them
down with Gatling guns” (Shanley and Stillman 282). While Twain does nothing to defend or
justify the violence of the past, he highlights the fact that the changes Hank is able to implement
with his technology are only so disruptive because of their unprecedented violence.
Twain’s belief that “progress” is actually regressive because it will ultimately destroy
itself finds its fullest expression in the Battle of the Sand Belt at the end of the novel. This is
Connecticut Yankee’s “apocalyptic finale in which Morgan's technological revolution no longer
forwards (or feigns) the project of civilization but descends into an aestheticization of violence”
(Pasqualina 115-116). The facade of progressivism falls away to reveal the cruelty that it has
always contained. Hank’s sixth-century empire crumbles under pressure from the static past,
but Hank’s belief in his own superiority convinces him that he can overcome any obstacle. He
and his brainwashed forces fortify themselves in a cave and use his technology to destroy
knights “beyond estimate. Of course, we could not count the dead, because they did not exist as
individuals, but merely as homogeneous protoplasm, with alloys of iron and buttons”
(Connecticut Yankee 481). His claims of wanting to help the people of Camelot, though already
shown to be hypocritical, lose all credibility when he brutally retaliates against the peasants’
choice. Hank expects them to rise up against the Church, but they instead defend feudalism.
Here Twain argues that the kind of progress that Hank believes in will always destroy itself
because it is more concerned with a grand arc of history than with the lives of actual people.

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Hank cannot accept that the people chose their traditions over “civilization,” so he swiftly
punishes their choice. He tells his loyalists that their campaign “will be brief—the briefest in
history. Also the most destructive to life… While one of these men remains alive, our task is not
finished, the war is not ended. We will kill them all” (Connecticut Yankee 482). This genocidal
language is still startling, even after Hank’s cruelty throughout the novel. Barrus asserts that
“[l]ike the Nazi genocide, the mass slaughter that concludes the Connecticut Yankee comes as
a surprise, and for the same reason: a modern man such as the Yankee is not supposed to
commit such atrocities, which are the deeds of tyrants from the barbarous past” (140). Except
that mass slaughter in the name of progress is what colonial regimes had done for centuries.
Hank’s mission of uplift was already a story that he manufactured to justify his desire to become
“the Boss,” and he destroys his entire enterprise because he will not give up on “progress.”
While Battle of the Sand Belt is shocking, Twain carefully lays the foundations for Hank’s
violence throughout the novel. Hank observes that Morgan Le Fay does not understand killing
peasants as a crime; it is “her right; and upon her right she stood, serenely and unconscious of
offense. She was a result of generations of training in the unexamined and unassailed belief
that the law which permitted her to kill a subject when she chose was a perfectly right and
righteous one” (Connecticut Yankee 171). Hank is likewise the product of a society whose
understanding of race, evolution, and history have convinced him that as a “civilized” man, he is
justified in slaughtering “savages.” He protests that he will fundamentally change the feudal
system, but “both sides of the dialectic are essentially the same…. [T]he justified powers (in
Hank's case, in spite of his appeals to natural causes and democratic sentiment) arrogate to
themselves the authority to enact unthinkable violence on those ‘others’ relegated to inferiority”
(Youngberg 315-316). Hank Morgan is just as much a product of his training as Morgan Le Fay
is of hers, and the nineteenth century mindset is no less violent than that of medieval Europe.
Twain wrote about the dangers of progress in other works. In Following the Equator, he
includes statistics from Hawaiʻi “that starkly record the decimation of the native population from

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the arrival of Captain Cook in 1788 to the present. He specifically notes that in the time between
his two visits the population was reduced by half. Disease and death thus implicate Twain’s
return to the islands as inseparable from this violent lineage of colonial encounters” (Kaplan 55).
Colonialism in Hawaiʻi was driven by profit, but this capitalist conquest had the same effect on
the people as any military approach. In “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” Twain makes this
comparison clear, when he says that the personification of “civilization” must “see how much
stock is left on hand in the way of Glass Beads and Theology, and Maxim Guns and Hymn
Books, and Trade- Gin and Torches of Progress and Enlightenment (patent adjustable ones,
good to fire villages with, upon occasion)” (165). Much like Hank, the missionaries and
imperialists Twain criticizes here understood “Enlightenment” and “Progress” as weapons to be
used against people who were not up to their standards of “civilization.” This repeats the
narrative of nineteenth-century indigenous resistance in the Americas, which “was used to
condemn them further as semihuman savages. Anglo-Saxon aggression was hailed as manly,
Indian resistance was condemned as beastly” (Horsman 205). Twain reverses time and points
out the extent to which Hank’s history is manufactured, and thereby exposes the “savagery”
inherent in progress even as progress attempts to position itself as “savagery’s” opposite.
Because Hank, like many people in the nineteenth-century, insulated himself from the
reality of his own “primitive” impulses with a new mythology of progress, he is shocked to learn
that his society is fundamentally self-destructive. Alkon calls the Battle of the Sand Belt
“nineteenth-century science fiction's most disturbing image of industrialized warfare, inevitably
read now as a grim forewarning of the horrors that were to unfold in the trenches…. Twain's
intention was less prophecy than diagnosis of industrial civilization's darkest potentialities for
self-destruction” (132). Hank’s rule in Camelot is a universal disaster. It fails to change anything,
breaks his spirit, and causes the destruction of countless lives. Throughout the novel
Hank is out to convert people to his way…. [I]f he must kill them in order to save them or
to convert them, he will do that. Eager to realize his utopian program of democracy and

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material plenty in sixth century England, Hank Morgan instead uses his technological
skills to kill on an unprecedented scale. Twain grimly shows the results of the
combination of technology with the American goals… to make the world safe for
democracy and to impose material plenty on all. (Shanley and Stillman 283)
If there is any chance for change, Twain believes that it must come about through a genuinely
democracy. However, Twain is skeptical of humanity’s willingness to let go of tradition, and he
has personal experience with the tendency of nineteenth-century “civilization” to conquest. As a
result, he understands “progress” as inherently violent. To make this point, Connecticut Yankee
“ironically invests the notion of labor-saving machinery (the foundation of technological utopias
like Bellamy's Looking Backward) with a sinister new range of meaning” (Alkon 133). This
technology does make life easier when it does not destroy society. At the end of the novel, Hank
describes the situation thus: “[o]ur camp was enclosed with a solid wall of the dead—a bulwark,
a breastwork, of corpses, you may say. One terrible thing about this thing was the absence of
human voices; there were no cheers, no war cries” (Connecticut Yankee 488). Technology
cannot bring about a utopia when it is used to slaughter and dehumanize, and Twain believes
that nineteenth-century society is structured around the dehumanization and conquest of others.
Hank’s Failure
Twain argues that this violent foundation will inevitably cause his American society to
destroy itself. Within the novel, the static past prevails because Hank, the partisan of progress,
is delusional. Despite everything, “Morgan's efforts to use technology as a basis for democracy
collapse in a final hideous battle against forces of the old order, where the Yankee's nineteenthcentury weapons bring no victory for reason or democracy but only appalling slaughter” (Alkon
117). In romances of empire, lost world novels, and other alternate histories, the present is
powerful enough to change the past. However, Hank’s belief in this mythology is proven false.
The nineteenth-century is not approaching a better future, it just tells itself a story that hides

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what Twain sees as a fundamental human failing. Hank’s final stand in “the old magician's haunt
remodeled with electric lights and modern weaponry is another ominous sign of human inability
to break away from the past” (Alkon 131). Hank cannot alter history, no matter how hard he
tries. The fall of Camelot at the Battle of the Sand Belt instead of Malory’s Battle of Salisbury
does not fundamentally change the narrative. It only poisons the air that Hank and his soldiers
breathe and turns Hank’s victory into the instrument of his own destruction.
This pessimism distinguishes Connecticut Yankee from other literature of the time, since
it challenges the Hegelian belief that individual humans can change history. Twain often wrote
stories in which the protagonist’s “[e]nergy confronts a jellied world and is finally absorbed by
the system's entropy…. [W]e face a new type of hero: the reformer. In The Prince and the
Pauper and The Private Recollections of Joan of Arc reform is endorsed; in A Connecticut
Yankee it is ridiculed: in both cases it is shown to be ineffective…. The Connecticut Yankee dies
after senselessly blowing up the world he worked so hard to create” (Khouri, “From Eden” 164).
In the tradition of speculative fiction, Twain sets up this novel as a thought experiment, and his
conclusion is that progress contains the seeds of its own destruction.
Connecticut Yankee argues that humans cannot be trusted to reform their own societies.
The novel is “unflinching in its condemnation of ideological or utopian zeal…. [T]he Yankee’s
effort to impose his utopia on others brings about destruction and death on a monstrous scale”
(Shanley and Stillman 269). In some ways, Twain’s assessment of the violence that can be
committed in the name of democracy is prescient of the rise of fascism in the 1930s and
nationalism in the present. Like many dangerous populists, Hank claims to be an enemy of the
elites, but himself becomes a “democratic despot: the political leader who, in the name of the
people, rules absolutely over them. Modernity thus does not do away with despotism; it only
changes its ideological justification, from the (presumed) will of God to the (presumed) good of
the people” (Barrus 136). Hank is deeply invested in keeping his position as “the Boss,” and will

63
go to whatever end to preserve his power. This is not separate from his ideological ends, but
integral to progressive definitions of utopia that demand social “evolution” even for the unwilling.
In the popular imagination of Twain’s contemporaries, the past was either a romantic
dream or a barbaric and unenlightened age. Over the course of the novel, Twain skewers both
of those perceptions, not just through his portrayal of the past, but through the avatar of his
present. When he isolates and distills the “spirit of the age” into a single character, Twain
reveals what he understands as the fundamental lie of his contemporary society. The myth of
progress is really only the most recent manifestation of the human drive to conquer others, and
we are seeing the continued impact of this ideology in our present. The plot portrays Hank’s
“‘progress’ as a circular or gnostic experience, and shows how every step he takes ostensibly in
the name of the Enlightenment merely hastens calamity. This impression is strengthened when
it is revealed that, from the beginning, Morgan's printing presses, schools, and factories were
built atop dynamite deposits wired to facilitate their destruction” (Morris 165). Twain warns that a
society built on this destructive myth will ultimately destroy itself, and we can see how our
continued belief in the power of new technology has created a world where large-scale violence
is easier, social systems are fraying, and resources are diverted to a small group of wealthy
individuals in wealthy nations. Barrus argues that Connecticut Yankee “shows how the progress
[Twain’s] contemporaries believed would abolish such evils from humanity's ‘barbaric’ past
could actually reintroduce them in its ‘civilized’ future,” but I believe that the extent to which
violence is embedded in Hank’s new society shows that progress is itself a form of violence
(133).
By using the conventions of science and technology to make this point, Twain sets
himself apart from both the political thinkers and the speculative fiction authors of his time. He
recognizes “the degree to which science and technology will contribute to the economic and
political forms of human exploitation and territorial conquest” that we still see today (Rowe 133).
Technology is not just a tool of oppression; it is born out of the same “progressive” ideology that

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produces imperialism. Therefore, technology cannot be redemptive, and the mechanistic
mindset will always lead to destruction not creation or improvement. “Artificial intelligence,” for
example, does make hiring processes fairer, it only encodes and obscures existing structural
iniquity. As Alkon observes, “Twain in turning to the past as an arena for exploring the
consequences of industrialization provided a new setting allowing better engagement of science
fiction with history” (123). Twain draws on many of the themes of early speculative fiction, such
as progress, technology, and colonialism, but he recombines them for the exact opposite
ideological effect of many of his contemporaries.
Throughout the novel Twain deliberately plays with the order of time. He puts a
technologically advanced and “civilized” contemporary into a distant and mythologized past.
This juxtaposes “the marvelous[, which] corresponds to the pre-Enlightenment [with] the
uncanny [of] the post-Enlightenment… [to] point outside temporal normativity, to intimate the
breakdown of chronological historical time” (Lim 31). Hank begins in the nineteenth century,
journeys to the past, changes nothing, and then returns to his present, all without ever
questioning the progressive mindset. Because he refuses to incorporate new knowledges or
listen to the voices of “primitives,” Hank learns nothing. The novel presents a “paralyzed setting”
and introduces “a character who is able to infuse some energy into it only to cause this
character to be himself eliminated by the system's own entropy…. The Dark Ages epitomizes for
Twain the impossibility for man to produce a historical rupture in an entropic society” (Khouri,
“From Eden” 165).
Unlike more optimistic works, such as Looking Backward, Twain sees progress as
ultimately futile. Both novels feature a nineteenth-century man who “is abruptly deposited in an
alternate reality and forced to orient himself through a series of intensive tutorials and close
observations… [T]he protagonist’s acceptance of the alternate world is designed to model our
acceptance of the fictional premise” (Gallagher 94). But where Bellamy wants to provoke the
reader into action by showing a world that could be, Twain hopes to shock his reader with a

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depiction of the failure of progress in the world that is. The victory of stasis in Connecticut
Yankee means that it is often considered a time-loop narrative, which calls into question
a fundamental aspect of causation: that time flows in one direction only. Instead of time
appearing to pass from an expectant future through an immediate present to a
remembered past, it is the human body and consciousness that passes backward and
forward, establishing history as a physically traversable terrain. (Mitchell 244-245)
On some level this is consistent with the ideology of anachronistic space, but Twain does not
reinforce accepted ideas about progress. Instead, “he uses an intrusion of present (the Yankee)
into past (Arthurian England) as a device for juxtaposing earlier with later modes of fictional
narration, and fictional with factual modes of writing in order to suggest new ways of reading
each in dialogue with the others” (Alkon 125). Time travel creates opportunities for new forms of
relationship, and by refusing to engage with the Other, Hank and the imperialists like him, deny
the coevalness of the people around them and impoverish their own experience.
Connecticut Yankee is undeniably pessimistic. Its early comedic tone gives way to the
horror of the Battle of the Sand Belt and the misery of Hank on his deathbed in the nineteenth
century. However, this pessimism does succumb to despair. Twain’s attitude in this novel is best
described in terms of an active and political hope, which “relies on disappointment and failure.
And because ideals are by nature incommensurate with lived conditions, hope is a continuous
dissatisfaction; unlike wants, it cannot be satisfied. Instead, hope, as a perpetual openness to
the as-yet-untried, is an end in itself. Hope is a disposition toward the imaginative value of
dissatisfaction” (Castiglia 4). Twain has not seen a world that can satisfy his utopian longings,
and he actively rejects the most popular utopian stances of his day. But by critiquing these
ideologies and exposing their inhumanity, he acts out of a hope that there can someday be an
end to violence and oppression. He warns his society because he believes it can do better.
Twain depicts Hank as the embodiment of the nineteenth-century modernity that runs
factories and invents new processes. While twenty-first century modernity is different in

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aesthetics, it is built on the same belief that technology and rationality will save us. Over the
course of this novel, Twain forces his readers to confront that these fundamental beliefs do not
just give us chromos or iPhones. This ideology also creates weapons of war, enslaves millions
to produce luxury goods, and justifies atrocities in the name of progress. Hank is of the tradition
that “not only saw God's kingdom moving to the West, but also thought of America as the place
from which the renovation of the world would begin” (Horsman 83). But his triumphant return to
the sixth century fails. America does not regenerate Europe, and Hank’s insistence on progress
and inability to acknowledge others results in his own destruction. This critique is not limited to
Twain’s own time, and the horrors he portrays have resonated throughout the twentieth century
and continue to do so today. None of Hank’s atrocities are “safely confined to some remote past
symbolized by the Yankee's sixth century…. The horrible past encountered by Twain's
Connecticut Yankee is also an emblem of what still too often exists in our present, and of what
despite technological and political progress may be humanity's bleak future” (Alkon 124). Since
the Enlightenment, most people who live under Europe’s cultural influence have believed that
the past is fundamentally different from the future. This has allowed for the oppression of people
who are seen to be “living in the past” by European standards and has also regulated whose
versions of history are considered valid. In this novel, Twain literalizes the metaphors of
anachronistic space to reveal the absurdity of Hegelian notions of progress. He argues that our
belief in the superiority of the present masks society’s self-destructive corruption, selfishness,
and cruelty. He issues a warning to the people of his time and to the future in the hope that
confronting the atrocities of progress will help us live up to our ideals of freedom and equality.

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Chapter 2: The Recovered Worlds of Pauline Hopkins
Just over halfway through Pauline Hopkins’s 1902-1903 serially published novel Of One
Blood; or The Hidden Self, the main character awakes in an unexpected situation. Where only
the day before he had been traveling through ancient ruins, he finds himself “on a couch
composed of silken cushions, in a room of vast dimensions, formed of fluted columns of pure
white marble upholding a domed ceiling where the light poured in through rose-colored glass in
soft prismatic shades” (Of One Blood 112). This is a familiar scene for an adventure story of this
period. The protagonists of the popular novel She by H. Rider Haggard similarly pass through a
ruined city to find “sculptures in bas-relief…. Near to the entrance of the cave both pictures and
writings were worn away, but further in they were in many cases absolutely fresh and perfect as
the day on which the sculptor had ceased work on them” (132). The similarities between these
two locations and the awe they inspire in the characters demonstrates the connection between
Hopkins’s novel and the enormously popular lost world genre. What distinguishes Of One Blood
even in these passages from Haggard’s more conventional work, is its emphasis on the present
of the lost world and the utopian elements of its society.
The lost world novel gained popularity in Great Britain and the United States in the
1880s, and like Twain’s Connecticut Yankee and other time travel narratives, lost world stories
sought to comment on the relationship between the past, present, and future. The genre was
retroactively named after Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel The Lost World, which contains
many of the common features that had gained popularity on both sides of the Atlantic. These
texts follow daring European or American protagonists who “discover” hidden ancient lands in a
fanciful retelling of early imperialism. Authors produced many variations on these themes and
plots, some of which, such as Of One Blood, even attempt to counter the lost world’s colonialist
origins. Instead of merely celebrating the imperialist-as-adventurer and his—almost always
his—place as the liaison between white racial history and a colonized Other, Of One Blood’s
mixed-race hero discovers his connection to the African greatness of the hidden city of

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Telassar. Hopkins’s aim was explicitly political, and her vision of an African utopia upends the
genre’s colonialist fantasy of Africa as primitive and in need of white intervention. Hopkins
reappropriates this racist genre as an attempt “to envision a world beyond the racially inflected
contours of the United States” (Daniels-Rauterkus 125). This lost world is simultaneously a
place of African American racial origin as discovered by a white-passing Black American, and
the site of Black futurity as understood via biblical prophecy. In this chapter I will first explore the
relationship between the conventional lost world novel and colonialism. I will then discuss how
Hopkins reframes the genre to challenge her readers’ understanding of history, progress, and
the relationship between temporality and geography.
From the beginning, the lost world genre was deeply entangled with racism and
colonialism, which raises the question of what it can offer to an anti-racist activist like Pauline
Hopkins. Hopkins uses the lost world’s connection between the imagined past and a possible
future to propose a model of history that is more egalitarian and less hierarchical. Even a genre
that relies “on the violent and gendered progress narratives of technological modernity,
capitalism and colonization” is not necessarily “coextensive with them. Linear models of
temporality give fictions of imagined futures shape and structure; yet an extrapolative orientation
toward alternative futurities can also demonstrate the complex and contradictory ways such
modes can be employed” (Lothian 19-20). Where Lothian considers narratives of the future,
Hopkins remakes a past-oriented genre to offer a more solid foundation for an anti-racist future.
In many ways, Of One Blood follows the conventions of the lost world story. The
protagonist is Reuel Briggs, a hard-working young medical student who joins an archeological
expedition to Africa in the company of a professor who believes that the secret to European
culture may be found in African ruins. Before he even finds the lost world, Reuel proves himself
just as much an adventurer as Haggard’s Alan Quartermain or Conan Doyle’s Professor
Challenger when he fights off a lion. Reuel then stumbles into a hole and discovers the hidden
utopia of Telassar. Like Marvel Comics’ Black Panther (1966), Hurston imagines a hidden land

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that can be both a source of pride and a refuge for the African diaspora. She also anticipates
Martin Bernal’s Black Athena (1987) with her assertion that this African civilization is the origin
of Egyptian and eventually European civilization. The inhabitants of Telassar inform Reuel that
he is their rightful king, and—as in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900), She, and many lost world
novels—there is a beautiful native virgin who waits to become his queen. However, I concur
with those who “see [Hopkins’s] text as inverting, revising, or deconstructing the genre” (Fiorelli
453). The novel shifts the focus from white imperialism to Black racial origin in ways that rewrite
the racist ideology of anachronistic space. In this chapter, I will consider how Hopkins
repurposes this racist form to offer African Americans a hope that is “socially transformative,
although not in the narrowest sense ‘political.’ Hopeful ideals generate social engagement, as I
have suggested, by providing the standards against which the already existing world is
measured” (Castiglia 6). This text remains powerful as both a rallying cry for social engagement
among Hopkins’s contemporaries and a vision of a better world that we can use to guide our
own struggle.
Lost Worlds
Like most genres, it is difficult to precisely define a lost world narrative. It shares many
similarities with satires and allegories such as Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627) or Jonathan
Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), but Allienne Becker argues that lost world authors tend to “take
the form of the fantastic voyage of the eighteenth century and incorporat[e] into it the scientific
knowledge that was dawning,” though lost worlds also often have an element of social
commentary (4). Recognizable lost world novels such as the pseudonymous Symzonia; Voyage
of Discovery1
(1820) begin to appear in the early nineteenth century, and the adventure stories
1 The novel is credited to its protagonist “Captain Adam Seaborn.” It has often been attributed to John
Symmes because of its prominent use of his ideas (Becker 12). Since 1965, scholars have come to
believe Nathaniel Ames is the author, a theory further strengthened by recent statistical analysis (Collins).

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of Jules Verne often used plot elements that we see in later lost world texts. Haggard
popularized the conventional formula in the 1880s with the publication of King Solomon’s Mines
and She. The genre continued to flourish through the 1930s and tied “science fiction to the
literary tradition by providing a much-needed link between the imaginary voyages of the
eighteenth century and the interstellar flights of recent decades” (Clareson, “Lost Lands” 714).
The popularity of Haggard’s novels inspired many imitators, and their specific plots and
conventions helped to define the genre. One of the most prolific scholars on the lost world story,
Thomas Clareson discusses them as tales of “an explorer or scientist, either by chance or
intentional search, [who] found a ‘lost colony’ or a ‘lost’ homeland of some vanished or littleknown civilization” (“Lost Lands” 715). Nadia Khouri, meanwhile, specifies that works in the
genre focus on a “pre-Columbian society of Carthaginians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Aztecs, or
Incas, etc…, pagan or esoteric rites with forms of advanced technology; and…, a team of
modem explorers who, coming from an industrial society, interfere with the stagnant culture of a
lost civilization” (“Lost Worlds” 170). Together, these descriptions summarize most of the
mainstream examples of the genre. The important features are the interaction between the
scientific-minded, “rational,” and “civilized” Europeans and white Americans and a hidden
location associated with the magical, “irrational” and “barbaric” past.
The preoccupations of this genre reflect the way in which Europeans and Americans
understood science, culture, and geography in the nineteenth century. The previous hundred
years saw “the emergence of natural history as a structure of knowledge… [and] a new
territorial phase of capitalism propelled by searches for raw materials” (M. L. Pratt 9-11).
Scientists undertook botanical, zoological, archeological, and anthropological expeditions, and
the search for both knowledge and resources justified European encroachment into territories
where they had once remained on the coast. This context helps explain why lost world
narratives are inextricable from nineteenth-century colonialism. Much of the existing work on
these texts has explored the ways in which the novels were both a product of and an

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advertisement for colonial projects. Haggard himself had lived in South Africa as part of the
British administration, was present at the British annexation of the Transvaal, and later became
involved in agricultural reform in the British Empire. Many of the writers who followed him in the
genre took up the same imperialist themes, explored colonial anxieties, and drummed up
support for the European conquest. McClintock argues that the stories touch on “three of the
governing themes of Western imperialism: the transmission of white, male power through
control of colonized women; the emergence of a new global order of cultural knowledge; and the
imperial command of commodity capital” (1-3). The white male heroes of these texts use their
superior reasoning and rugged masculinity to penetrate into the heart of a feminized and
“savage” landscape and return to “civilization” with wealth, archeological knowledge, and most
importantly, increased prestige and a feeling of mastery over an “inferior” culture.
These colonial fantasies were especially popular at the turn of the nineteenth century
because European science had surveyed so much of the world. The only “unexplored” places
were those most difficult for Europeans to reach, such as the source of the Nile or the Amazon
rainforest. Lost world novels express “nostalgia over the loss of ‘empty space,’ with the once
‘open’ spaces of Asia and Africa fully colonized, [and] the American frontier closed in 1890” (Lim
78-79). They adapt the romanticism of “exploration” from eighteenth-century travel writing to an
increasingly well-mapped world. Therefore, stories take place on inaccessible plateaus, as in
The Lost World; at the poles as in Mary Bradley Lane’s Mizora (1881); or even inside Earth’s
crust, a setting made famous by Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864). These
fictitious societies are scattered across the globe,2 but “[o]ne can tell which areas of the world
remained unexplored and so captured the popular imagination simply by glancing at trends in
the novels” (Clareson, Some Kind of Paradise 174). This means that stories were often set in
2 Wikipedia’s page for “Lost World,” for one, includes a list of exemplary stories set on every continent.

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the interior of Africa, the jungles and deserts of Central and South America, and the South
Pacific, since these locations were considered the least “civilized.”
Clareson points to three main scientific developments that helped create and feed the
lost world genre:
first… explorations which sought to map the interiors of Africa, Asia, and South America,
as well as both polar regions; second, the cumulative impact of geological discoveries
and theories which expanded the past almost immeasurably and populated it with such
creatures as Tyrannosaurus Rex, Pithecanthropus Erectus, and Neanderthal Man; and
finally, the impact of archaeological discoveries and theories which—from the valley of
the Indus to the depths of Africa and South America—found civilizations in the past more
spectacular and mysterious than legendary El Dorado. (Some Kind of Paradise 164)
The emerging sciences of archeology and anthropology inspired authors, such as Ignatius
Donnelly, who in the 1880s interpreted genuine scientific research to erroneously claim that all
“civilized” peoples of the Americas, Africa, and Europe were descended from Atlantis (Becker
43). Donnelly prefigures Frazer’s syncretic analysis of world religions though their arguments
are different. Frazer compared cultures in order to “build up a vast picture of the gradual
development of the human mind and to draw a parallel between physical and mental evolution”
(Vickery 80). Donnelley instead used similarities between various pantheons to argue for a
single Atlantean origin for different cultures, and many lost world authors incorporated this into
their fiction. Frazer’s syncretic mythography also provided “evidence” for the idea of social
evolution that lost world authors enthusiastically adopted in their portrayal of “primitive” humans.
The lost world story declined in popularity in the 1930s and 40s as readers increasingly
turned to science fiction. European science had recorded visits to both poles, found the source
of the Nile, and developed radar and sonar, so authors “switched over to the moon or the
stars…. If utopia was no longer to be discovered or established on our present-day earth nor in
the divine world beyond, it had to be shifted into the future” (Koselleck 86-87). The once-exciting

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discoveries of geography, biology, and anthropology had become more familiar, and audiences
wanted fiction that focused on new knowledge about physics, chemistry, and astronomy.
Because lost world stories involve both physical and temporal travel, the genre is part of the
fictional legacy of both space travel and time travel that emerged in this period.3
This shift happened gradually, and at the peak of the genre’s popularity, many lost world
stories took inspiration from the real-world accounts of places that were distant and culturally
different from Europe. Just as Conrad used elements of real events in Lord Jim, authors took
inspiration from travel writing in their lost worlds. Haggard built on both his own experiences in
South Africa and on Joseph Thompson’s Through Masai Land (1885). Boys’ adventure author
Grant Allen built The White Man’s Foot in 1888 with details from writings about Hawaiʻi from
authors including Mark Twain. Mary Louise Pratt observes that travel literature “furnished a
‘safe’ context for staging alternate, relativizing, and taboo configurations of intercultural
contact…. [since the] tale was always told from the viewpoint of the European who returned”
(85). In the fictional lost world, authors could address even greater taboos, often in a fetishistic
way, as Becker discusses in her observations about both nudity in lost world stories and the
romances between white men and native princesses (30, 33).
This fictional context also allowed the lost world to break some of the norms of travel
writing, since the white protagonists occasionally decide not to return to “civilization.” Most
protagonists either return or die, but in some examples, including The Devil’s Tree of El Dorado
by Frank Atkins as Frank Aubrey (1896) and Drome by John Martin Leahy (1927), the
3 Much like fantastic voyages prefigure lost world stories, lunar journeys have a long history in satire and
allegory, including Cyrano de Bergerac’s The Other World: Comical History of the States and Empires of
the Moon (1657). Verne used the theme in From the Earth to the Moon (1865), and it flourished in the
interwar pulp magazines (Stableford). Early time travel plots often featured a character jumping to the
future and remaining there. This emerged first in eighteenth century texts like the French novel L'An 2440,
rêve s'il en fût jamais by Louis-Sébastien Mercier (1771) and more popularly in the nineteenth century
with Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” (1819). Travel to the past is very rare until the late nineteenth
century, in texts like Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, which I discuss in chapter one.
The first mechanical time travel story was “The Clock that Went Backward” by Edward Page Mitchell
(1881) and H.G. Wells popularized time machines with his 1895 novella “The Time Machine.”

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protagonists choose to stay and lead the world that they have “discovered.” These stories are
no less imperialist propaganda than the stories of return, since they also “gave European
reading publics a sense of ownership, entitlement and familiarity with respect to the distant parts
of the world that were being explored, invaded, invested in, and colonized” (M. L. Pratt 3). As
lost world stories rewrote global history through their imagined discoveries, their revisions
served to justify, glorify, and perpetuate European and American colonial endeavors.
In addition to travel writing, lost world stories also drew inspiration from the growing field
of archeology and its new insights into pharaonic Egypt, the Maya Civilization, and the Assyrian
Empire, among others. As they gained knowledge about these cultures, Europeans and
Americans realized that history “as the objective prehistory of the present, is something which is
not alien and incomprehensible to the human spirit. For the modern writers, however, it is
precisely the strangeness of history which is attractive” (Lukács 231). The rediscovery of ancient
empires by archeologists changed the European conception of history and transformed the past
into an exotic location. Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and the artifacts he took sparked a
nineteenth century interest in ancient cultures. Jean-François Champollion’s translation of the
Rosetta Stone and the contemporaneous deciphering of cuneiform helped Europeans
understand ancient societies in other parts of the world. In addition to these writing systems,
innovations in archeological methods increased information about cultures that did not leave a
written record. This new image of past civilizations sparked the imagination of Europeans and
Americans, and lost world authors used their stories to both cope with and expand on this
reconsideration of the known facts of history. As Khouri explains, lost worlds seek “to conserve
a historical residue outside the chronology of events. It will therefore not focus on the
unimpeachable rationality of history proper, but on a fabulated archaeology which could still be
validated by history…. The ruins of lost civilizations come to life again as both testimony and
disappearance. (“Lost Worlds” 172). The lost world story’s hidden societies and newly
discovered pasts rewrite the relationship between past, present, and future.

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This makes the lost world novel among the clearest demonstrations of McClintock’s
concept of anachronistic space. In political discourse, places and peoples outside of Europe
were only seen as relics of the past, but many lost worlds exist geographically as a remnant of
the past. Journey to the Center of the Earth is one of many lost worlds that includes prehistoric
plants and animals. Writers including Willis George Emerson in The Smoky God or A Voyage to
the Inner World (1908), set their stories in Eden, while Edgar Rice Burroughs includes cavemen
in At Earth’s Core (1922). Like alternate histories, a lost world “asks questions about time,
linearity, determinism, and the implicit link between past and present. It considers the
individual’s role in making history, and… foregrounds the constructedness and narrativity of
history” (Hellekson 453). While lost world stories are an important part of the history of science
fiction, they are not just a precursor to space travel. Instead, they reflect a growing interest in
history as a scientific pursuit and the past as an exotic but knowable place. Lost world stories
speculate about an ancient world that has extended into the present moment. They bring
representations of that past into contact with the present, and even the future as represented by
technological advancements. These interactions between temporalities ask readers to fit this
new history into their conception of the world. What if there are other branches of human
evolution still on the planet? What is there still to learn about ancient civilizations? How would
humans and dinosaurs coexist? And what does the discovery of these new worlds change
about the future of humanity? Authors ask different questions and imply different answers, but
the interaction of disparate times is a consistent feature of the genre.
The societies that the protagonists encounter in lost world novels vary from Edenic
paradises to technological dystopias, but most often the “lost race” of the inhabitants are
portrayed as more “primitive” than Europeans. These settings may be living museums of how
the author imagines a past culture as in the Antarctic Tudor England of Edward T. Bouve’s
Centuries Apart (1894) and the South Pacific Carthaginians of The Secret of the Crater by
Duffield Osborne (1900); a society of less-evolved life forms, like Verne’s ”missing link” in The

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Village in the Treetops (1901); or simply non-European cultures that have escaped colonization,
including Haggard’s most famous works and Mabel Fuller Blodgett’s At the Queen’s Mercy
(1897). As Clareson explains, “[a] yearning for the past stood behind the creation of the ‘lost
race’ novel. Its writers emphasized primitivism and sought to reconcile old beliefs and new
ideals with the facts and theories of the period” (“Lost Lands” 722). These texts appealed to
audiences as a combination of adventure tale and archeological thought experiment.
The lost race and their interactions with the explorer-protagonist is essential to their
function as imperialist propaganda. Lost world stories address colonial anxieties “by
simultaneously reveling in the discovery of uncharted territory and representing the journey as a
return to a lost legacy, a place where the travelers find a fragment of their own history lodged in
the midst of a native population that has usually forgotten the connection” (Rieder 40). Because
these “prehistoric” people frequently have some connection to the explorer’s own society, the
lost world is not just a metaphorical prehistory of the “civilized” present, but an ethnographic
past that is rediscovered for the glory of European culture. These hidden societies have
preserved something of the lost race’s “uncolonized ‘natural’ state,” but they have been hidden
for a reason and “the only way to make contact with their communities was literally to invade
them. Only through a guilty act of conquest (invasion) can the innocent act of the anti-conquest
(seeing) be carried out” (M. L. Pratt 65). When Europeans claim this lost legacy, the indigenous
people who preserved the culture are often destroyed and forgotten.
Instead, the narrative centers the explorer’s culture. As Julie Fiorelli notes, “[t]he imperial
imaginary of lost-race romance shapes American racial identity by yoking together past and
future” and using the colonial space as “a stable source of racial origin and the means to
reproduce this origin into the future, as well as the imaginative assimilation of these contents
into national space” (455). The lost world frequently features a reconsideration of the
protagonist’s original society that could suggest radical innovations in how the European and
American publics view history and their relationship to other peoples. Instead, the actual texts

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almost universally reify the order that McClintock discusses “from white, male adulthood to a
primordial, black degeneracy usually incarnated in women” and reinforce the narrative of
anachronistic space to justify European and American imperial ambitions (9-10).
These connections between times and places are also legible through the nineteenth
century’s understanding of history. Lukács argues that in the “mass experience of history…
more and more people become aware of the connection between national and world history”
(25). Colonialism connects national history to world history and helps to define the distinct
national identity that Fiorelli understands as a cornerstone of the lost world genre. She says that
“the prospect of racial survival in lost-race romance depends on establishing both a great
ancient past and a way to reproduce racial lineage into the future. This temporality is a feature
of its parent genre, historical romance” (454). The historical novel, the lost world novel, and the
ideology of colonialism all emerge from Enlightenment beliefs in homogenous time and
rationality. The historical novel looks at the “irrational” past from the author’s “rational” present.
Colonialism understands itself as the interaction between “rational” European power and the
“irrational” peoples of the rest of the globe. The lost world novel takes elements of both
paradigms as it depicts encounters with an Other that is both in the past and outside of Europe.
The explorer-protagonists’ actions reflect this colonial view of time and space. They
often think of the lost race as children, and according to many nineteenth-century European and
American thinkers, “[p]rimitive thought illuminates the thought of Western children because the
two are equidistant from Western adult thought. Both represent early stages in a developmental
sequence” (Fabian 61). This representation of the lost race as childlike echoes the rhetoric of
the colonialist “civilizing mission,” and the few protagonists who stay in the lost world undertake
something like Kipling’s “white man’s burden.” They seek to help those who the author has,
even more blatantly than in real life, reinvented “as backward and neglected… as manifestly in
need of the rationalized exploitation the Europeans bring” because they are “incomplete beings
suffering from the inability to have become what Europeans already are” (M. L. Pratt 148-149).

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In this way, Europeans and Americans can position themselves as not just more “advanced,”
but as the inevitable future of these other cultures.
Lost world novels only rarely consider how to incorporate the lost race’s values and
culture into European social norms. Instead, they maintain that “that the future is already known
(the achievement of progress, secular disenchantment, and rationality), and hence… anticipate
that the primitive will one day be like the modern observer (‘their’ future can be extrapolated
from ‘our’ past)” (Lim 14). This condescending attitude distances the adult and “civilized” reader
from the colonized peoples within the narrative, as Twain demonstrates with Hank’s distance
from the people of the sixth century. In stories such as William Le Queux’s The Great White
Queen (1896), and Osborne’s The Secret of the Crater a white individual or small group of white
elites rule over a non-white populace, and the narrative ignores the majority of the lost race.
These texts only consider the leaders, and everyone else is part of the “deracinated,
dispossessed, disposable work force European colonialists so ruthlessly and tirelessly fought to
create in their footholds abroad” (M. L. Pratt 52). Lost world writers addressed various forms of
intercultural contact in their works, but they almost all sought to uphold and justify colonial
might.
The exact racial identity of the inhabitants of the lost worlds varies significantly from text
to text. Following Donnelly, Atlantis became a common setting in works such as Paschal
Grousset’s The Crystal City (1896), written under the pseudonym André Laurie, and Pierre
Benoit’s Atlantidia (1920). These texts often supported an imperialist national identity by making
the lost race of the same cultural or racial lineage as the explorer-protagonists. This turns the
people of these lost worlds, like those of Twain’s Arthurian England, into both colonial subjects
and the ancestors of the “civilized” explorers. In regard to this trend, Fiorelli explains that the
lost-race romance displays a contradictory desire to at once dominate exotic, colonial
space and find in it a home, a national racial identity…. [A]n ancestral link between the

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lost-race society (or the colonized society that it represents) and the colonizers' renders
whatever the colonizers take (land, goods, women) always already theirs. (453)
It is both a justification for colonialism and a celebration of those who are most involved in the
project of nation-building through colonialism. “Great Britain” or “the United States” is formed in
opposition to the colonized Other. However, that Other and its conquest must be reincorporated
into the nation’s history. The connection between the lost races and the explorer-protagonists
allows this process to appear to happen organically instead of violently, as it did in real life.
As a colonialist fantasy, the societies “discovered” by the protagonists often do not offer
anything of value except resources and sexually available women. While the real process of
colonization was much more complicated and crueler, this sanitized fiction repeats colonial
tropes without significant critique. These stories’ central propagandistic purpose is “stimulating
pride in those who can identify with the winning side, fear in those who can't—of an intensity
which only myth can express; and Europe's self-image in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries derived from many such acts of mythic self-identification” (Green 28). In the repeated,
romanticized portrayals of colonial encounter, the lost race genre both reflected and helped to
produce a masculine, imperialist perspective in which the process of colonization was an
adventure detached from the brutality and mundanity of real-world colonial projects.
The avatar of this colonialist fantasy is the ruggedly masculine white protagonist. These
characters are such an epitome of desirable colonial men that Bradley Deane uses the lost
world stories to demonstrate how colonialism changed Victorian masculinity in his book
Masculinity and the New Imperialism. As Fiorelli puts it, “[t]he hero of lost-race romance is
hypermasculine: brave, physically fit, skilled, and the object of women's swooning affection”
(460). Even the Oxford scholars who are the heroes of Haggard’s She survive a shipwreck and
fight cannibals. These highly gendered protagonists reinforce a specific view of racial
superiority, as seen in the previous chapter where the western provided a proving ground for
American masculinity. But even before that, these authors considered normative humans to be

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“European, male, secular, and lettered; his planetary consciousness is the product of his contact
with print culture…. The systematizing of nature in the second half of the century was to assert
even more powerfully the authority of print, and thus of the class which controlled it” (M. L. Pratt
29-30). The explorer-protagonist therefore often belongs to an elite class and can fund
extravagant colonial expeditions. The use of frame narratives in texts such as John Uri Lloyd’s
Etidorhpa (1895) and Symzonia require a literate protagonist to transmit his experiences in the
lost world. At the same time, the explorer must prove himself physically, so cannot be either
decadent or overly bookish.
The white male explorers in these novels often suffer significant indignities. The
protagonist of Willis George Emerson’s The Smoky God or A Voyage to the Inner World (1908)
ends the novel in an asylum, while the heroes of Benoit’s Atlantidia are captured by the
predatory queen of Atlantis. These trials allow the protagonist to prove his masculinity through
deprivation, since “he has at last lost everything. He is no longer defined by European
commodities. He has become that creature in whose viability and authenticity his readers may
have longed to believe: the naked, essential, inherently powerful white man” (M. L. Pratt 79).
This victorious white male body that can overcome lions, sorcerers, and the temptation of
interracial relationships is a regular feature of the lost world novel.
Since Haggard, lost world novels frequently have a love plot, usually between the white
male protagonist and a woman from the lost race that plays out colonialist power dynamics. Like
the common racial origin of some lost races, the interracial romance attempts to soften the
conquest in the eyes of the reader. The protagonist fights the “natives” only to protect his native
princess, and “European supremacy is guaranteed by affective and social bonding; in which sex
replaces slavery as the way others are seen to belong to the white man; in which romantic love
rather than filial servitude or force guarantee the willful submission of the colonized” (M. L. Pratt
95). This is true even in the majority of lost world stories in which the interracial relationship is
never consummated. In King Solomon’s Mines, for example, the beautiful native woman Foulata

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dies to save the white male protagonists from an evil native crone. Though he cannot ever be
with her, the protagonist Captain Good bestows on her a final kiss. This is both taboo eroticism
and a way to align Good with the natives without introducing a long-term relationship that might
disrupt the English social order to which the protagonists belong. This forbidden interracial
relationship recurs in many novels, and it often ends with either the woman’s tragic death, as in
The Bowl of Baal by Robert Ames Bennet (1916) or with the protagonist explicitly choosing a
white woman over the native love interest as in A Queen of Atlantis by Frank Atkins (1899).
In a few twentieth-century texts, including Clifford Smyth’s The Gilded Man (1918) and
Abraham Merritt’s Dwellers in the Mirage (1932), an explicitly non-white woman and a white
protagonist engage in a romantic or sexual relationship. Other times, the author goes to
extremes to bring the non-white woman closer to European norms. In The Wizard of Zacna by
T. A. Willard (1929), for example, the native love interest is a blonde, blue-eyed Maya woman.
Other love interests are already connected to whiteness through earlier interracial contact,
which creates yet another link between the protagonist and the lost race. Texts such as The
White Man’s Foot or Conrad’s Lord Jim that are closer to real colonialism are more likely to
have these mixed-race princesses. Nonetheless, the interracial relationship that produces this
princess is relegated to backstory. An earlier white man can have a mixed-race child, but the
colonial expectation on the lost world protagonist prohibits him from pursuing the same kind of
contact.
The exceptions to this pattern of the unconsummated interracial romance usually feature
technologically advanced or utopian lost worlds where the protagonist is not there to conquer,
but to learn. Mary Bradley Lane’s Mizora (1881), Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915),
and the anonymous Equality, a history of Lithconia (1802) all follow this model, while others,
such as Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) and James De Mille’s A Strange Manuscript Found in
a Copper Cylinder (1888) are a more satirical mode. These texts often have political aims and
“try to imagine what sort of past could have led to a present we’d like to inhabit and a future we

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could whole-heartedly desire” (Gallagher 147). This kind of lost world story complicates the
notion of anachronistic space because the new society is more advanced than Europe, but
these texts still support racial hierarchies. These utopian lost worlds are more directly
addressing “contemporaneous social problems in the US that the [lost world] genre was
deployed to—but could not always—imaginatively resolve” (Fiorelli 454).
One way in which many authors, including Gilman and Lane, fall short of their political
potential is by emphasizing the whiteness of the lost race, as if to justify the existence of a
utopia outside of Europe. These feminist lost worlds attempt to preserve the integrity of the
white male protagonist even as they critique the society that created him. Khouri describes
these texts as “a dream of conquest coupled with a desire to recapture a utopianized lost
history… [that] revers[es] the order of time in the chronological paradox of submitting the here
and now to the scrutiny of the past” (“Lost Worlds” 171). These authors valorize the hidden past
as preferable to the current social order and seek to bring it into the present. In doing so, they
begin to challenge the model of anachronistic space. However, their refusal to fully examine the
racial implications of such a reversal means that they fall short of providing a meaningful critique
of the lost world’s colonial ideology.
Of One Blood
When Twain wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court to challenge American
imperialism, he did so in conversation with various genre traditions, but his own text was not
easily identifiable as any established genre. Of One Blood, in contrast, specifically relies on the
themes and plots of the lost world novel even as she adopts an oppositional political stance.
Fiorelli suggests that the conventions of the lost world genre provide Hopkins “the spatial and
temporal ground to reshape African and black American history and produce a vista of the
future, however endangered” (468-469). I will now turn to a closer examination of this novel and
consider how Hopkins imagines both a past and a future outside of Hegelian notions of time.

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The story is often considered in two parts, each of which draws from a different genre.
The first half of the novel is a passing narrative in the tradition of Clotel; or, The President's
Daughter by William Wells Brown (1853), The Garies and Their Friends by Frank J. Webb
(1857), and various works of Charles W. Chesnutt. This section takes place in the United States
and focuses on the white-passing medical student Reuel Briggs. He falls in love with Dianthe
Lusk, a light-skinned African American singer who raises money for the education of formerly
enslaved people during Reconstruction. The two want to marry, but Reuel, despite his mystical
ability to return the dead to life, has unknowingly had his career prospects sabotaged when his
apparently white best friend Aubrey Livingston spreads rumors of Reuel’s racial background.
This causes Reuel to leave the United States on an expedition to Ethiopia, which begins the lost
world half of the story. Lukács argues that the historical novel “arises out of the great social
novel and then, enriched by a conscious historical attitude, flows back into the latter. On the one
hand, the development of the social novel first makes possible the historical novel; on the other,
the historical novel transforms the social novel into a genuine history of the present” (169). The
second half of Of One Blood successfully combines elements of the social novel, the historical
novel, and speculative fiction, which all use imagined scenarios to comment on real situations.
Both the passing novel and the lost world story are essential to understanding Hopkins’s
project in Of One Blood. While scholars increasingly recognize the generic complexity in this
text, earlier research tended to focus on the “romance subgenres—melodrama, sentimental
fiction, and gothic—that dominate the novel's initial, US-bound section” over the “adventure
story or imperial romance” that takes place in Africa (Fiorelli 453). By combining these distinct
genres Hopkins offers the reader a new perspective on the familiar issues of her day. Unlike the
protagonists of Du Bois’s Dark Princess (1928) or James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography
of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), Reuel does not dwell on the prejudices of his time; he tries to
escape them. Further, Reuel does not follow Booker T. Washington’s proposal to focus on
technical education and accrue wealth, and Du Bois’s strategy of proving himself to white

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society with his intellect explicitly fails Reuel. He uses his education to hide rather than lead,
and just the rumor of his race means that his only job offer is the archeological expedition. He
plans to return with enough money to start a life with Dianthe where they will both pass as white.
However, once in Africa, the narrative changes. Reuel discovers Aubrey’s betrayal and is told
that Dianthe has died. Before he can return to the United States and confront his former friend,
Reuel falls into the ancient city of Telassar. Hopkins uses the lost world novel to offer a “startling
infusion of the extraordinary into everyday life[, which] therefore represents and engenders an
instantaneous, unexpected, and vulnerable epiphany” (Castiglia 152). In Reuel’s case this is the
race consciousness and utopian potential he finds by reconnecting with his African roots.
In Telassar, Reuel learns he is the prophesied descendant of a legendary Ethiopian
king, much as the protagonist of She is the reincarnation of an ancient ruler. The people offer
Reuel the throne and expect him to marry the virgin-queen Candace, the most recent woman
chosen to await the lost king’s return and become the mother of “a dynasty of dark-skinned
rulers, whose destiny should be to restore the prestige of an ancient people” (Of One Blood
139). However, before the marriage occurs, Reuel learns that Dianthe is still alive and rushes to
rescue her from Aubrey. Meanwhile in Virginia, Aubrey convinces Dianthe that Reuel is dead,
assaults her, and coerces—and possibly mesmerizes—her into marrying him. Dianthe learns
from Aunt Hannah, a former slave on the Livingston property, that Aubrey and Reuel are both
her full siblings. Hannah had a daughter named Mira with her white master, and Mira had Reuel,
Dianthe, and Aubrey with her own white half-brother who had inherited her as property after
their father’s death. This makes Reuel, Dianthe, and Aubrey “of one blood” both literally and
metaphorically. Upon learning this, Dianthe attempts to poison Aubrey, but he kills her before
Reuel returns. The sages of Telassar compel Aubrey to commit suicide for his crimes. Reuel
abandons the United States and brings Hannah to Telassar where he marries Candace, and
they begin “to work together for the upbuilding of humanity and the restoration of the race of
[their] fathers” (Of One Blood 142).

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Even beyond the exact traditions of lost world novels that Of One Blood adopts—from
the virgin queen to the opulent riches—Reuel has many similarities with conventional explorers
in the lost world genre. Khouri describes how, “the witness-traveller of the lost-race utopia never
finds himself in the position of the Founding Fathers. Nor is it the wilderness which attracts him
as a pioneer. He is rather in the position of inheritor, seeking to be a man who receives, never a
man who strives” (“Lost Worlds” 178). This statement perfectly describes Reuel’s sudden
elevation to kingship. He is fully embraced by the people of Telassar as the figure of prophecy,
and this utopian society governed for millennia by a council of sages accepts his rule
immediately. This extreme level of deference resonates with the other lost world examples of
white explorers who are accepted as rulers over the native populations.
Despite these similarities, Of One Blood uses the conventions of the lost world in ways
that challenge the reader’s perception of history, global geography, and racial hierarchy. Instead
of merely finding a new place on the map for Europeans or Americans to colonize, Hopkins
considers the implications of a strong, advanced, utopian civilization in Africa that will, as
Hopkins says in a paraphrase of Psalm 68, “stretch forth her hand unto Eternal Goodness, and
that then her glory should again dazzle the world” (Of One Blood 115). Hopkins directly
addresses the racial aspects of colonialism in ways that most utopian lost world stories
completely fail to do: she pushes back against the model of anachronistic space. Long before
Black Panther or Black Athena, Hopkins asks the reader to consider Africa as more than a
backward continent that must be “civilized.” Instead, she positions it as a site of futurity and
power that does not need and may even surpass Europe and America. This shows the
relationship between the lost world and the alternate history, since both begin with “a point of
departure in the historical past in order to imagine forms of society and the history of nations
that might have followed” (Carver 5). While Hopkins, like Bernal, believed in this original African
civilization, she used the lost world novel to portray the future of a glorious past that slavery and
colonialism had sought to destroy.

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Hopkins’s use of this genre is rooted in the specific historical forces and narratives at
work in the United States during her life. In order to imagine a better future for Black Americans,
Hopkins used the emergent sciences of history, anthropology, and archeology to construct a
meaningful past beyond historical trauma. She considers these questions from a time where
slavery had been legally over for decades but racist policies at all levels of government had
undone many of the gains won during Reconstruction. Therefore, the importance of history in
Hopkins’s work emerges from “the development, spread and deepening of historical feeling…—
the feeling that a real understanding for the problems of contemporary society can only grow out
of an understanding of the society's prehistory and formative history” (Lukács 231). To
understand both the importance of passing and of race consciousness, Hopkins relied
extensively on the history of racism and slavery in the United States.
The Americanness of Hopkins’s novel is in sharp contrast to British lost worlds’ concern
with colonial power. In the United States after “the closure of the western frontier, the imagined
boundary between nations and races was relocated to the imperial realm. To be sure, global
space was also considered increasingly saturated” (Fiorelli 456). American lost world texts are
the product of both imperialism and the mythic western boundary, and even Hopkins cannot
completely detach her work from that context. However, she does complicate the lost world’s
relationship to nation and borders. She does not use her novel to imagine a new space for
colonization or a return to the frontier spirit, as the other authors did. Instead, Hopkins seeks to
challenge these boundaries and animate a space outside of colonialist power
This political goal informs Hopkins’s theory of history, which is similar to that of Bernal,
where Africa is the source of European art, science, and culture. Hopkins begins with an original
Ethiopian civilization that influenced Egypt, which influenced Europe. This makes the people of
Telassar a part of Europe’s racial legacy, which echoes other lost world narratives. But
Hopkins’s lost race is also unapologetically African and not racially separated from the
surrounding communities like the utopia in Gilman’s Herland. Reuel is guided through Telassar

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by the sage Ai, who tells Reuel that they knew of his arrival because Ababdis, a camel driver on
Reuel’s expedition, is secretly from Telassar (Of One Blood 119). This suggests that Ababdis
was, to Reuel’s eyes, indistinguishable from the other local employees. Hopkins does not
believe in separate racial origins but insists that Telassar belongs equally to the heritage of
Europe and Africa. The people of Telassar range “in complexion from a creamy tint to purest
ebony; the long hair which fell upon their shoulders, varied in texture from soft, wavy curls to the
crispness of the most pronounced African type” (113). Hopkins’s insistence on Telassar’s role in
both European and African history is even present in the title of the work, which reminds the
reader of her claim that Europeans and Africans share the same ancestors and are therefore all
“of one blood.”
The novel does not focus on common racial origin as a fact of history, it provides a
model for a future without racism and colonialism. Telassar is a “utopian societ[y] that history
might have produced and whose representation as [an] imaginar[y] might yet assist a project to
realize [it]” (Carver 4). As an activist, Hopkins was both personally and politically invested in the
utopian promise of racial equality. She therefore refuses to keep Africa relegated to the past but
portrays it as the home of future teachers who the rest of the world should emulate. Reuel’s
leadership represents the beginning of a new era for both Telassar and the world. She
describes how Reuel “spent his days in teaching his people all that he has learned in years of
contact with modern culture” (Of One Blood 193). This does follow some of the traditional lost
race pattern where “the surface-level people—representing colonial subjects understood as
relics of a precivilized past—are history, while the civilized antiquity found below allows the
adventurer and his people to have history and, thereby, modernity” (Fiorelli 457). But Hopkins’s
utopian image of Telassar complicates the easy division of past from future upon which
Hegelian progress rests.
Hopkins’s criticism of lost worlds is effective in part because it uses the genre’s own
conventions to criticize its project and highlight the fundamental harm done by its reimaginings

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of history and race. When Hopkins uses these conventions, she “lays bare the wrenching nature
of the genre's temporal and spatial yoking and the mental gymnastics required to project this
kind of homogeneity” (Fiorelli 455). The conventional lost world’s insistence on white identity
and racial legacy frequently involves awkward contortions of history so that the white
protagonist will have a claim to the riches of the ancient civilization but ensure that his liaison
with the native princess never becomes miscegenation. In Hopkins’s revision, the lost race is
not the racial origin of only Europeans, or even of only Africans. Instead, she presents a
universal human racial origin and thus reveals the absurdity of other lost worlds’ racist logic.
Hopkins’s insistence on humanity’s shared ancestry does not mean, however, that she
wrote a generic story meant to resonate equally with everyone. Her novel is specifically rooted
in African American traditions and discourses. She understands that “the work of social
transformation requires collective deliberation at least as much as individual critique,” and
therefore engages in utopian imagining in conversation with other Black thinkers (Castiglia 6).
Of One Blood follows novels like Martin Delany’s Blake; or the Huts of America (1859) and
Sutton Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio (1899), which combine realism and utopia thought to
imagine a better world for the African diaspora. Delany and Griggs both advocate for
international Black unity using stories set in the Americas, while Of One Blood’s utopia is in
Africa. This is a common choice for lost world writers, but Hopkins’s use of Africa has a very
different valence than it had for writers like Haggard. The novel’s references to Ethiopia’s grand
past and bright future reflect a late nineteenth and early twentieth century Black religious and
political movement that has been called “Ethiopianism,”4 which draws inspiration from Psalm
68:31: “Princes shall come forth out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch forth her hands unto
God” (Authorized King James Version). Hopkins references this verse in Of One Blood, and her
4 The “Ethiopia” in Ethiopianism is variously national, regional, or even the whole continent of Africa.
Hopkins adopts this broad usage, with Reuel’s journey to “Ethiopia” ending at the ruins of Meroë in the
territory of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. English-speakers more commonly used “Abyssinia” for the nation that
is now Ethiopia, and Hopkins uses both names in her other writings (Daughter of the Revolution 322).

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plot focuses on the fulfilment of this prophecy. Nadia Nurhussein explains that “Ethiopia has
long held synecdochic significance for African American writers… [as] an imaginary locus of
nostalgia, biblical or otherwise” (278). Hopkins was dedicated to the contemporary movement
for equal rights, and her work incorporates this powerful site of speculation for her community.
Ethiopia took hold in the Black imagination as a free African state with a great history
that showed an alternative to oppression and colonialism. As William Scott explains, “[f]avorable
scriptural and historical mention of the ancient African state had made that nation, however
defined geographically, an icon of black capability, potency, and sovereignty for generations of
racially persecuted black Americans” (41). Despite centuries of colonizers, enslavers, and their
apologists using the Bible as a justification for the abuse of non-white peoples, biblical
references firmly place Ethiopia in Africa, and therefore place Africans in sacred history. The
rise of Ethiopianism during this period was “the result of the relentless efforts of early black
Christians to give a distinctly theological cast to their emergent historical consciousness, notions
of group struggle, and faith in race advancement” (Scott 44). Late nineteenth and early twentieth
century Black leaders focused on Ethiopia as a way to unite the diaspora around a historical
and contemporary source of African pride.
Ethiopianism influenced Du Bois and other thinkers of the period, but it was only one of a
number of contemporaneous movements in Black thought. Scott argues that “[t]he sense of
racial unity and global regeneration identified in Pan Africanism parallels some of the core
values intrinsic to Ethiopianism. Each philosophy projects the existence of international ‘ebony
kinship’ and espouses racial progress” (50). Many of these movements sought to unite the
African diaspora—and in the case of Du Bois, especially, an international coalition of “darker
peoples”—by reclaiming history and forging solidarity (Du Bois 12). While there were a variety of
strategies used to foster this solidarity, both Hopkins and Du Bois turned to fiction. Of One
Blood demonstrates not only Hopkins’s investment in the global African diaspora, but also “her
sense that racial progress could be achieved vis--à-vis imaginative writing. This is perhaps best

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expressed by the novel… trading in the American racial nightmare for a mythical and triumphant
Africa where black people are fully vested members of social and political life” (DanielsRauterkus 128). This is also a feature of Du Bois’s later romance Dark Princess, which uses
different genre features for the same project of imagining international Black liberation.
Both books begin when a young African American doctor is prevented from pursuing
medicine due to racism before becoming involved in international anti-racist and anti-colonial
movements. The emblem of this resistance in both cases is a beautiful, powerful, dark-skinned
princess who can inaugurate a royal line that will lead the oppressed peoples of the world. Du
Bois’s novel lacks many of the fantastical elements of Hopkins’s, so the union that he imagines
is one between an Indian princess and an African American man, whose son will inherit both a
royal title and the privileges of American citizenship. Both Hopkins and Du Bois are considering
“whether nationalist perspectives are an adequate means to understand the forms of resistance
and accommodation intrinsic to modern black political culture…, which involves processes of
political organisation that are explicitly transnational and international in nature” (Gilroy 29).
Neither author wants to cut off African Americans from either the wider diaspora or other
peoples of the world. Hopkins is less concerned with specific international groups than Du Bois,
but she takes care to describe the people of Telassar as being of all races because, as the title
insists, all the peoples of the world are of one blood.
This is a strong statement in an age of eugenics and not long after theories of
polygenetic origins of humanity lost favor among scientists. As recently as the mid-nineteenth
century “the inherent inequality of races was simply accepted as a scientific fact in America, and
most of the discussion… concerned either the religious problem of accepting polygenesis as an
explanation of racial differences or the problem of exactly defining the different races” (Horsman
135). Even scientists who believed in the monogenetic origin of humanity often claimed that
Europeans and their culture were inherently superior to people of other races. In contrast,
Hopkins insists on monogenesis and firmly places the origin of European culture in Africa. Many

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lost worlds feature a significant prophecy, but Hopkins created her utopia based on a prediction
that she considered sacred and that had a strong grounding in contemporary African American
thought. Though Of One Blood is a fictional exercise, Hopkins used new knowledge from history
and philosophy to develop her speculative work.
She combines the religion, science, and political thought that define Ethiopianism and
uses them to animate her lost world novel. Reuel’s journey “provides evidence that all people
share a common racial origin and initiates black reascension to greatness…. What begins as a
search for knowledge and riches by Western scientists and entrepreneurs thus becomes a hunt
for the treasure of racial identity” (Fiorelli 453). The journey Reuel takes to race consciousness
is not easy, but the novel argues that the African diaspora will achieve a brighter future through
pride in their ancestry. Reuel admits to Ai that he is ashamed of his African heritage, and Ai
responds: “from Ethiopia came all the arts and cunning inventions that make your modern glory.
At our feet the mightiest nations have worshipped, paying homage to our kings, and all nations
have sought the honor of alliance with our royal families because of our strength, grandeur,
riches and wisdom” (Of One Blood 129). While all peoples are of one race, Hopkins situates this
theory in the context of Black political thought and African American identity.
Questioning Categories
Hopkins sees Black identity as a source of pride, but also as an arbitrary category that
colonial powers have forced upon the world. Lukács identifies theories of “the struggle of races
[as] the first step towards a coherent and scientific history of progress” despite racial categories
being an ”anti-historical mythical entity” (Lukács 175-176). Hopkins believes in a single human
race above any constructed racial grouping, and she makes this argument by complicating
racial categories and showing the extent to which racial mixing is a lived reality. This begins with
Reuel, who as a white-passing mixed-race protagonist, forces the reader to confront racial
hierarchies and origins. Reuel represents the lived reality of the many Americans who are

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descended from both enslaved people and their white enslavers. Hopkins could not write a
novel about Black American racial legacy and follow the racist pattern of lost race stories that
“carefully avoided miscegenation” (Clareson, “Lost Lands” 720). Hopkins instead complicates
the idea of “miscegenation” in several ways. She demonstrates the prevalence of interracial
sexual contact through several generations of the Livingstons’ sexual abuse of the Telassarian
royal line. Dianthe is horrified to learn that she has married both her brothers, but Hannah, who
was enslaved for most of her life, merely responds, “[d]ese things jes’ got to happen in slavery”
(Of One Blood 176). Lukács deems incest unable “to carry a dramatic action… [because it]
lacks the relative, subjective justification either of being rooted in the social order of the past, or
of anticipating the future” (112-113 Lukács). However, Hopkins demonstrates that this deep
taboo has a place in the past social order as part of the normalized brutality of slavery.
Throughout her work, Hopkins advocated for both the unity of all races and drew
attention to the specific experiences of mixed-race people in the United States. Beyond just
passing narratives and the “tragic mulatto,” Hopkins emphasized both the horrible reality of how
many mixed-race people were conceived and their place in the African American community.
She writes about both oppression and belonging as part of “a transformational process arising
from the materiality of ‘experience’ and generating a fictive space of possibility… that, in turn,
translates back into ‘experience’ as affective and imaginative resilience” (Castiglia 113). In this
narrative, Hopkins specifically speculates about the future of a mixed-race individual who also
represents the broader diaspora. This contrasts with racist European science and even
contemporary African Americans such as Roger Sherman Tracy in his novel The White Man’s
Burden, a Satirical Forecast (1915), who believed that only those of “pure” African blood could
ensure the future greatness of the African diaspora. Hopkins rejected the idea that humanity has
always been separated into “races which had remained unchanged and were unchangeable…
[who] could not successfully intermingle” (Horsman 72). Instead, Hopkins centers her novel on
characters who have both African and white ancestry. Reuel, Dianthe, and Aubrey each have

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different experiences of race, and Hopkins “aims at showing the various facets of a social trend,
the different ways in which it asserts itself etc.” and the complex “relation of the individual to the
social group to which he belongs and which he represents” (Lukács 140). Hopkins explores this
relationship not just among individuals, but also between societies. Having parents of different
races puts her characters at risk in the racist society of the United States, but the enlightened
people of Telassar accept them as descendants of the royal family without question.
Hopkins continues to consider social constructions of race through Reuel’s two love
interests. Dianthe is so light skinned she temporarily believes herself to be white and has the
delicate health of many desirable white female protagonists of this time. In contrast, Candace is
dark-skinned, powerful, and untouched by the generations of trauma Dianthe’s ancestors
endured. While Hopkins believed that humans would eventually intermarry and create one
undifferentiated race, Reuel’s union with the dark-skinned Candace challenges contemporary
beauty standards and notions of an “appropriate” partner. Candace serves as the “native
princess” in the lost world tradition, but Hopkins deviates from the usual models of this type.
Often the relationship between the princess and the protagonist is informed by the real-world
exploitation of colonized women who “knew how to prepare local food and medicine, and could
tend Europeans when they were sick. Sentimental travel writing converts this function into the
beneficent female figure of the ‘nurturing native,’ who tends to the suffering European out of
pity, spontaneous kindness, or erotic passion” (M. L. Pratt 93-94). Foulata from King Solomon’s
Mines is the prototype for the love interest who also serves as a liaison with the lost world. This
trend continues even in Herland’s feminist utopia, though because Gilman’s women are all
white, the protagonist is allowed to marry one of them.
In Of One Blood, Ai, not Candace, is Reuel’s guide to the lost world. Instead, Candace is
introduced dramatically: “[t]he heavy curtains were lifted now, and discovered the Queen
reclining upon a pile of silken cushions—a statue of Venus worked in bronze” (Of One Blood
136). This immediately suggests her power and ability to incite desire, which would align her

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more with She’s Ayesha. However, unlike the voracious and villainous women in that tradition,
Candace is “the embodiment of all chastity” and the ideal queen for Reuel (Of One Blood 137).
Significantly, this idealized woman is described as having “[l]ong, jet-black hair and totally free,
[which] covered her shoulders like a silken mantle; a broad, square forehead, a warm bronze
complexion; thick black eyebrows, great black eyes” (Of One Blood 137). Fiorelli explains the
significance of this choice by saying:
for Hopkins to imagine the reproduction of an American national racial identity that
includes black citizens, her princess must be black. The one-drop rule's social logic bars
blackness from equivalence or equal coexistence with whiteness; rather, blackness
threatens to cancel out whiteness. (465).
The symbol of the reproductive future of Black identity in the novel has to be Black herself in
order to reconcile Reuel’s complicated relationship with his own racial identity.
Like many of the white “native princesses” of lost world stories, Candace’s beauty, racial
purity, and chastity are designed to preserve the racial heritage of the protagonist and tie him
more closely to his ancestral legacy. Candace’s Blackness, then, subverts the archetype’s usual
promise “to reproduce the racial origin and value with which treasure is invested. This
reproduction depends on two central aspects of turn-of-the-century gender and sexual politics:
the valorization of a muscular kind of masculinity and the safeguarding of racially pure
reproduction through female chastity” (Fiorelli 460). In Of One Blood, Reuel’s ancestral legacy is
specifically African, despite his coexisting white heritage. The “appropriate” female love interest
of lost race stories may be “Assyrian, Egyptian, Viking, Carthaginian, Roman, or a cavewoman,
so long as she might somehow be accepted as part of a people who had contributed to modern
[white] European and American stock” (“Lost Lands” 720). In making Candace both Black and a
link to Reuel's lost racial past, Hopkins argues for the inherent dignity and beauty of Black
women, and for Africa’s place in the racial and cultural history of Europe and the United States.

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Hints at the interconnectedness of this history can be found in the names of the
characters and places in the novel. Hopkins is invested in tying Africa to the Christian tradition
and so supports her beliefs about human culture with biblical evidence. “Telassar,” therefore, is
a biblical name for the home of “the children of Eden” (Isa. 37:11-20). Hopkins takes this biblical
name, which only occurs once and has no specific location, for her own lost world just as other
authors appropriated Plato’s Atlantis or the biblical Ophir. In keeping with Hopkins’s syncretic
approach, Ai later claims that the Telassarians are descendants of the Chaldeans, who the
Hebrew Bible associates with Babylon. Hopkins claims a connection to the ancient Israelites,
but her political stance requires the incorporation of the enemies of Israel into the same legacy.
Hopkins continues to emphasize the unity of seemingly disparate peoples and traditions
with character names in the novel. Reuel is one of the names given for Moses’s father-in-law.
Jethro is the more common and the one that Zora Neale Hurston uses in her adaptation of the
Exodus story, which I will discuss in chapter four. Significantly, Reuel/Jethro is neither Egyptian
nor Hebrew, but one of the nomadic Midianites, which puts him outside the legacy of “Western
civilization.” However, his daughter Zipporah’s children with Moses give the biblical Reuel a
place in Israelite ancestry. This Midianite legacy is especially significant because Moses’s sister
Miriam “spake against Moses because of the Ethiopian whom he had married,” and this is often
interpreted to be Zipporah5
(Num. 12:1). By naming her hero Reuel, Hopkins reminds the reader
of the place of the “outsider” and potentially even the African in the history of Christianity.
Reuel’s grandmother, Hannah, is named after the prophet Samuel’s mother, which befits
her role as the matriarch of the Telassarians in America. The biblical Hannah’s story is told in 1
Samuel 1, and it begins with her unable to have a child, though her husband’s other wife has
many. Eventually she is granted a son through a miracle, and she dedicates Samuel’s life to
5 The debate about the identity of Moses’s Ethiopian wife has existed for nearly 2000 years. Some
interpret Zipporah and the Ethiopian wife as two different women, since Zipporah is clearly identified as a
Midianite. However, since the Torah never gives a name for this Ethiopian wife, others, including Hurston
in her adaptation, assume that it refers to Moses’s known wife, Zipporah. (Sadler 396).

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God in gratitude. The biblical Hannah’s life provides a tragic contrast to that of Aunt Hannah in
Of One Blood. While the biblical Hannah’s husband loves and respects her despite her infertility,
Aunt Hannah is enslaved by the father of her many children and never considered equal to his
lawful white wife. Unlike the childless biblical Hannah, Aunt Hannah tells Dianthe that “Mira was
de onlies’ child of ten that my massa lef’ me for my comfort; all de res’ were sold away to raise
de mor’gage off de prop’rty” (Of One Blood 175). The biblical Hannah voluntarily dedicates her
child to God and continues to see him throughout his life, while Aunt Hannah never finds her
other children. Both Hannahs are the mothers of a great legacy, and their children are
foundational in the formation of a revitalized kingdom. By using this name, Hopkins evokes this
powerful biblical matriarch, but also highlights the way in which Aunt Hannah was denied the
respect and autonomy of her biblical namesake.
The other side of Reuel’s family are the Livingstons, who represent the cruelty of white
American society. They too are “amalgamated” into the line of kings of Telassar, but Hopkins
reserves this name for Aubrey, whose connection to his African heritage is most hidden.
“Livingston” also echoes the name of the famous British explorer of Africa David Livingstone,
which hints at Aubrey’s deeper connection to Africa, but also shows his opposition to Telassar’s
anti-colonial stance. Unlike the more positive connection between Reuel and the biblical
narrative, David Livingstone was a colonial agent who abandoned his missionary activities in
favor of joining the “advance of mighty nations penetrating the dark, mysterious forests” of Africa
that so concern Reuel at the end of the novel (Of One Blood 193). The sensationalized
narratives of European “explorers,” including Livingstone and other travel writers provide the
model for lost world protagonists. Aubrey’s name connects him both to Africa and to European
colonialism. For Hopkins, even the villainous Aubrey is of the same blood, but he has rejected
the family legacy and chosen to see himself as an outsider who can exploit and oppress his kin.
Aubrey and the white characters in the novel, including Reuel’s affable friend Charlie
Vance, hold themselves apart from this shared African legacy because they understand

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themselves to be more “advanced.” The narrative of progress exerts a strong pull on historical
thinking, including religious conceptions of history. Thinkers combined scientific discoveries with
“[t]heological frameworks—especially Christian visions of ‘improvement’ as redemption for the
Fall…. To be reminded of this, one need only recall that Linnaeus considered his taxonomic
system… as an Adamic act of divine renaming that would facilitate human dominion”
(Delbourgo and Dew 12). Hopkins’s Christian perspective reflects her understanding of how
both science and religion have been used to oppress “primitive” Africans and the African
diaspora.
When a lost world is revealed, it changes the way in which its readers imagine history,
even before the genre incorporates Romans, cavemen, and dinosaurs. Unlike actual history,
however, these lost worlds can actively change the present and even the future because they
represent the continued existence of the past in the present. This often becomes a way to
literalize the metaphor of anachronistic space, though differently than Twain’s narrative. He
made the metaphorical time travel of romances of empire into a literal journey to another time.
Lost worlds, meanwhile, take the metaphor of other cultures as behaving like Europe’s past and
makes it literal by having the protagonist’s journey through space bring them to a recognizable
historical culture. In the lost world, other cultures are “translated as a relic or vestige of a prior
developmental stage, something that has been superseded but stubbornly returns. Seen in this
way, the survival of the past tends only to shore up the cachet of progress rather than to critique
it. But there are other ways to conceive of the survival of the past” (Lim 14). Hopkins, for her
part, roots her lost world in biblical history. When Ai claims descent from Chaldea, Reuel
protests that “[t]he Chaldeans disappeared from this world centuries ago” (Of One Blood 141).
But Telassar’s antiquity is not a sign of its backwardness. Ai brags that “here in Telassar are
preserved specimens of the highest attainments the world knew in ancient days. They tell me
that in many things your modern world is yet in its infancy” (119). In contrast to Twain’s

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imagined medieval England, Hopkins’s imagined Africa is in many ways more “advanced” than
Europe.
Hopkins portrays Telassar as both an idealized past and a utopian future. It shares many
traits with utopias, a genre that was enormously popular contemporaneously with lost worlds,
especially after the 1888 publication of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. Utopias of this
period often featured “the organization of society according to reason, the elimination of
contradictions through rational state control, an obsession with perfection (including eugenics),
[and] a concern for the welfare of the community” (Khouri, “Lost Worlds” 184). Telassar is
portrayed as perfect—though there is no obvious eugenics program—and decisions are made
by the rational council of Sages who “must be married and have at least two children; [have] a
knowledge of two out-world languages, and… pass a severe examination by the court as to
education, fitness, and ability” (Of One Blood 130). The narrative does not spend much time in
Telassar, but it shows just enough to imply a utopia. The perfection of this society is more
important for what it can offer to the world outside of Telassar. Ai condemns Charlie’s racism,
saying “[f]air-haired worshippers of Mammon, do you not know that you have been weighed in
the balance and found wanting? that your course is done? that Ethiopia’s bondage is about
over, her travail passed?” (Of One Blood 154). Because all humanity is of one blood, the return
of Telassar will benefit the entire world. This futurity is essential because “[m]ovements against
racial and imperial domination also rely on a future toward which adherents can work” (Lothian
2-3). Hopkins addresses this dynamic with her portrayal of the challenges that accompany
Telassar’s return to global prominence.
Racism and colonialism are the biggest threats to the glorious future promised by
Reuel’s return. The plot proves wrong the optimism expressed early in the novel that “the
theories of prejudice are swept away by the great tide of facts,” at least with regards to white
American culture (Of One Blood 87). Even when confronted directly with Telassarian greatness,
Charlie retains his racist beliefs. At the end of the novel, Reuel still does not know how he will

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effectively combat racism and colonialism. The narrator concludes with the assertion that “none
save Omnipotence can solve the problem…. Caste prejudice, race pride, boundless wealth,
scintillating intellects refined by all the arts of the intellectual world, are but puppets in His hand,
for His promises stand, and He will prove His words, ‘Of one blood have I made all races of
men’” (Of One Blood 193). Hopkins offers hope for a utopian future led by this African
civilization, but that utopia can only be achieved with divine aid. Hopkins creates a society that
is both ancient and full of potential to push back against the idea of time as a linear march
toward civilization. However, she encounters many of the problems that postcolonial thought
has still not resolved. As McClintock explains, “the term postcolonial… is haunted by the very
figure of linear development that it sets out to dismantle. Metaphorically, the term
postcolonialism marks history as a series of stages along an epochal road from ‘the precolonial,’
to ‘the colonial,’ to ‘the postcolonial’” (10). Despite her efforts to challenge linear time, Hopkins
was not able to entirely expel the Enlightenment mindset from her novel.
Of One Blood grounds its hopeful future for the African diaspora in a history that was
both actively destroyed through slavery and colonization and frequently ignored by Europeans
who believed that “primitives” could not have any history of their own. In this context, Hopkins
adopts a new perspective that draws attention to the gaps and assumptions in the mainstream
histories. Most European and white American “writers of the imperialist period consider
themselves faithful to history… but this faithfulness is restricted to the observation of isolated
facts…. There develops in the imperialist period a new cult of ‘facts’" (Lukács 251). Like other
authors, Hopkins selects her own real historical details, but she combines them with a powerful
narrative that challenges the racist and colonialist purposes of other lost world authors. Hopkins
achieves this through her incorporation of magic and science on an equal footing. Her African
civilization is not anti-scientific, and Ai shows Reuel “a record of the wisdom and science of [his]
ancestors” (Of One Blood 141). However, Hopkins does not dwell on this science or suggest
that it is the only source of wisdom. Instead, Telassar embraces a simpler life as part of “a new

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primitivism, a rejection of the increasingly complex urban-technological society spawned by the
new century.” (Clareson, “Lost Lands” 716). Hopkins challenges the narrative of anachronistic
space by refusing to consider science and reason as the only ways forward. Part of the
European definition of progress at the end of the nineteenth century is that a culture moves
away from magic and toward Christianity and ultimately rationality.
Hopkins, however, rejects this distinction and her utopia is marked both by scientific
achievement and supernatural powers. The descendants of Telassar all have mystical abilities
that allow them to heal, mesmerize, and haunt. This holds with the idea that I discuss more in
chapter four that Black Americans understood Africa as “a mythical space, an idealized place of
singular black power and special promise. From slavery times to the modern era, black
Americans commonly saw Ethiopia as a site of special significance, a sacred land, the center of
ancient black power and prestige” (Scott 41). This power is sometimes manifested in the
magical traditions inherited from Africa. Aunt Hannah is specifically “the most noted ‘voodoo’
doctor or witch in the country” (Of One Blood 174). Hopkins connects the power of West African
magic traditions with the long history of African Christianity as referenced in the New Testament.
While the Ethiopianist project looked forward to the fulfilment of the great prophecy, it also
looked back to the mystical idea of a historical Ethiopia. These cross-temporal images of Black
greatness offer her readers “the replenishing experiences of wonder that make the world worth
fighting for and encourage[s] resilience when those struggles seem overwhelming” (Castiglia 1).
She associates Africa’s legacy with a higher power that cannot be rationalized or dismissed.
According to nineteenth-century models of progress, however, Of One Blood’s use of
magic would have aligned even Reuel, with his prestigious scientific education, with a
“backwardness” by the rational standards of progress. Many influential thinkers, including Frazer
and Hegel, imagined “the Enlightenment as a cultural adulthood for the human race, [where] the
marvelous is seen to belong to a premodern childhood, something to be ‘outgrown’ as well as
yearned for once we moderns ‘mature into rationality’” (Lim 24). Hopkins, however, does not

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accept this paradigm and makes magic and science indistinguishable. When Ai shows Reuel a
disk that can reflect images from the past, Reuel exclaims “[i]t is magical!” But Ai claims that it is
“a secret of Nature” (Of One Blood 144). Hopkins does not provide a scientific explanation, but
instead suggests that seemingly supernatural abilities are part of the same natural world as
science. Frazer nearly acknowledges this possibility, but he remains dedicated to the principle
of development. He fails to understand the implications of his observation that “magic and
religion have frequently been confused with one another and are usually closely interrelated,”
since he still believes that this perspective is “representative of those ignorant classes,” which
includes “primitives,” in Africa, India, and even the poor and uneducated in Europe (Vickery 43).
Hopkins positions these ambiguously supernatural moments not as “primitive”, but as wondrous
and performed by characters of great dignity and intelligence.
Nonetheless, the characters who perform magical feats are all somehow outside white
American culture’s narrative of progress. Telassar itself is a relic of a past time, Aunt Hannah
and Mira practice magic from the marginal condition of enslavement, and Reuel uses his
powers in secret to supplement his scientific training. Through these acts of “primitive” magic,
Hopkins offers a “glimpse [of] an ‘outside’ to the regime of modern homogeneous time…:
immiscible times—multiple times that never quite dissolve into the code of modern time
consciousness, discrete temporalities incapable of attaining homogeneity with or full
incorporation into a uniform chronological present” (Lim 12). Hurston refuses to condemn magic
or separate it from science, which subverts the narrative of progress that justifies the oppression
of “primitive” peoples.
Hopkins powerfully combines supernatural abilities and non-linear temporality through
her use of ghosts. As Lim notes, “[g]hosts call our calendars into question. The temporality of
haunting—the return of the dead, the recurrence of events—refuses the linear progression of
modern time consciousness, flouting the limits of mortality and historical time” (149). First, Mira
appears to both Dianthe and Reuel and helps them learn about Aubrey’s plot. Though Mira died

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before the events of the novel, she returns and refuses to be consigned to history, just as
Telassar and its royal line do over the course of the narrative. Mira is the victim of slavery, but
she appears to her children to ensure a better future for her descendants. She represents both
“history’s structural exclusions” and the ways that “lingering presences and possibilities of past
futures open possibilities for thinking and living the present in different, deviant ways. If a
forward-oriented narrative of historical development signifies the time of capitalism and
colonialism, then the time of the colonized, excluded, and othered is most frequently to be found
in the past” (Lothian 20). To fully realize his glorious future, Reuel must first reckon with Mira as
the spectral embodiment of both his personal and racial past.
The second ghost in the novel is Dianthe, who leads Aubrey to her own deathbed where
he is found and brought to justice by the party from Telassar. While Dianthe is a much more
recent death than Mira, these dual hauntings represent the full arc of “the nostalgic allegory of
ghostly return, [where] what is dead and long past comes to life, old concerns acquire a new
urgency and relevance, and a radicalized historical consciousness fathoms the past’s
entanglement with immediate concerns” (Lim 160). Mira’s ghost is the manifestation of the years
of trauma endured by the royal line of Telassar and the African Americans who they represent.
Dianthe’s ghost represents the continuation of this trauma into the present. Both hauntings,
however, are hopeful since both ghosts aid Reuel in his journey to the throne and therefore his
ability to dismantle the oppressive systems that resulted in Dianthe and Mira’s deaths.
These optimistic hauntings illustrate how Hopkins finds a hopeful message in the various
genres in which she writes. The passing narrative has been closely associated with the “tragic
mulatto” and cautionary tales from various perspectives about passing and race relations. The
lost world novel, however, tends to be more triumphant. While there is an element of risk or
loss, the colonial protagonists usually return to their European or American society richer and
wiser than when they left. In the lost world the protagonist is “[l]iving in the Time of the
primitives,” and he completes the journey by “mov[ing] through the Time he may have shared

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with them onto a level on which he finds anthropology” (Fabian 61). This return is essential to
the genre, but it is less positive when viewed, as Hopkins does, from the perspective of the
colonized peoples. Hopkins’s cautious optimism at the end of Of One Blood shows her in
conversation with both the tragedy of the passing narrative and the brutal triumphalism of the
lost world. This tension makes Hopkins’s use of ghosts more effective, since “the ghost is above
all a revenant, a figure of return. Genre, likewise, is a formal, social, and industrial contract to
repeat and to return and, as such, is always temporally diverse, involving the unmooring and
entanglement of the ‘old’ with the ‘new’ and with versions yet to come” (Lim 190). None of
Hopkins’s generic sources are especially old, but they were well established when she wrote Of
One Blood, so she can recombine them to challenge the conventions of both the passing novel
and the lost world story.
Reuel as Protagonist
Reuel’s character development is the site where the two genres most obviously engage
with each other. Reuel is both the racially ambiguous protagonist of the passing novel and the
explorer of the lost world story, but each of those roles alters the presentation of the other.
When Reuel passes as white at the beginning of the novel, he is correspondingly committed to
Enlightenment scientific values. He initially believes that rationality and science are more
“advanced” than African magic, and therefore he is distressed, saying, “I have the power… and
could I but complete the necessary experiments, I would astonish the world” (Of One Blood 3).
Folk tradition and his own experience are insufficient; he is obsessed with proving himself by the
standards of white society. In the first section of the novel, Reuel only uses his powers when
Dianthe will die without supernatural intervention. Reuel’s abilities are part of his African legacy
and later associated with the formerly enslaved Aunt Hannah, who is compared to an elderly
“African princess” (174). Even after Reuel uses his powers, he seeks work in the white world of
science and rationality. He initially understands his journey to Ethiopia not as a return to his lost

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homeland, but as a scientific endeavor that only expects to find ruins of an African civilization. In
the linear conception of time, Black greatness is limited to the past. The leader of the expedition
acknowledges the importance of Africa in world history, but even he cannot imagine a powerful
African civilization in the present, much less one that represents the future.
The events of the story force Reuel to grapple with his internalized colonial mindset.
Telassar challenges his perceptions of the relative value of African and European civilizations,
just as it is intended to challenge the reader’s. By depicting this story as a personal journey
Hopkins is “finding ways to address those emotional and spiritual needs that must be met if
social activism is to have a future. Showing how attention to human interiority may have realer
political consequences than does abstract dogma” (Castiglia 120). Hopkins only shows
glimpses of the lost world, which is not uncommon in adventure-oriented lost world stories.
Utopias often describe more about the lost society, but Telassar is not intended as a political
model. Instead, Hopkins speaks generally, as when she describes Ai as having “the grace of a
perfect life” and “the musical language that flowed from his lips… charmed the scholar in his
listener” (Of One Blood 114). The city itself has “marvelously delicate architecture worked in
stone” (Of One Blood 120). The existence of an African utopia is more important than the details
of that society. Hopkins focuses her political project on the connection between this African
culture and Reuel as the representative of Black Americans. Therefore, the utopian elements
“are subordinated to the hero's private quest” (Khouri, “Lost Worlds” 184). In Of One Blood the
hero’s destiny is essential because it is intimately linked to the utopia’s success.
At the beginning of the novel, Reuel focused on his own accomplishments and hid his
Black ancestry. In Telassar he sees his heritage as a source of power and pride, and he enters
into solidarity with Africans around the world. As Fiorelli notes, “[i]f Reuel's initial gaze is
imperialist, his view changes after he finds Telassar and learns that he is the descendant of an
ancient royal line destined to lead black people to greatness” (457). He is part of an African
civilization that is demonstrably superior to the racist society he spent so long trying to impress,

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and this helps him fully embrace his Black identity. His direct experience of Telassar removes
his skepticism about the African origin of European civilization, and by the end of the novel
Reuel becomes a leader in Telassar’s resistance to colonialist powers. Unlike Bellamy’s
protagonist, Reuel cannot simply fall “into a trance and [awaken] a hundred years later to find
his world has been transformed while he slept” (Slotkin, The Fatal Environment 515). As a
model for readers, Reuel must commit his life to bringing about a better world for future
generations.
What Hopkins does show of Telassar reflects her condemnation of the racist American
society and its elevation of rationality. The narration shows that Telassar is both more equitable
and more rational than the United States. Ai expresses shock at American racism in the same
scene as he describes Telassar’s architecture as “a masterpiece of beauty and art…. The
Sages have seen nothing equal to it in the outer world” (Of One Blood 130). Their utopia is one
of both architectural achievement and mesmerism, and this fusion of rationality and mysticism
upends the dichotomy between an irrational “savage” past and a perfectly rational future. Here
Hopkins turns from the specifics of Reuel’s life to the awe-inspiring possibilities of a utopia. She
avoids the dangers of a critique that “often overlooks—and renders ineffective—resistance and
alternative social identifications… [and] forestalls the hopes that generate social resiliencies”
(Castiglia 110). She gives her readers Telassar as an ancient and mystical African society. The
narrative portrays a United States that remains irrationally committed to racism and allows
violent men like Aubrey to prosper, but that is not all that Hopkins offers. Her portrayal of
Telassar complicates the view of history as a march from superstitious squalor to a logical
utopian future. She suggests that the past can inform and teach the future, as the people of
Telassar could teach the world.
Hopkins also implicitly compares the two societies through Reuel’s personal relationship
to the systemic oppression of white America and the new temporalities Telassar offers. As a
mixed-race African American, his very body is the result of contact between white Americans

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and Africans. This reinforces Hopkins’s central message that all peoples are “of one blood.”
However, as Aunt Hannah explains to Dianthe, Reuel’s body is also the result of centuries of
violence against African Americans, especially women. Unlike the mystical African legacy Reuel
learns about in Telassar, Aunt Hannah’s story is a familiar American history of slavery, rape,
and incest. In keeping with the tradition of the historical novel, Reuel is a “typical [character]
nationally, but in the sense of the decent and average, rather than the eminent and allembracing” (Lukács 36). The story of Reuel’s ancestry is horrific, but Hopkins gives it to her
protagonist to make the point that it is a typical American story. She refuses to let the reader
look away from the brutality of slavery even as she presents an African utopia. The violent
legacy of slavery is an essential part of the novel’s criticism of Eurocentric temporality. The
ideology of the Enlightenment also justified the transatlantic slave trade, and these legacies
cannot be separated historically, or in Reuel’s life. He is a character “in which the important
social-human contents, problems, movements, etc., of an epoch appear directly” (Lukács 285).
Reuel represents a history that includes the horrors of chattel slavery and therefore exposes the
cruelty and irrationality of white American culture. Like Twain, Hopkins accuses white
Americans of the “savagery” that imperialist lost world writers typically associate with “primitive”
cultures.
Hopkins not only undermines accusations of African “primitivism” but also the late
nineteenth century cult of rationality that helped justify imperialism. Telassar fully embraces
supernatural beliefs and abilities as part of its utopia that is more “advanced” than Europe. In
Hopkins’s time, rationality, progress, and whiteness were nearly inextricable from each other.
Enlightenment thinkers and their heirs, including Hegel, argued that rationality was the most
“evolved” form of thought and that all people in the society, and eventually all societies on Earth,
should be as rational as possible. These white men, of course, understood themselves to have
the most naturally rational minds, and therefore it was their “responsibility” to rule over more

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inherently irrational women and colonial subjects. Rationality was seen as not just the
evolutionary pinnacle, but the primary mover of technological progress and moral development.
Reuel’s character arc over the course of the novel is in the same tradition as the
protagonists of Delany’s Blake and Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio. All three novels focus on
young men who come into a political awareness and a sense of pride in their own Blackness
and the potential of Black futurity. Like the protagonists of these other novels, Reuel provides a
model for how all African Americans can become race-conscious individuals and work toward a
more just society. Hopkins sends Reuel to Africa for this because in Black thought of this period
“Africa yields a temporary and partial haven from the onslaught of US racism…. Africa offers a
place to reconstruct past black greatness and predict a great future” (Fiorelli 467). As
protagonist, Reuel inhabits both the African and the American worlds and moves between them.
He does not accept the kingship for its wealth and prestige. He only takes the throne after he
learns to be proud of his race and commits himself to the service of others. This follows a
tradition where “is not simply a remote history which the writer of the lost-race utopia wishes to
recapture; it is a highly personalized antiquity which he seeks, one which has been oddly
refurbished and cross-bred” (Khouri, “Lost Worlds” 172). In Of One Blood, Reuel is the one who
has been “cross-bred,” while his personalized antiquity is the pure African heritage that he has
spent his life trying to hide. Reuel’s ties to the rest of the world are especially important in light
of the threat of colonialism expressed at the very end of the novel. The final mention of Reuel in
the text is not a celebration of his coronation, but an acknowledgement that he “views, too, with
serious apprehension, the advance of mighty nations penetrating the dark, mysterious forests of
his native land” (Of One Blood 193).
In Of One Blood, Hopkins adapts many of the conventions of the lost world genre to
reflect specifically African American experiences. She builds a Black utopia that is both past and
future and asks her readers to reconsider their view of history as a linear progression toward
rationality. As professional history and archeology developed, lost worlds became less

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plausible. But popular science writers and novelists often applied not to better understand the
diversity of humans on the planet but as another tool of imperialist conquest. With her lost world,
Hopkins “reimagines a remote past where harmful entanglements are unpicked and modern
institutions consequently liberated from corrupting influences that persist in modern institutions
(Carver 214). She demonstrates the power of speculation to disrupt normative narratives of
historical time and depicts how our perception of the past can change how we imagine the
future. At the height of imperialism in Africa and the beginning of Jim Crow in the United States,
Hopkins’s revision of history prefigures authors such as Martin Bernal in her emphasis on Africa
as a source of history and culture rather than a “primitive” place that needs European
“civilization.”
We currently find ourselves in a moment when reactionary figures in politics and culture
attack any attempts to broaden history to include an acknowledgement of the past and the
importance of Africans and colonized peoples to world history. As we consider our response to
these circumstances, Hopkins offers a remarkably hopeful model of utopian imagining. She
adopts “an orientation begun in suffering but trained into something more capable of wonder at
the unprecedented, more hopeful possibilities of life” that centers “the positive good that
constitutes humanism, generating both personal and social dissatisfaction (generating critique)
and endurance (ensuring the perpetual life of ideals)” (Castiglia 121). Hopkins also lived in a
time of reactionary politics, where governments around the United States were chipping away at
the rights and freedoms won by African Americans during Reconstruction. The strategies she
presents in Of One Blood to confront this kind of historical moment are not easy, but they are
founded in a sense of both urgency and community. She advocates for pride in one’s own
identity while also believing in the fundamental humanity of everyone. She reminds us of the
power of utopian thinking to disrupt the normative ideologies that reinforce oppressive systems.
In Of One Blood Hopkins uses the conventions of a genre that exemplifies the racism of her
social context, but she reimagines it to express her own deepest political convictions. In both

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form and content, Hurston uses this text to model how to transform the direst circumstances
through practices of hope.

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Chapter 3: Weird Genders, Genres, and Times in C.L. Moore
The pulp fiction magazine Weird Tales was already famous for its publication of H.P.
Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos and Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian stories when its
October 1934 issue debuted a new series by one of the magazine’s rising stars: C.L. Moore.
The editor introduced the story glowingly and reminded readers of Moore’s first story only a year
before that “disclosed such finished craftsmanship, such imagination and such utter originality
that it was hailed at once as a veritable tour de force of literature…. With this story, ‘The Black
God's Kiss,’ perhaps the weirdest story ever penned, C. L. Moore presents a new character,
Jirel of Joiry, whose fascinating adventures will hold you spellbound” (F. Wright 403). The story
was as much of a success as the editor predicted, and the Jirel of Joiry stories that followed not
only solidified Moore’s reputation as one of the foremost authors of 1930s speculative fiction,
but also helped to define the genre that would later become known as sword and sorcery.6
Moore’s work in Weird Tales presented the readers with new configurations of gender, genre,
and time and challenged the hierarchies that preoccupied the work of her contemporaries.
From 1933 to 1958, Catherine Lucille Moore was a frequent contributor to pulp
magazines, and her Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry stories consistently garnered praise from
fans and authors alike. She began to write professionally during the Great Depression after she
dropped out of college to help support her family with a job at a bank (“C.L. Moore Talks to
Chacal” 26). When her first story was accepted, she used her initials to prevent the bank’s
management from connecting her to the pulp magazine, which might have put her job at risk
(“C.L. Moore Talks to Chacal” 27). Nonetheless, her contemporary Fredrik Pohl notes that “the
close-knit science fiction world, which included a number of female fans and editors, knew full
well who C.L. Moore was and respected her as an outstanding writer” (143). Her name
6 The term “sword and sorcery” only came into common use in 1961, but I will use it in this context
because it has become such a commonly accepted term for the genre that originates with Weird Tales
series such as Conan the Barbarian and Jirel of Joiry (“Sword and Sorcery”).

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recognition within the speculative fiction community faded somewhat after her marriage to fellow
author Henry Kuttner in 1940. The two worked almost exclusively in collaboration and used a
wide variety of pseudonyms until Kuttner’s death in 1958.7 Moore stopped publishing her writing
altogether upon her remarriage in 1963. However, by 1981 she was still well-regarded enough
that she received Lifetime Achievement awards for her contributions to speculative fiction from
both the World Fantasy Convention and the World Science Fiction Convention.
This chapter considers Moore’s uses of time and gender in her two most popular Weird
Tales series from the 1930s: the interplanetary8 stories that feature space cowboy Northwest
Smith and the fantastical adventures of the medieval female knight, Jirel of Joiry. Northwest
Smith is the protagonist of the first story Moore ever sold, “Shambleau” (November 1933), and
its quality and popularity led to nine more solo stories published in Weird Tales by 1936, a
crossover with Moore’s other character Jirel of Joiry, and an additional two stories that were
only published in fan magazines. Northwest is described in his debut story as a “tall Earthman in
the space-explorer’s leather garb, all one color from the burning of savage suns save for the
sinister pallor of his no-color eyes in a scarred and resolute face, gun in his steady hand”
(Northwest of Earth 18-19). The Northwest Smith stories take place almost entirely in the kind of
space-faring future associated with rational and masculine science fiction. However, the content
of the stories destabilizes the binaries between masculine and feminine, past and future, and
rational science and superstitious fantasy. Northwest is not physically strong or politically
7 Together the pair have nineteen recorded pseudonyms, and scholars and fans still debate which works
and pseudonyms belong to which author. Part of the reason for this proliferation is that unlike many of
their contemporaries, neither Moore nor Kuttner were in active service in WWII. They were therefore able
to fill the empty space in magazines like Astounding in the early 1940s. The variety of pseudonyms
allowed them to publish multiple stories in each issue (Moskowitz 314, Jodell 37).
8
“Interplanetary romance,” or “interplanetary,” was the term preferred in the 1930s for a subgenre of
stories that is generally considered to have begun with Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars in
1912. The stories usually feature people from Earth who interact with the denizens of an inhabited Mars
and/or Venus and have adventures on other planets. Later scholars would refer to this genre as
“planetary romances,” since they correctly note that they are almost always limited to a single planet and
not the travel between them. However, “planetary romance” does not enter into wide circulation until after
1978, so I have chosen to use “interplanetary” for this genre (Prucher 100, 146).

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important. Instead, he is a criminal whose “name is known and respected in every dive and wild
outpost on a dozen wild planets” (Northwest of Earth 17). Throughout the largely unconnected
stories, he is constantly in search of work, money, and Venusian whisky. But he more often
finds himself in dangerous, mythologically inspired conflicts that challenged twentieth-century
readers’ preconceptions of time and masculinity.
While the setting is drastically different, the Jirel of Joiry stories also touch on many of
these same ambiguous situations and complicated temporalities. The clearly medieval
European scenery combines with fantastical elements of magic, dark gods, and alternate
dimensions to imagine a different kind of past. Between 1934 and 1939 Moore published six
Jirel of Joiry stories, all in Weird Tales. Though not initially part of an established genre, the Jirel
of Joiry stories have become known as one of the earliest examples of sword and sorcery
fiction. Most people understand Conan the Barbarian as the first real sword and sorcery series,
but David Drake argues that “Jirel [is] a development parallel to Conan rather than Conan’s
direct offspring. Much of later [sword and sorcery] owes a great deal to Moore” (9). Like the
Northwest Smith stories, Jirel’s adventures are mostly disconnected, but throughout them all,
Jirel herself emerges as a powerful and nuanced character.
Both the Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry series offer critiques of culture from marginal
positions with respect to time, genre, and gender. Northwest’s supposedly rational future
frequently comes into contact with the mythological past of many planets, and his rugged
cowboy masculinity often gives way to a feminine role. Jirel inhabits a correspondingly
masculine position in her own stories, but her irrationality and emotionality are key to her
victories across multiple dimensions. This similarity between Jirel’s fifteenth-century France and
Northwest’s futuristic Venus allows Moore to put these two protagonists together in the story
“Quest of the Starstone” (November 1936), which uses conventions from both science fiction
and fantasy to bring the past and future into a conversation that disrupts binaries and
emphasizes the universality of the irrational. Moore writes a genre that was often defined

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through conflict between the human and the alien. Many interplanetary stories followed the
“logics of absolute opposition [that] were plausible in a culture organized around the
Manichaean divide between the Soviet Union and the United States, and its domestic corollaries
in the antagonisms of treachery/loyalty, homosexual/heterosexual, or simply good/evil”
(Castiglia 158). However, her own work destabilizes these boundaries and lifts up emotional
and irrational solutions to the problems of both the past and the future.
Moore’s investment in the unruly and the marginal is likewise present in her approach to
genre. As speculative fiction developed into recognizable genres over the course of the 1930s,
the distinction grew between futuristic science fiction and past-oriented fantasy. In her
discussions of temporality and genre, Lim argues that, like the repetition that creates gender,
“generic repetition inevitably encodes difference or novelty. Generic repetition is always inexact,
never a precise iteration. Accordingly, the pleasures of genre’s iterative temporality are ones to
which genre scholarship must always return: what are the pleasures of variance-in-repetition?”
(193). Authors like Lord Dunsany and his imitators created fantasy as they repeatedly drew from
history and mythology, while the proto-science fiction of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne set a
precedent for those who wanted to repeat variations on their extrapolations of new inventions in
a technological future.
However, both genres remained deeply invested in the Hegelian fantasy of progress.
Their authors understood themselves to be in a moment where “the future was no longer
knowable through familiarity with the past on the basis of the cyclic nature of human
experience…. This new future was as yet unknowable, but could be realised according to a
human vision of progress” (Griffin 10). This “progress,” however, largely confirmed society’s
biases around questions of race, gender, and rationality. The unwillingness to consider
alternative perspectives led Ursula Le Guin to criticized mainstream science fiction as
incredibly regressive and unimaginative. All those Galactic Empires taken straight from
the British Empire of 1880. All those planets—with 80 trillion miles between them!—

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conceived of as warring nation-states, or as colonies to be exploited, or to be nudged by
the benevolent Imperium of Earth towards self-development—the White Man’s Burden
all over again. (209)
This reflects the tradition of colonialist travel writing that inspired many early speculative fiction
texts, but also reveals the irony behind many speculative works of the pulp era. While they were
placed at the margins of “proper literature,” they replicated their own society’s normative
ideological centers within this new literary context.
The systematization of genres and the division between “proper” literature and popular
fiction also serve to reify other binaries. This kind of normative division is “profoundly gendered.
It reproduces culturally ascribed values of masculinity and femininity by failing to register the
ways in which binary oppositions reinvoke gendered hierarchies” (Rabinowitz 5). Moore is
especially interesting in this context because her gender and working-class background placed
her outside the center of her culture, and this perspective is reflected in her writing. The
precarity of Moore’s financial situation as a woman who made a living off her writing begins to
explain why Moore’s galactic empires are not the “benevolent imperium” of Le Guin’s critique.
She is much more interested in the instability of these systems: the rebellions, compromises,
and abuses that trouble the constructs at the heart of society. Moore’s interest in genre
hybridity, ambiguous gender, and collapsing empires highlights her skepticism about the idea of
progress itself. At this time, many believed in “scientific ‘diffusion’... from center out to periphery,
through which European science was seen as the engine of ‘modernization’ and ‘development’
for the entire world” (Delbourgo and Dew 10). Moore often places her stories deliberately away
from this civilizational center. Northwest Smith is an outlaw, not an important official in the solar
system, and her protagonists are more likely to cause the destruction of a state than be its
heroic savior. As she decenters empires, Moore also denies linear models progress and
presents a diffuse model of both the solar system and of time itself.

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This intra-genre conversation shows how Moore’s works use fantastical settings for real
political ends. Her stories are a form of imagination that “shapes ideals into worlds… and
simultaneously [makes] the social into an unreal—and hence reimaginable—possibility.
Imagination allows us to express ideals in familiar forms—as a system, a social structure—
without accepting as necessary the terms in which that familiarity is currently constituted”
(Castiglia 3). Moore refashions numerous social systems throughout her oeuvre and refuses to
stay within conventional boundaries. In particular, Moore approaches time and genre much in
the same way as Judith Butler understands gender. Like Butler, Moore argues that “naturalized
and reified notions of gender” can and should be disrupted “through the mobilization, subversive
confusion, and proliferation of precisely those constitutive categories that seek to keep gender
in its place by posturing as the foundational illusions of identity” (44). Both gender and genre are
created through repetition, and Moore blurs the generic boundaries between science fiction and
fantasy through crossovers, time travel, alternate worlds, and mysterious forces that may be
science or may be magic. In this period of genre codification, “the divisions within genres point
to the fissures within ideology and history and open a space for theoretical intervention into the
(con)text” (Rabinowitz 66). Moore chose to intervene in the creation of systems that center
certain experiences, times, and ontologies by focusing on the marginal rather than the central
formations of time, gender, and genre.
I ground this analysis in Moore’s portrayals of gender in part because this is also the
only aspect of Moore’s work on which there is significant scholarship. Despite Moore’s
popularity in the pulp era, as late as 2018 Eileen Donaldson notes that Moore’s “writing has
received relatively little scholarly attention, most of which focuses on her short stories
‘Shambleau’ (1933)... and ‘No Woman Born’ (1944)” (48). Even Donaldson’s own excellent work
on Jirel of Joiry is part of a long history of scholars who focus on Moore’s identity as a woman
and debate the rarity of female pulp authors and the ways in which her work is or is not feminist.
Though Eric Davin has successfully proven that women in the pulp magazines were far more

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common than later scholars have assumed, the cultural context in which Moore wrote did make
her gender significant. Born in 1911, Moore was part of the first generation of women who grew
up with the knowledge that they would be able to vote, and she would have only just been old
enough to do so when she began publishing in 1933. With her job at the bank and her
supplemental income from writing, Moore was one of the women who “made up over 25 percent
of the labor force” in the United States during the Great Depression (Rabinowitz 46). This
context for Moore’s life certainly impacts her work. After their marriage, writing became Moore
and Kuttner’s sole source of income, and she was very quick to remind interviewers that she
would “sit down and grind out a story cause the rent was due” (“C.L. Moore Talks to Chacal”
28). All of her stories are not just written by a woman, but as a form of labor that was essential
to her family’s survival.
Most of the existing commentary on Moore’s work, however, situates her gender in the
context of science fiction history. Early speculative pulp magazines in particular were assumed
to be the domains of men, in part because of their origins in the boys’ adventure magazines of
the 1880s and 1890s (Ashley 20). In her work on Moore feminist scholar Susan Gubar claims:
When SF written by male writers of the 1930s and '40s consisted primarily of stories
about all-male crews setting out to conquer the universe, women writers had to be
seriously hampered by the images available to them for their female symbols or
characters: the womblike rocket ship, the virgin planet in need of civilizing, or the
tiresome but necessary bearers of life brought along to populate new worlds. In all these
roles, moreover, because the “feminine” was classified as irrational within the rhetoric of
a genre dedicated to rationality, the woman was viewed as monstrous. (17)
Gubar represents one of the two broad camps of scholars who have considered Moore’s work
through the lens of gender. Gubar and most twentieth century scholars believe that Moore
repeated the same patriarchal conventions of her male contemporaries, while more recent
scholarship tends to argue that Moore complicates gender dynamics in her works.

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The later scholars often directly address what they see as the failings of the earlier
scholarship. Donaldson, for example, gives a description of how she understands Gubar’s goal:
“to have empowered women unseat masculine authority and assert a better, feminine way of
living. At the time, feminist SF critics would therefore have expected authors to challenge and
subvert the ‘He-Man ethos’ of the masculinist system” (51). This means that both the female—or
at least feminized—villains of the Northwest Smith series and the Amazonian protagonist Jirel of
Joiry were anathema to their idea of feminist speculative fiction. According to Gubar and her
camp, these portrayals were manifestations of Moore’s internalized misogyny.
In his dissertation on gender in sword and sorcery fiction, Anthony Conrad Chieffalo
offers a different way of considering what is and is not progressive or regressive in a genre. He
argues that “[c]ritical analyses of sword-and-sorcery fiction have tended to be rather reductive in
their analysis of gender. This… overlooks stories within the genre that attempt to use it to
forward transgressive and resistive ideas and performances of gender through some of its
stories,” including Moore’s (9). Nicole Emmelhainz agrees and suggests that early speculative
fiction in general, and specifically sword and sorcery fiction like Jirel of Joiry, provide “feminist
utopic spaces of the imagination, where… gender becomes a strategic performance rather than
an essential source of identity; humans are indeed animalized as sexed bodies… [but] they are
also framed as conscious individuals with freedom, individuals who take chances and make
choices deliberately” (119-120). Fundamentally, these two strains of analysis represent two
different views of feminism, but in the more recent discourse, Moore’s work offers the
opportunity to explore gender and to decouple gender from sex and the body. Jennifer Jodell’s
thesis on Moore is both the most extensive work on Moore to date and one of the very few
pieces of scholarship to seriously consider elements of the stories other than gender. Jodell
uses Butler’s queer theoretical perspective to argue that Moore’s work takes up “[t]he idea that a
unified ‘center’ is ‘artificial’ and thus requires ‘maintenance,’” which Jodell connects to Moore’s
fascination with the collapse of empires (89). For Jodell, Moore’s queer critique of various

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political and social centers applies equally to her portrayal of gender and her portrayal of
empire.
Building on Jodell’s engagement with Moore’s political philosophy, this chapter considers
how Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry’s queer and performative genders align with Moore’s
queered understanding of temporality. I will read both series in the context of Alexis Lothian’s
argument that “[c]hrononormativity and chronobiopolitics also mark the ways that gender and
sexuality are racialized and classed. Thinking race, coloniality, and capital along with gender
and sexuality is necessary to thinking queerly about histories, futures, and histories of futures”
(12). I will discuss how Moore’s deconstructive approach to centers of power manifests through
her portrayals of gender, time, and genre and how Butler’s understandings of performance and
repetition can be applied to the way we think about time. If “[t]he only way we know history is
through the retelling of accumulated stories that are narrated,” then history is just as constructed
as gender (Rabinowitz 9). Instead of repeating historical narratives of linear time, Moore offers
stories of incongruous and suspended times, of improper contact between times, and of times
that are unknowable by the human mind.
In doing this, she aligns herself with future queer theoretical approaches to time. In a
world where queerness is “improper, unfitting, unsuitable,” then queer subjects are at odds with
“things like time and space, history and politics…. Queer life is unbecoming for history and its
disadvantages— and thereby offers a propitious opportunity for extemporalizing on time itself”
(Tuhkanen and McCallum 10). Moore’s queer subjects exist in complicated relationships to
temporal norms in ways that challenge the myths of Hegelian progress. These speculative and
queer times are directly opposed to the structures of the realist novel, which has the “capacity to
organize human experience according to the linear time of clocks and calendars” and
“collaborates with other examples of modern print culture— most famously, the daily
newspaper— to introduce homogenous empty time into the lives of Western readers” (L. Pratt
196). This is especially true of the stand-alone stories that make up both the Northwest Smith

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and Jirel of Joiry series. The reader is expected to dip in and out of strange worlds with little to
no references to a clear narrative of past, present, and future.
Moore’s commitment to decentering binary gender, empire, and progress all resonate
with the twenty-first century discourses around queerness, history, and decolonization. She
does not offer concrete solutions for any issues of either her present or our own time, but the
way she frames the world “queers humanism, making it not legible and predictable but informal,
contingent, inscrutable to all but those who have experienced suffering within institutional
logics…. When queered, humanism is not an identity or a political position but a practiced
response to suffering” (Castiglia 115). Moore rehearses different gender, genre, and temporal
constructions, but the commonality across all of them is the coexistence of intense pain and
radical empathy. Gender, genre, and history can all be understood as stylized and repeated
acts, and Moore’s deconstructive approach to all three demonstrates her writing’s “increased
awareness of the function of imagination, idealism, and literary ‘worlds elsewhere’ in maintaining
resilience and motivating hopeful reconstructions in a world that seems to offer or to tolerate
nothing but what already is” (Castiglia 18). As a working woman in the Great Depression,
Moore’s worlds offer new ways of thinking and modes of being that continue to resonate today.
Troubled Genders
By the early twentieth century, portrayals of gender had become essential to narratives
about time and history. Nineteenth-century anthropology theorized that there were prehistoric
matriarchies “in which women ruled, largely through their role as mothers…. But they had to be
superseded in the interests of progress” because patriarchal rule was “an advance for the
human race” (Eller 805). This was eventually taken up by Second Wave feminists, who used it
to advocate for a return to a supposedly original and often utopian matriarchal system.
However, in the 1930s it was largely used to associate women, especially powerful women, with
the past and “primitive” societies, an idea which Europeans supported with examples of women

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in important social and political roles in societies outside of Europe. The rational progress
necessary for the improvement of human society was the domain of white men. However,
Moore’s work in both the Jirel of Joiry and Northwest Smith series understands that gender and
power are each “an effect produced by the ongoing process of history rather than being the
cause of historical events” (Rabinowitz 9). Therefore, she Moore against the gendered
expectations about her protagonists and portrays their fluid and non-normative gender
presentations as part of worlds built around queer temporalities.
Moore’s understanding of gender has been most thoroughly discussed in reference to
Jirel of Joiry. Despite the different scholarly interpretations of Moore’s work, critics agree that
Jirel is written as a masculine woman. Gubar remarks that Jirel “always chooses armor over
amour” (22). Emmelhainz acknowledges that Jirel “does not exhibit any traits stereotypically
designated as feminine, such as passivity and domesticity. She is aggressive and excessively
violent” (123). While Gubar takes a dim view of this portrayal, more recent scholars argue that
Jirel’s masculinity does not necessarily make Moore (or Jirel) an unwitting dupe of the
patriarchy. Donaldson argues that “because the female warrior does challenge conventional
gender norms she is recognized as an agent for change, forcing readers (and viewers) to reevaluate their assumptions about the construction of ‘masculine Man’ and ‘feminine Woman’ as
heteronormative ideals” (52). Jirel’s masculine traits and social role prove that masculinity is not
the unique province of men, but rather that “gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time,
instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts” (Butler 179). Jirel’s masculine
performance and role as the hero in predominantly male adventure genre suggests that the
narrative of progress that centers men’s ability to find and seek and conquer is neither unique
nor essential to men.
However, Jirel’s gender is not only queered through her performative masculinity. Rather
than entirely rejecting socially inferior feminine traits, Jirel is also defined by her expressions of
empathy and emotion. This is present from the first Jirel stories “Black God’s Kiss” and “Black

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God’s Shadow” (December 1934), which demonstrate Jirel’s passionate recklessness, but also
her astonishing and seemingly contradictory capacity for love and compassion. “Black God’s
Kiss” begins when a man named Guillaume captures Jirel’s castle and imprisons her in her own
dungeon. She escapes from her cell with the help of her priest, and plunges into an alternate
dimension accessed beneath the castle in search of revenge. She undertakes a harrowing
journey through a strange land where she encounters unknowable beasts, tortured humans,
and even a mysterious guide who appears in the form of Jirel herself. At her guide’s direction,
Jirel arrives at a shrine housing a strange black statue that is “so alien and innominate that
instinctively she drew away” (29). She is not allowed to maintain the distance between herself
and this Other, and when she kisses the statue, she invites its curse into her body so that she
can take it back with her to the surface world. This story ends when she passes the curse to
Guillaume with a kiss, and he dies painfully.
“Black God’s Shadow” begins immediately after the events of “Black God’s Kiss,” when
Jirel realizes that she loves Guillaume at the moment of his death. She demonstrates her depth
of feeling when she returns to the realm below the castle to rescue Guillaume’s spirit from
strange and unknowable entities. This time she achieves victory not through a single-minded
determination for revenge, but through the force of her emotions. When she possessed by the
titular black god, “[s]he called up the memories of hate and love and anger to hurl against it,
thinking as she did so that perhaps one who had lived less violently than herself and had lesser
stores of passions to recall might never be able to combat the god’s death-chill” (Jirel of Joiry
75). The deep and volatile emotions most often associated with femininity are the key to
defeating the god and putting Guillaume’s soul to rest. Jirel’s gender does not attempt to uphold
the rational and stoic norm of early twentieth-century masculinity. Instead, Moore’s choice to
portray “evil as an emotional vacuum” means that “every moment of acute emotion Jirel
experiences is crucial and may be weaponized” (Donaldson 57). Jirel triumphs against enemies
who cannot be overcome with violence through her emotionality, openness, and femininity. This

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story portrays Jirel’s masculine sense of adventure and her feminine depth of feeling not as
opposites, but as essential to both Jirel’s character and her success in these narratives.
Jirel’s emotions do more than just help her overcome enemies who attack from within,
they allow her to connect with and show genuine compassion for the many Others that she
encounters. Throughout the stories Jirel repeatedly enacts this feminine care and openness,
and Moore centers these moments as heroic and pivotal to the narrative. In the early stories,
Jirel demonstrates this compassion with her embrace of the black god and her sacrificial love of
her enemy Guillaume. Moore makes this idea even more central to the plot in “Jirel Meets
Magic” (July 1935), which begins when Jirel charges off alone to an alternate dimension in
pursuit of the evil wizard Giraud. This tone of adventure and daring changes when she
encounters the sorceress Jarisme torturing a dryad to death. Instead of pursuing her own quest,
Jirel stops and tries to rescue the dryad. When she fails, she holds the dying dryad and listens
to her last words. The dryad tells Jirel that Giraud is a servant of Jarisme and gives Jirel advice
on how to destroy Jarisme. Jirel then seeks out Jarisme as both a means to find Giraud and a
way to avenge the dryad. The sorceress captures Jirel, but Jirel uses the dryad’s advice to
break Jarisme’s talisman and destroy her before she returns to her own lands.
Like the black god, the dryad is not an inhabitant of Jirel’s dimension and is explicitly
framed in the story as inhuman. Jirel’s compassion is not tied to a possessive need to protect
her own people or even a desire to help those who are most like her. Across the stories, she
exhibits genuine empathy for and connection to those who seem completely alien. Responding
to those who condemn Jirel’s harsh and aggressive masculinity, Donaldson argues that Moore’s
portrayal of Jirel “is nuanced and complicated by a potent feminine interiority. Moore specifically
avoids essentializing either masculinity or femininity in her Jirel stories so that her protagonist's
performance of gender remains progressive even today” (49). Like Moore herself, Jirel does not
respond to strangeness by seeking to enforce boundaries. She is bold enough to go into
unknown worlds and caring enough to remain open to the connections she may find there. The

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episode with the dryad emphasizes that when someone is in genuine distress, especially
someone defenseless, Jirel reacts not only with chivalry, but with compassion.
Jirel’s sense of duty and her caring specifically reflect the relationship between her
gender identity and her social role within medieval society. As Butler notes, gender is “a shifting
and contextual phenomenon… a relative point of convergence among culturally and historically
specific sets of relations,” and Jirel’s gender must be understood in the context of her feudal
rights and obligations (14-15). Her behaviors are intelligibly masculine to a twentieth-century
observer, but she also takes on the male role of lord and warrior within her community. As
Donaldson notes, Jirel repeatedly identifies herself by saying “I am Joiry,” which, “[g]iven the
medieval belief that land and king are linked, and that the king's authority is divine in origin,
when Jirel says she ‘is Joiry’ she asserts absolute authority” (55). Jirel combines legal authority
with martial prowess, which allows her to take on a role in history that is usually reserved for
men. Even historical women such as Elizabeth I of England or Joan of Arc, often needed to
prove their ability to lead and were only allowed to do so through very specific deployments of
the feminine ideal of virginity. This ambivalence about female leadership continued into Moore’s
time. Since the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, “many middleclass white
women had expected to enter politics, but their gains in the public sphere were meager”
(Rabinowitz 46). In Moore’s imagined worlds, however, Jirel “never needs to become leader,
she is always leader and that is never questioned” (Chieffalo 94). Her authority is challenged by
outside opponents, such as Guillaume, but she is always accepted by her own people.
This authority is derived not just from Jirel’s place as a warrior and a feudal lord, but
from her compassion for the people she rules. She is a capable and often reckless warrior, but
Moore also inextricably ties her to duty and a people. Unlike Conan the Barbarian, Jirel’s
primary allegiance is not to her own interests, but to her subjects. She takes this duty seriously,
as evidenced from “Black God’s Kiss,” where she risks her life and soul to save her people from
Guillaume’s invasion. When the narrative uses the royal medieval construction “she was Joiry,”

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Moore glosses it with a description of what that means: “[h]er men were hers to bully and
threaten and command, but they were hers to die for too, if need be” (Jirel of Joiry 167). Jirel’s
existence as a compassionate medieval warrior and ruler presents an alternative to the
sometimes violent and cruel male rulers of medieval European history. In these stories, Moore
is part of a literary tradition of women in the 1930s who sought to “revise narrative as they
searched for gaps through which to enter history” (Rabinowitz x). Moore asks her readers to
consider the impact of a leader like Jirel on the distant past and to imagine the potential of
women as leaders in a society that still tacitly denied them political power.
In portraying the possibilities for women in an alternate Middle Ages, Moore uses a
common strategy of alternate history and “describe[s] utopian societies that history might have
produced and whose representation as imaginaries might yet assist a project to realize them.
These wishful instances of alternate history… excavate political possibilities” (Carver 4). Moore
does not make claims about history in the way that her Second-Wave feminist successors did,
but by carving an imaginative space in history for female power, Moore challenges the
narratives of both feudal history and male-centered speculative fiction. As she does this, she
highlights the ways in which “[a]lternate history also mediated relationships of past, present, and
future by altering lines of historical descent and subverting historical methods. Beaumont’s
description can be modified for this study, leading to the formula: The alternate history
transforms the past into the pre-history of an otherwise unimaginable present” (9 Carver). Moore
uses familiar medieval plots and characterization, but applies them to a woman, which
challenges the historiographic and gender norms to which her contemporary readers were
accustomed and suggests new configurations of gender in both the past and the future.
Jirel’s ambiguous and fluid gender takes elements of both masculinity and femininity, but
also of different stereotypes within femininity. Throughout her Jirel stories, Moore
subverts the female sword-and-sorcery archetypes of the female monster (the witch/the
sorceress), the siren luring the hero to his doom (the damsel in distress), or the woman

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warrior (the amazon/the Valkyrie). Jirel of Joiry inhabits all three roles simultaneously in
‘The Black God’s Kiss’ as the temptress for Guillaume, his woman warrior equivalent (if
not superior), and ultimately the female monster channeling the destructive essence of
‘blackness’ into the kiss that ends his life. (Chieffalo 108-109).
Moore is not content to break down the binaries between men and women, she also breaks
down the divisions within femininity and creates a character who incorporates elements of all
the different “types” of women in a way that is a strength. By presenting a compassionate
masculine woman who uses many different facets of femininity as a tool, Moore challenges the
idea of a unified masculinity and femininity that always stand in opposition to each other. She
decenters masculinity and focuses on hybridity and characters with complicated and flexible
relationships to their gender roles.
Though scholars have said less about gender in the Northwest Smith series, Moore’s
interplanetary stories feature a protagonist with his own ambiguous and non-normative
relationship to gender. Though Northwest has a number of liaisons appropriate for the
heterosexual masculinity that is expected of a space cowboy, his life and relationships are
precarious in a way that evokes typically feminine narrative roles. Jodell accurately notes that
“the half-starved Smith is hardly the attractive, ambitious ‘idealized’ figure required by the
science fiction pulps nor the dangerous ‘master’ of the Gothic. Northwest has no prospects for
earning riches, property, or glory… nor any ambition to advance the cause of anything other
than his next drink” (30-31). In keeping with the conventional link between masculinity and
futurity, Moore does put her male protagonist into the science fictional setting, but she continues
to frustrate gendered binaries by making him a complicated site of masculine performance.
Most of the analysis of Northwest as a character, including his gender, discuss only his
debut story, “Shambleau,” which traces Northwest’s transformation from stereotypically
masculine space cowboy to the victim of a monstrous woman. The story has an introduction that
connects Greek mythology to humanity’s past in space. It explains that “Man has conquered

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Space before, and out of that conquest faint, faint echoes run still through a world that has
forgotten the very fact of a civilization which must have been as mighty as our own” (Northwest
of Earth 17). The introduction also specifically identifies Medusa as an alien, and thus primes
the reader to interpret the Shambleau through the lens of the Medusa myth. The story itself
begins on Mars when Northwest stops a mob from killing a young woman they identify as
“Shambleau.” Northwest takes the woman home, where she takes off her turban to reveal that
she has worms for hair. She wraps Northwest in the worms, and he is paralyzed as she feeds
off his life force. He is only rescued when his friend Yarol returns to the room and kills the
Shambleau. Yarol attempts to extract a promise from Northwest to kill any other Shambleau he
meets on sight, but Northwest, barely capable of speech, only promises that he will try.
Contemporary scholars tend to read this story in terms of how it destabilizes gender.
Bredehoft argues that “the (hyper)masculine Smith… seems to have his masculinity ‘retooled’
as a result of his encounter with the Shambleau” (373). Northwest is introduced saving a damsel
in distress, but by the end of the story, he is a far less conventionally masculine character.
Bredehoft traces how Northwest’s encounter with this vampiric woman changes him. At the end
of the story, his speechlessness that is “so different from the confident masculinity seen in his
defiance of the mob, suggests that the death of the Shambleau may have indeed re-established
the social order [on Mars], but Yarol's killing of the Shambleau has not had the same effect of
returning Smith to his pre-Shambleau state” (374). This pattern continues in Northwest’s other
appearances, where he is consistently vulnerable to all manner of intrusions upon his mind and
body that leave him changed. As in “Shambleau,” Northwest often “assume[s] the role of victim
traditionally assigned to a woman. If the Shambleau was a damsel in distress in the beginning,
she has manipulated events to swap roles with the Earthman by the end” (Wilson 78).
Gubar’s analysis is slightly different than that of later scholars. She observes of
“Shambleau” that “what is striking is… the revisionary myth-making, specifically of a myth
central to women's identity; and… the concomitant portrait of the woman as alien, specifically

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the obsession with the ways in which her body is experienced as foreign or dangerous” (20).
Throughout the Northwest Smith stories the female body is certainly a site of danger and
irrationality. What Gubar fails to recognize is that these female bodies are not fundamentally
different from Northwest’s own body. Wilson observes that while Smith “is man enough to resist
the temptation to abuse the Shambleau. Smith’s fundamental humanity goes unrewarded
because the alien female has no such qualms…. Moore inverts the conventions of pulp fiction
with this revelation; it is the Earthman who assumes the victim’s role, not the Shambleau, who
instead holds him in her thrall” (77). His performed masculinity of rescuing the Shambleau is
exactly what makes him a victim in need of rescue.
This is not the only instance in which Northwest’s body is feminized through precarity.
Like many female characters, he is “figured by the desire [his] body both seeks and inspires in
others” (Rabinowitz 13). This is clearest in the story “Black Thirst” (April 1934), which also
begins when Northwest meets a beautiful woman. Her name is Vaudir, and she lives in a
special compound on Venus that breeds inhumanly beautiful women. She asks Northwest to
help her escape from the secretive leader of the compound, a vampire who feeds on beauty. In
the course of the escape, Northwest is lured further and further into the compound until he
confronts the vampire. The vampire then reveals that he wants to feed on Northwest’s beauty in
the same way as he does on that of the women who he has bred specifically for that purpose.
The vampire explains that “I realized how long it had been since I tasted the beauty of man. It is
so rare, so different from female beauty that I had all but forgotten it existed. And you have it,
very subtly, in a raw, harsh way” (Northwest of Earth 78). Northwest and Vaudir work together to
escape, with Vaudir attacking the vampire psychically to weaken the hold on Northwest’s mind
enough for him to shoot the vampire. While Northwest does heroically kill the villain in this story,
he is only able to do so after he is first rescued by the story’s initial damsel in distress. He then
relies on Vaudir once again to lead him out of the compound. The story ends with Vaudir asking
Northwest to kill her before the vampire’s remaining psychic energy can consume her. He does

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so, and thereby fails to save her or gain any of the usual rewards of heroism in adventure
stories. This is typical of the Northwest Smith stories, and many stories follow the ending of
“Shambleau” where Northwest gains nothing and loses speech, health, pride, or resources.
Moore’s choice to end the narratives with loss rather than success is notable because it
challenges the expectations her readers would have brought to this kind of story. As a space
cowboy in an interplanetary romance setting, Northwest’s character can trace its lineage to both
the Western hero and Burroughs’s John Carter, whose adventures are effectively lost world
stories set in space. These hypermasculine heroes conquered new territories with the “superior”
knowledge and technology of white men from Earth. Much of colonial masculinity was about the
ability of the white male body to overcome anything. It could not be violated, since it represented
the empire itself. As part of her move away from imperial and masculine centers, Moore
presents a hero whose body is constantly vulnerable. Jodell observes that “despite frequent
characterizations of Northwest as the epitome of the ‘macho’ hero, the steely-eyed Smith often
finds himself thrust through ‘portals’ to female-dominated worlds where he is ‘penetrated’ in
moments of perceptual vertigo” (30-31). The violation of his bodily and mental autonomy is not a
unique threat, but a regular part of his experience. Both Jirel and Northwest find strength in their
fluid gender presentations, but they are also vulnerable to the bodily incursions associated with
both genders. They are both wounded in battle and preyed upon by stronger forces. Moore
does not argue that non-normative genders create some sort of Nietzschean übermensch but
suggests that the binary poles of masculine and feminine are not opposed in practice.
In her treatment of Northwest’s gender, Moore queers the masculinity associated with
adventure heroes. She does this “by problematizing language, categories, definitions, and
framings” in the tradition of “deconstructionist critiques of identity and feminist contestations of
constricting definitions of sexual differences, [which] emerged out of a critique of Western
metaphysics and its stable ontology” (Tuhkanen and McCallum 3). Moore’s willingness to
rewrite genre conventions and colonial expectations through a feminized male hero speaks to

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Moore’s distinction from the rest of the interwar pulp science fiction community. As Cheng
explains, science fiction’s faith in progress and need for resolution meant that “[a]dventures out
there, while thrilling, were often also perilous and required returning to the safety of where they
began…. [T]o ensure science fiction’s premise of progressive possibility, stories did not disturb
their original present” (10). But Moore’s protagonists return from their adventures fundamentally
changed and unable to maintain the fiction of distinct and oppositional genders that were so
foundational in the 1930s and that continue to organize much of society in the twenty-first
century. While Russ describes gender in the 1930s as “masculinity equals power and femininity
equals powerlessness,” Moore herself never defaults to an uncritical repetition of these
stereotypes and her portrayal of gender in these stories actively frustrates many of them (203).
In most of Moore’s texts, she includes some element of “the frustration of binaries (light/dark,
male/female, human/animal) and the examination of a patriarchal culture that depends heavily
upon ‘blind faith’ in the logos” (Jodell 86). Moore does not ignore these binaries, but rather
writes them into her work in order to complicate them.
Permeable Boundaries
This is especially true in Moore’s interplanetary stories, where she refuses to draw
distinctions between significant ontological categories such as human, alien, monster, and
animal. The second most significant character in the Northwest Smith stories is the Venusian
outlaw Yarol. Pulp interplanetary fiction often associated Venus with femininity and exoticism,
and Yarol is smaller and speaks in “the liquid cadences of High Venusian” (Northwest of Earth
332). However, none of this makes Yarol less competent than Northwest. In “Shambleau”
Northwest is actually the more vulnerable party, and Yarol rescues him. Across the stories
Northwest feels the same chivalrous urge to protect women on Mars, Venus, the moons of
Jupiter, and surreal alternate dimensions, and those women often turn out to be more
dangerous than helpless. The delicate, ethereal moon people he meets are just as capable of

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empire and violence as the tough Martian drylanders. In many stories of this period, there is a
desire to find or maintain “a supposedly authentic, natural, and stable ‘rooted’ identity. This
invariant identity is in turn the premise of a thinking ‘racial’ self that is both socialised and unified
by its connection with other kindred souls… within the fortified frontiers of those discrete ethnic
cultures which also happen to coincide with the contours of a sovereign nation state (Gilroy 30-
31). Moore rejects this model. Most of Jirel’s adventures take place in alternate dimensions
where she makes connections with inhuman beings. In the interplanetary world, Northwest
similarly engages with the people of other planets more than with other Earthlings. There are
differences in culture and disposition among the peoples of the solar system, but Moore is not
interested in telling a story that reinscribes the standards of “Earth normal” as the pinnacle of
civilization in the solar system.
In many ways, Moore’s characters are so completely Other that they defy easy
categorization, either within or without the stories. Instead, the Other in Moore is often both
terrifying and pitiable. The black god from the Jirel stories carries implications of a racialized
otherness, but Jirel’s time in the under realm is marked by recognition as much as
estrangement. When the black god uses her own image as a mouthpiece and when she takes
the curse into herself, she becomes the messenger of the god. Despite her fear of the unknown,
she literally embraces the Other. Moore presents strangeness in her stories as what Foucault
identifies as “that not-known from which man is perpetually summoned towards self-knowledge”
(352). A boundary between the self and the Other is always porous in Moore’s work, and
characters who accept these connections may become wiser or more successful, but embracing
otherness always makes the characters vulnerable. This prefigures Le Guin’s idea that “[i]f you
deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different
from yourself… you have denied its spiritual equality, and its human reality. You have made it
into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have
fatally impoverished your own reality. You have, in fact, alienated yourself” (209-210).

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In the case of “Shambleau,” the story begins when Northwest draws a literal line in the
sand with his heat-gun between himself and the mob that is attacking Shambleau. To a firsttime reader, this boundary seems to be one of morality or humanity, but Bredehoft observes that
it “only serves to redraw and reconfirm the boundary otherwise defined by their differing
linguistic knowledge…. The members of the mob are a mob precisely because they know (or
think they know) exactly what the word "Shambleau" means: Smith (and, again, the reader) is
an outsider with respect to their linguistic community” (378). They only leave Northwest alone
because he implies that he understands what a Shambleau is and why he should fear it. He
claims her, but he never gains mastery over her. Later, she is revealed as partially animal with
worms for hair. This suggests monstrosity, but Northwest clearly saw enough humanity in her
that he cannot even promise to kill her. As a result, after the Shambleau’s death “Smith's very
language has been altered. At the end of the story, his speeches are replete with the dashes
and syntactic dislocations that had characterized the Shambleau's earlier attempts at English”
(Bredehoft 379). Instead of maintaining the clear line in the sand between himself and others,
Northwest is altered and aligned with the unknown. He too has embraced the Other at great risk
to himself. By the end of the story, he is both inarticulate like the Shambleau and has learned to
fear her like the mob. No matter who he tries to distinguish himself from, he only becomes like
them.
Moore develops this theme further in later stories. Her fan magazine contribution
“Werewoman” (1938) demonstrates the fluidity between human, animal, and monster. The story
begins with Northwest running from a battle into an eerie desert that once was home to a great
city. It is long abandoned, but there are still rumors of wolves living in the desert. Eventually, he
is confronted by the titular character, and he sees “[a] woman’s face, twisted into a diabolical
smile… glare-eyed in the dark. White fangs slavered as she bent to his throat” (Northwest of
Earth 355). In this first passage, the werewoman is marked as “a woman,” “diabolical” and
possessed of the same fangs that Northwest has feared in the rumored wolves. She is

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accompanied by a dark pack whose “forms were not stable; shifting from dark to light and back
again” (Northwest of Earth 356). The wolf-woman invites him to join the pack, and he is
transformed by the experience. When running with the pack “it seemed to him that he fled on
four legs, not two—fleetly as the wind, thrusting a pointed muzzle into the breeze” (Northwest of
Earth 358). He has performed wolfness so thoroughly that he becomes more wolf than man.
Moore does not hold the white male body to the same standards of inviolability as the lost world
authors. His body is not only feminized throughout the texts, it is not always clearly human.
In this story, Moore draws attention to the relationship between queerly gendered
subjects like Northwest and Jirel and their context. These characters “are not only
performatively reworking themselves, but also simultaneously reformulating the property,
attribute, qualities, or actions that surround them” (Tuhkanen and McCallum 12). This is made
clearer as Northwest and the wolves encounter a group of men who see Northwest as just
another wolf. The story ends when the werewoman and Northwest break a curse on the land
where the ancient city stood, and Northwest wakes up with the party of men who had previously
only seen him as a wolf. This transformation from man to wolf and back is never explained, but
the story suggests a fluidity to ontological categories that renders ridiculous the boundaries of
civilization, gender, and race that Moore’s culture sought to police. Northwest’s temporary
departure from humanity is also part of his assimilation into the pack, which reveals the extent to
which “the shattered self is selfhood itself[, and] selfhood can only be established as a perpetual
conflict along its borders” (Marriott 112). Moore has no interest in drawing clear and
unambiguous distinctions between categories. Instead, she wants to decenter the reader’s own
perspective and invite them to consider the inherent complexity of not just the alien world, but
also our own.
Moore encourages readers to accept this fluidity in part by refusing to identify or explain
elements of her world. The reader never fully understands the nature of the Shambleau or how
exactly Jirel becomes the Lady of Joiry. Jodell interprets this as Moore’s stories presenting an

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argument that “there is value in questioning what appear to be ‘fixed’ identities. Further, it is
possible to consider multiple possibilities at once when assessing… ‘identity’” (16). Moore
suggests a label, such as “Medusa” or even “damsel in distress,” and then shows that the label
is both performative and culturally conditioned. She offers “a fluidity of identities that suggests
an openness to resignification and recontextualization; parodic proliferation deprives hegemonic
culture and its critics of the claim to naturalized or essentialist gender identities” (Butler 176).
She denies the reader of the centers of masculine and feminine, past and future, and science
and myth that so many of her contemporary pulp writers performatively reinforce in their work.
The instability of categories in Moore’s work also reflects her interest in different
perspectives and sources of knowledge. She “interrogates the question of what can be
‘known’... through her explorations of the reliability of ‘perception’ (Jodell 67). As she refuses
labels, Moore rejects a strict dichotomy or hierarchy between people, the very foundation of the
colonialist order in which she lived. Instead, her ambiguous figures demonstrate “that all social
systems are vulnerable at their margins, and that all margins are accordingly considered
dangerous. If the body is synecdochal for the social system per se or a site in which open
systems converge, then any kind of unregulated permeability constitutes a site of pollution and
endangerment” (Butler 168). The permeability of the bodies of Moore’s characters is echoed in
the unruliness of time and the vulnerability of empire in her works. Taken together, this serves
as a powerful rebuttal to the hegemonic systems that defined Moore’s inter-war world, including
the imagery of “an excessively masculine and virile proletariat poised to struggle against the
effeminate and decadent bourgeoisie” (Rabinowitz 8).
The Northwest Smith stories in particular emphasize Moore’s antipathy toward the
ideologies of colonialism and rationality. They consistently break down barriers and hierarchies,
not just between genders or between past and future, but between individual beings, time, and
dimensions. At the time in which Moore was writing, many of her contemporaries in the pulp
magazines wrote about “a vividly imagined future in which superior, selected (read: white,

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heteronormative, ‘Presbyterian’) people will win the day as a result of normal technological
progress. Implicitly, it also posits normal scientific/technological progress as coherent with white
supremacy, such that any deviation from the existing racial structure would signal a failure of
progress as well” (Evans 60). Moore rejects this idea of “normal” and “selected” and presents a
messier, more dangerous world that is full of hopeful speculations about the alternatives to
hegemonic systems across time.
Queer Times
Linear progressive time is essential to the colonialist order, but Moore offers a queer
speculative time that aligns with her other presentations of fluid and ambiguous categorization.
These texts present numerous visions of “inside and outside, of frontiers crossed and
recrossed, violated. Time, too, is here: inside and outside do not just happen, they are formed”
(Marriott 108). In place of the Hegelian model of constantly moving progress, Moore proposes a
cyclical view of history, and her stories rely heavily on imagery from Greco-Roman mythology to
reinforce this idea. This relationship to history is part of Moore’s “re-writing of myth and origin
stories” that “seems to advocate for an awareness of how the past is both constructed and
utilized by the present” (Jodell 16). Her combination of classical mythology and science fiction
tropes refuses both generic conventions and temporal progress.
Moore wrote about “progress” as merely one phase in history rather than the driver of a
Hegelian march toward a divinely appointed or a scientific utopia. In her stories, complex
technology will ultimately be forgotten, and highly organized states will one day become ruins.
The present moment is not the peak of human achievement, but merely one place in a cycle of
creation and destruction that has recurred for longer than recorded history. Much like her
modernist contemporaries, she writes about the feeling that “contrary to the consciously
philosophic and historical conception which proclaims unceasing and peaceful progress—one is
experiencing a last brief, irretrievable intellectual prime” (Lukács 30). Her characters sometimes

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believe that they live in a society that is continually progressing, but they are almost always
mistaken. The hope in Moore’s worlds is not that the future will improve forever, but that there
will be another period of great technology and highly organized society someday. It is easier to
believe in this cycle of historical rise and ruin at “the point when the Enlightenment sense of
linear progress and the liberal-rational hopes invested in the French Revolution started to break
down” (Griffin 6). Moore’s queer view of time reflects her “sense of ambivalence, liminality, flux,
transition” in contrast to her speculative fiction contemporaries’ “utopian schemes, gradualist or
revolutionary, religious or secular, moderate or fundamentalist, conceived to reverse or
overcome the leaking of transcendent purpose from human existence” (Griffin 6).
Mythology is central to Moore’s vision of this cycle, because she understands it as how
our culture carries the memories of past cycles. She lays out this idea clearly in the introduction
to “Shambleau,” when she claims that “[s]omewhere beyond the Egyptians, in that dimness out
of which come echoes of half-mythical names—Atlantis, Mu—somewhere back of history’s first
beginnings there must have been an age when mankind, like us today, built cities of steel to
house its star-roving ships” (Northwest of Earth 17). Like Hopkins, Moore believes that humanity
is not at a unique peak of “civilization,” but that there are ancient societies who have wisdom
that the modern world has forgotten. Wilson argues that this is “not only one of Moore’s
recurring themes, but also the root of her Classical influences: she views all civilizations as
doomed to fall. However, she also believes that new cultures will be built using the ruins of the
old” (Wilson 83). This premise also demonstrates the difference between Moore and the other
proponents of cyclical time including Giambattista Vico and matriarchal Second-Wave feminists.
Unlike Vico, Moore does not believe that the cycles inherently improve on themselves as time
moves forward. The current cycle is not more advanced than the last cycle, it is only different.
Nor does she prefigure the feminists who see the mythic past as inherently more natureoriented and matriarchal. Instead, the past in Moore’s work has accomplished great
technological feats and is inhabited by powerful beings that confound binary gender formations.

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This is most apparent in the stories that are explicitly set in the future. Instead of being
oriented toward his own present or an even greater future time, Northwest Smith’s experiences
are constantly shaped by and in contact with long-forgotten pasts. The story “Lost Paradise”
(July 1936) is especially interesting for Moore’s presentation of the relationship between the
past and the future. The story begins when Northwest encounters a member of the Seles race,
who are the remnants of an ancient people that escaped the destruction of all life on the Moon.
The Seles explains that for his race, “‘peak’ and ‘origin’ are synonymous; for, like no other race
in existence, our most ancient legends begin in a golden age of the infinitely long past. Beyond
that they do not go. We have no stories among us of any crude beginnings…. But so far as
history tells us, we sprang full-fledged from some remote, unlegended birth into highly civilized,
perfectly cultured being” (Northwest of Earth 267-268). This premise is unthinkable from the
perspective of Hegelian progress. The Seles do not have an evolution or teleological end, just a
decline into obscurity that has already rendered them a part of mythology. Moore does not deny
the process of change, since the Seles have lost significant power over the millennia, but she
rejects the idea that change inherently moves toward a technological utopia.
The Seles offers Northwest a chance to learn of his race’s great secret and transports
Northwest’s consciousness back to inhabit the mind of someone who lived on the Moon at the
peak/origin of Seles society. There Northwest learns that “[t]he Moon's gravity was too weak,
even in this long-vanished era, to hold its cloak of life-supporting air without the aid of some
other force than its own,” and therefore the Seles have been willingly sacrificing themselves to a
trio of gods who keep the Moon habitable (Northwest of Earth 280). However, the temporality of
this story gets even more complicated when Northwest begins to resist the sacrifice of the
person whose mind he inhabits. Northwest’s resistance from within the sacrifice’s own mind
means that the gods sense unwillingness on the part of the sacrifice. As the gods cannot
consume an unwilling sacrifice, they revoke their protection from the Moon, and all the air
disappears instantly. In this moment of temporal contact, Northwest is queerly “characterized by

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a lack of proper orientation in terms of time as much as of social norms” (Tuhkanen and
McCallum 7). His improper connection to another time causes the Seles civilization to crumble,
and the only survivors are those colonists who have gone to Earth, from whom the Seles
Northwest met is descended. Therefore, the civilization was greater and older than Earth, but it
was ultimately destroyed by Northwest himself from thousands of years in the future. As the
Seles who Northwest encounters observes, “[t]his tangle of time and space, and the disaster
that a living man can bring to something dead millenniums ago—it is far beyond our narrow
grasp of understanding” (Northwest of Earth 286). This story demonstrates multiple dimensions
of Moore’s theorization of time. It portrays the cyclical fall of a civilization and shows how
characters are able to influence events across vast temporal distances.
Moore’s work decenters empire by portraying its collapse as part of an inevitable cycle of
history. Moore claims that our present society has forgotten the powerful technological empires
of the past, so we understand history as the process of becoming more organized and more
technological. In contrast, the Seles have not forgotten their earlier empire, so they view history
as a decline from their peak/origin. Both understandings are incomplete, but they represent two
points in a universal process. Unlike Twain, Moore does not see the inevitable fall of society as
the consequences of the sins of progress. She understands it as a natural, even mythical force.
In “The Lost Paradise,” the gods destroy the civilization on the Moon as retaliation for
Northwest’s intrinsic and universal “urge to live… the raw, animal desperation against extinction”
(Northwest of Earth 283). So, the destruction is the product of the combined force of cosmic law
and basic instincts, against which technology and “civilization” are powerless.
Even as “The Lost Paradise” shows the larger cycles of time that adhere to universal
laws, the story also eschews linear time by dramatizing contact between different points in the
histories of different cultures. The past and the future are not positioned as completely distinct
from each other. Northwest does not merely observe the past as a disinterested historian; he is

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an integral part of events that happened millennia before his birth. The past and present are
always in relationship, and a person who lives in this temporal universe must learn to accept
a mode of being which accommodates that dimension – always open, never finally
delimited, yet constantly traversed – which extends from a part of himself not reflected in
a cogito to the act of thought by which he apprehends that part; and which, in the inverse
direction, extends from that pure apprehension to the empirical clutter, the chaotic
accumulation of contents, the weight of experiences constantly eluding themselves.
(Foucault 351)
Moore is interested in stories that take place on the margins of time, at the places where events
double back on themselves or distinct timelines come into contact with each other. Her cyclical
view of history challenges Hegelian progress, but it is intelligible by rational standards. Her use
of time travel and alternate dimensions adds an element to these cycles that is far less easy to
explain by scientific standards. Her speculative portrayals of time are a form of imagination that
“allows us to express ideals in familiar forms—as a system, a social structure—without
accepting as necessary the terms in which that familiarity is currently constituted. When we
acknowledge imagination as the proper location of the ideal, we infuse the real with
inexhaustible wonder” (Castiglia 3). Moore queers time and denies its teleological ends, and
thereby reveals the constructedness of history and asks her readers to open themselves to the
novel reconstructions of time that are possible through speculation.
This is likewise true in Moore’s Jirel of Joiry stories that imagine the past rather than the
future. In these stories, as in alternate history, the setting is “shaped by (and reflected upon)
emerging techniques for understanding the past; their authors were also more or less aware of
the strangeness of fabulating alternatives in history, an activity whose outcomes could only ever
be chimerical” (Carver 4). With her connection to scientific discourses and her affiliation with the
self-proclaimed “weird,” Moore’s Jirel stories manifest this tension between the strangeness and
the increasing confidence with which people began to speculate about the past.

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One way in which this manifests is in the stories’ relationship to historical accuracy.
Unlike many fantasy stories, they are set in a specific time and place in known history. However,
much as Twain’s sixth century is a purposeful and anachronistic construction, Jirel’s setting is
not a faithful tour of the past. Lukács criticizes writing of this type as “degenerat[ing] into a
collection of episodes. There is no connection between the exclusively private individual
experiences of characters and historical events. The characters cease to be really historical; the
historical events become external and exotic, a merely decorative backdrop” (206). Moore does
engage with the historical environment, but viewed in its pulp context, the past is clearly
exoticized.9 This use of the past as exotic allows Moore to reflect broadly on the development of
history, but also means her stories lack the grounding of a more straightforward alternate history
or time travel story. Donaldson observes that the Jirel series consists of “almost pointedly
atemporal moments out of Jirel's life. These glimpses, like shards of a broken mirror, reflect
bright pieces of some greater whole that Moore refuses to solder together” (54). While these
disparate glances into the life of an adventurer are normal for pulp magazines, Moore uses
other strategies throughout the Jirel series to draw attention to non-linear temporalities.
As she does to Northwest Smith’s future in “The Lost Paradise,” Moore complicates the
temporality of Jirel’s world by putting her into situations where history, time, and physics all
operate outside the rational scientific norms. The alternate world of “Black God’s Kiss” and
“Black God’s Shadow” is to some degree a reflection of the past. Wilson describes the setting of
these stories as an “eerie world-within-a-world… populated with ghostly echoes of Greek and
Roman mythology. Significantly, Jirel must disregard her priest and take off her cross in order to
enter. Even as this subterranean space represents the ruins of the Classical world that served
9 Much of the fiction published in Weird Tales capitalized on the idea of the exotic, with stories set in
Africa (“At the Bend of The Trail” by Manly Wade Wellman), the Balkans (“The White Prince” by Ronal
Kayser), and Italy (“Fioraccio” by Giovanni Magherini-Graziani) all in the same issue (F. Wright). Other
magazines at the time show the popularity and appeal of various forms of exotic locations, such as Jungle
Stories, to which Henry Kuttner contributed, and Oriental Stories, later retitled The Magic Carpet
Magazine, whose editor was Farnsworth Wright, the editor of Weird Tales.

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as the foundations of the medieval one” (80). Jirel’s own perspective on this realm is that “the
beings who made the shaft, in long-forgotten ages—well, there were devils on earth before
man, and the world was very old” (Jirel of Joiry 10). “Black God’s Shadow” makes it especially
tempting to conceive of this alternate dimension as the past, since Jirel returns to it in order to
revisit her own past sins. Its association with non-Christian gods, the presence of idols, and the
racial implications of the black god only contribute to this interpretation. However, just as Moore
refuses to let her readers see the black god as entirely Other, she does not allow the alternate
world to remain entirely past. Moore describes this realm by writing that Jirel
was no scholar in geometry or aught else, but she felt intuitively that the bend and the
slant of the way she went were somehow outside any other angles or bends she had
ever known…. [T]he peculiar and exact lines of the tunnel had been carefully angled to
lead through poly-dimensional space as well as through the underground— perhaps
through time, too. (Jirel of Joiry 10-11)
While there are nods here to a scientific explanation that must be Moore’s rather than Jirel’s,
Moore suggests both time travel and a besideness that cannot be reconciled with linear time.
These hints of logic in the descriptions of this world suggest that it may be “merely ‘different,’
and its hostility to humanity nothing more than the result of colliding realities” (Harvey).
This denies a clear comparison between this alternate world and the past, as there is in
the metaphor anachronistic space. Worlds outside of time in speculative fiction often follow the
lost world tradition and function as metaphors for a colonized place, where time outside of the
imperial center has “stood still” in that the Hegelian measures of progress have not been met by
the inhabitants. However, Moore’s alternate dimension is both too strange and too familiar for
this metaphor. In many ways, Jirel’s descent is reflective of Foucault’s assertion that “[m]an and
the unthought are, at the archaeological level, contemporaries…. The unthought (whatever
name we give it) is not lodged in man like a shrivelled-up nature or a stratified history; it is, in
relation to man, the Other: the Other that is not only a brother but a twin, born, not of man, nor in

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man, but beside him and at the same time” (355-356). As hinted at by Jirel’s encounter with her
own image as one of the messengers of the black god, this strange alternate dimension is a
reflection of Jirel’s own, intimately entwined, but undeniably other. The outsideness of this world
presents a queer alternative to the perpetual, inevitable linear flow of history. Unlike a lost world
protagonist’s masculinized journey to reclaim the past, Jirel’s quest is both internal and external.
It reflects her “own unconscious mind, which she must access in order to gain the power to
overcome her enemy” (Wilson 80). This further decenters the normative time in which Jirel lives
because it is too closely tied to its dangerous and marginal reflection.
This is made even clearer by Jirel’s contact with the past in the final Jirel story,
“Hellsgarde” (April 1939). This ghost story allows for different times to interact, but instead of
drawing a contrast between the past and the present, it portrays complex dependencies and
connections across temporal boundaries. The plot begins when Jirel is sent on an impossible
mission by the lord of Garlot to retrieve the treasure of the long-dead Andred as ransom for her
captured men. Legend says that Andred refused to reveal the location of his treasure under
torture, so it has remained hidden in Hellsgarde castle, and Andred himself “walked Hellsgarde
as jealously in death as in life. In the two hundred years searchers had gone fearfully to ransack
the empty halls of Hellsgarde for that casket—gone and vanished” (Jirel of Joiry 168). Once she
arrives at the castle, Jirel discovers that Hellsgarde is not abandoned, but rather inhabited by a
strange group of people under the leadership of Alaric, who claims to be Andred’s descendant.
Alaric forces Jirel into a confrontation with Andred’s ghost, where she learns that Alric and his
company are actually a group of vampiric beings that feed on the spirits of the dead. They use
Jirel to lure Andred into manifesting so that they can consume his essence. They allow Jirel to
take Andred’s treasure, which she uses to kill Garlot and free her men.
By venturing to a castle abandoned for two hundred years to meet a spirit from that time,
Jirel intentionally puts herself in contact with the past. Though she does not fully time travel as
Hank Morgan does in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, she leaves her present

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world to confront a time even further back than her own. And yet the past is not nearly as
foreign to her as it is to many other time travelers. Like Reuel Briggs in Of One Blood, Jirel finds
kinship and common ground with the past rather than attempting to conquer and control it.
Neither here nor in “Quest of the Starstone” does Moore present a hierarchical relationship
between past and future. Alaric tells Jirel, “there must be in you a kindred fierceness which
Andred senses and seeks” (Jirel of Joiry 192). Andred lived and died by the same rules of
chivalry that drive Jirel on her quest. Andred’s refusal, even after death, to give up his treasure
is selfish, but no less honorable than Jirel’s suicidal quest to save her men from death at an
enemy’s hands. This is confirmed at the end of the story when their goals align one final time as
Jirel uses Andred’s lost treasure to kill her enemy. Jirel’s specifically masculine approach to
feudalism not only puts her in a position to make this inter-temporal connection, but it also
shows that “the dual narratives of desire (of the gendered body) and history (of class and antiimperialist politics)... [interrelated and in fact inseparable” (Rabinowitz 10). Jirel’s historical place
and her gender performance intersect at the exact coordinates to align her, however briefly, with
Andred.
This association between Jirel and Andred makes Alaric and the vampires into the
story’s terrifying Other. Like many of Moore’s characters, Alaric’s men blur the boundaries
among human, animal, and monster. Jirel observes that they “seemed scarcely more than
beasts; let greed or anger stir them and no man alive could control their wildness” (Jirel of Joiry
174). When Jirel eats their food, she notes that it has “a flavor almost of decay” (Jirel of Joiry
184). Their animal-like qualities, the decaying flavor of their food, and their consumption of dead
spirits all imply that these vampires are pre-human. But, unlike Andred, they are not creatures of
the past. Jirel also notes that the food’s flavor “lingered on the tongue long after the food itself
was swallowed” (Jirel of Joiry 184). They feed on decay, which invokes pastness, but the taste
lingers, just as the vampires exist in Jirel’s present moment. Despite their initial associations
with primitivism, the vampires are the ones who share Jirel’s present. They are still alive and

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help Jirel by giving her permission to leave Hellsgarde with Andred’s treasure. These character
contrasts destabilize the reader’s expectations about temporality. Their strange place in the
story reflects the queer potential of these stories to suggest “new formations of kinship, remodel
futurity and provide an example, however unsettling, of the ways becoming may be sustained
outside of a heterosexual reproductive paradigm” (Tuhkanen and McCallum 9). Like the dark
realm of “Black God’s Kiss,” “Hellsgarde” does not offer the reader any normative times, only a
complicated entanglement of past and future.
This cross-temporal relationship becomes even more complex in the story “Quest of the
Starstone.” This unique work in Moore’s oeuvre was co-written with her future husband Henry
Kuttner and features Northwest Smith traveling back in time to go on an adventure with Jirel of
Joiry. Moore wrote about fluid and ambiguous genders, complicated temporalities, “‘blended’
minds and ‘hybridic’ entities,” and she “was not adverse to producing ‘composite’ texts” in her
own life (Jodell 38). “Quest of the Starstone” represents Moore’s willingness to blend distinct
times and genres into one text. With this story Moore “violated a generic boundary that is still
considered by some today to be sacrosanct… [and] imported characters from enclosed, generic
worlds across genres into other enclosed, generic worlds” (Jodell 28-29). Sword and sorcery
and interplanetary romance were becoming increasingly distinct, and the resulting literary
environment genres “reproduced the pitfalls of biological essentialism by codifying, hence
excluding, certain bodies of work.” (Rabinowitz 65). This text decenters many of the priorities of
both history and genre to make space for its weird and marginal protagonists.
“Quest of the Starstone” begins when the medieval warlock Franga reaches into the
future to summon Northwest and Yarol to the past to help him take the powerfully magical
Starstone from Jirel. Northwest accepts because he longs to return to the Earth that has
banished him in his present. According to the myth of progress, Jirel and Northwest should be
completely foreign to each other. At most they might participate in “an antichronological meeting
of divergent temporalities and frames of consciousness” in the manner the anthropologist

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Johannes Fabian criticizes (Lim 160). But when Northwest encounters Jirel in her banquet hall,
Moore does not highlight the differences between the two characters and times. Instead, she
reframes both the known history of Earth and the supremacy of the future throughout the story.
The “primitive” inhabitants of fourteenth-century France could not be expected to understand
Yarol’s High Venusian speech, but Moore does not privilege the future with a universal
translator or an innate command of French. Instead, the inhabitants of the past dismiss Yarol by
asking “[h]as he never learned a civilized tongue?” (Northwest of Earth 327). Yarol likewise
does not understand the linguistic and cultural differences at play and asks Northwest if Joiry’s
guards are “speaking a language… or merely howling like a wolf” (Northwest of Earth 330).
Northwest only understands the people of Joiry because he learned French on Earth. When he
is first summoned, the narration describes the “cracked voice speaking in a tongue that despite
himself sent Smith’s pulses quickening in recognition. French, Earth’s French, archaic and
scarcely intelligible, but unquestionably a voice from home” (Northwest of Earth 325). Each of
the time periods sees their own experience as most important and most civilized, which shows
that the future is just as provincial and self-involved as any other time.
Once in the past, Northwest convinces Jirel to trust him, but in the course of doing so, he
realizes that Franga is evil and decides to help Jirel. Even when Northwest is set up as the
enemy of this representative of the past, he finds kinship with her. He rejects the binary
presented between the past on Earth and the future in space through an embrace of his position
as an Earthling and a spacefarer. When he arrives in the past, he sees Joiry as “at once alien
and yet dearly familiar…. Separated from his own time by dusty centuries, yet it was earthsprung, earth-born, reared on the green hills of his home planet” (Northwest of Earth 333). In
emphasizing the connection between the times, Moore in a sense reverts to the preEnlightenment “general principle derived from experience that the future could bring nothing
fundamentally new. Until the expected end of the world… the nature of man (as seen from a
humanist perspective) would remain the same…. Whatever was to be expected could be

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sufficiently justified by previous experience” (Koselleck 111-112). By this logic, rather than the
Hegelian logic of progress, Northwest operates across times and cultures. His experience with
temporal complexity and gendered vulnerability have placed him “on the margins of social
intelligibility[, which] alters one’s pace; one’s tempo becomes at best contrapuntal, syncopated,
and at worst, erratic, arrested” (Tuhkanen and McCallum 1). He does not expect a world that
moves forward in a linear fashion, so he can adjust to this sudden move to the past.
Northwest accepts the premises of Jirel’s time and allies with her to defeat Franga in
part because Moore never portrays Northwest’s futuristic setting as rational. Both her past and
his future are populated with monsters, magic, and old gods that operate outside of the rational
world. In “Quest of the Starstone,” the irrational past and the rational future do not come into
conflict as they do in Connecticut Yankee, because the two time periods share a common but
irrational vocabulary. Northwest and Jirel are able to come together across time in part because
they have already bridged the gulf between the real and the fantastic. This allows Moore “to
open up innovative forms of intimacy that betoken not only new modes of becoming, but new
ways of affiliation with others and alternative” (Tuhkanen and McCallum 13). For Northwest,
Jirel, and Yarol the overwhelming power of magic creates a bond that defies categories of time
period, gender, and even planet of origin. Moore describes how Franga’s magic “had shifted
their relations, too, so that the three mortals — he could not think of Franga as wholly human —
stood together against Franga and his malice and his magic” (Northwest of Earth 337). Though
Jirel uses the Starstone’s power to return Northwest and Yarol to the future, the story ends with
Northwest remembering the connection that their shared quest created across time and space.
This is reparative in a way that fights against the “denial of coevalness” that Fabian identifies as
perpetuating anachronistic space within anthropological work. In his formulation, the gap
between two people “becomes intensified as time-distancing turns from an explicit concern into
an implicit theoretical assumption (39). In this case, however, the theory is broken before it is
formed. While Jirel is not coeval with Northwest and Yarol in the way that Fabian’s

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anthropological subjects are living in the same time period, the visitors to the past are forced to
reckon with Jirel’s ingenuity, agency, and ultimate equality. They are all mortals facing magic
together and therefore must be willing to forge relationships with each other.
While Jirel does not recognize Yarol and Northwest’s futuristic heat guns, the presence
of irrational magic helps lessen even the technological divide. The guns are not an easy solution
to all their problems. When fighting Franga’s magical minions, Northwest and Yarol open fire,
and “[o]ne of the approaching horrors toppled over, the left arm completely burned from its
body. Then it regained its balance and crawled onward with a crab-like sidewise motion”
(Northwest of Earth 341). The guns slow the creatures, but technology cannot simply overcome
magic, which is how Franga is still able to imprison Northwest. In fact, Northwest escapes
Franga by kicking the Starstone out of Jirel’s hands and breaking it. This releases the ancient
power trapped in the stone, and that power destroys Franga and sends all three characters to
their respective times and places. The failure of technological solutions at the end of “Quest of
the Starstone” is part of Moore’s critique of the ideological centers of masculinity, futurity, and
rationality that upheld both empire and science fiction in the 1930s. Moore’s overlapping
speculative worlds instead follow a queer theoretical “attempt to imagine a sustainable form of
life reliant on neither the promise of futurity… nor the resources of nostalgia (which has been
repeatedly associated with queers, the South, and any people or place giving rise to unplottable
lives that trouble conventional narratives of modernization)” (L. Pratt 184). By placing
representatives of these two times into the same story and acknowledging their coevalness,
Moore offers new possibilities for engaging with the Other and with our own history.
Conclusion
Across Moore’s stories and genres, she subverts expectations of time in a context where
science had created “a momentous—and in the eyes of many, machine-made—break from
tradition’s past” (Cheng 4). By bringing these irrational worlds to her science-obsessed present,

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Moore acknowledges the ways in which rationality and progress have become “indispensable to
our daily lives and to emancipatory projects of political and intellectual modernity, yet
inadequate to diverse ways of being in the world,” and presents the irrational instead as a way
“of recognizing and translating a plurality of worlds and times, while resisting the tendency to
refuse supernaturalisms, or their supposedly superstitious adherents, contemporaneity” (Lim
21). As Moore puts the “superstitious” past and “scientific” future together in her own present,
she brings them into coevalness with each other and embraces the potential of marginal
temporalities, genders, and genres. Her commitment to the ambiguous and the irrational is
important because often “[t]he supernatural is… disparaged as an anachronistic vestige of
primitive, superstitious thought. But from an alternate perspective it discloses the limits of
historical time, the frisson of secular historiography’s encounter with temporalities emphatically
at odds with and not fully miscible to itself” (Lim 2). Even in the Gothic tradition that helped
inspire early science fiction, the supernatural elements must be explained and rationalized in the
course of the moral argument. But Moore offers a different future, one in which monsters, gods,
and all the trappings of the past still exist easily alongside space travel and heat-guns.
Both of Moore’s protagonists live in worlds that can slip into irrationality at any time, and
therefore they must be constantly prepared for this eventuality. They flourish in “the formless
haze of spiritual battle with the unknown. The plot situations were rarely solved by a logical
sequence of events, but instead by a burst of rhetorical hypnotism” (Moskowitz 311). Northwest
and Jirel are both heroes for a non-rational time and are therefore successful because of their
irrational and feminine passion and empathy. What connects these two times and these two
heroes is not “institutional power-knowledge but… sharing of experiences of pain” that can
reclaim “normalcy for the diseased, criminal, and pathological, making suffering the basis of a
countersociality of the abnormal” (Castiglia 114). Like Connecticut Yankee, “Quest of the
Starstone” deals with the interaction of the past and the future in ways that complicate notions of
the relationship between temporality and rationality. As in Twain, the past is not necessarily less

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rational than the present, but Moore and Kuttner go one step further when they refuse to
valorize rationality in either time period. This is a radical act in the face of science that
“conceives of itself as objective, rule-bound, and politically neutral, a set of values seen as
essential to a well-functioning society. The consequence is a conformity that appears voluntary
yet is irresistible” (Castiglia 159). Jirel and Northwest both resist this conformity by defying the
conventions of their genres. Jirel’s past is not wholly static, while Northwest’s world has not
abandoned irrationality, and Moore suggests that the present could learn from both times by
adopting her protagonists’ shared values of instinct, empathy, and faith.
Combining the sword and sorcery and interplanetary genres into the same story draws
attention to the expectations and formulations of both genres. Like Hopkins’s fusion of the
passing novel and the lost world, Moore’s hybrid narrative changes the reader’s perceptions of
both genre and time. The Jirel of Joiry stories present a past that remains at least vaguely
recognizable until it begins to interact with dimensions outside any human experience, while the
Northwest Smith stories offer similarly strange worlds in a future of uncontradictable and
endless possibility. At this time, many stories set in the future extrapolate what is to come based
on a belief in progress, and even today futuristic science fiction often “represents the present
into the pre-history of the future,” (Beaumont 48). However, by removing some of this causal
logic and making this future equally irrational, Moore “endeavoured to strip history of its
providentialist ‘plot,’ whose naturalization as the dominant mode of interpreting the past as
progress constituted an ideology of historical knowledge. The depiction of alternatives to the
historical record [is]... a critical method for challenging this and other orthodoxies” (Carver 15).
History for Moore is not teleological but follows cycles as they are destroyed and remade across
different times and places. Moore sees the future, the past, and alternate dimensions as merely
facets of reality shaped by conscious perception, and by drawing attention to the fractured
nature of history, she seeks to shatter the myth of a unitary, rational time.

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Throughout her work, Moore commits to an aesthetic and narrative principle of
irrationality and hybridity, and her character’s fluid genders point toward her interest in queer
modes of time. In representing time as a construction, she reveals the absurdity of the Hegelian
myth that humanity moves from an irrational past to a more rational future and complicates the
claim that we can ever study history rationally. Instead, she proposes a more nuanced and more
delicate relationship between the past, the present, and the future that acknowledges the
complex and atemporal contacts between times. In our current moment of crisis around the
various narratives of history, Moore invites us to examine our own relationship to that history
and its persistence into the present in ways that can be strange and painful. This
acknowledgement of complexity is especially important in the speculative fiction Moore wrote.
She is not interested in precise scientific narratives, but “a speculative and idealistic excess… a
reimagining of the confining space of alienation into a new realm of infinitely imaginative
possibility” (Castiglia 153-154). Moore refuses to domesticate or rationalize the future she
portrays, and in doing so puts it on the same ground as the past. She rejects the idea that time
will progress towards rationality and pushes back against a state of the world where rationality
“is defined in contradistinction to supernaturalism not because the world has been completely
disenchanted but because enchantment is now derided as a state of cultural provincialism” (Lim
24-25). Moore instead uses enchantment as one of Castiglia’s practices of hope to speculatively
imagine worlds, times, and genders, that are free from the constraints that have been
constructed around them through repetition.

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Chapter 4: Nation, Hierarchy, and Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses
Like much speculative fiction, Zora Neale Hurston’s 1939 novel Moses, Man of the
Mountain turns on a question. Can we be sure, Hurston asks her readers, that the stories we
know are true and not just convenient? Can we trust the Bible when it claims that the baby
Moses survived his trip down the Nile? How does this familiar story change if the lawgiver who
spoke with God on Mount Sinai was not born a Hebrew? Hurston’s alternate history of the
Exodus does not seek to supplant the original story, but rather to open it up to these kinds of
questions. She uses her personal knowledge of folklore and her study of anthropology to create
a hybrid text that challenges the Hegelian model of the development of civilization out of
“primitive” anarchy. She shows how cultures build on and borrow from each other so that there
is no such thing as a completely “pure” society. She challenges white “prejudice by combining
literacy, intelligence, nobility, and the ability to perform Hoodoo in the figure of Moses…. It is not
about assimilation and unification, but about the illustration of diversity and consciousness”
(Zeppenfeld 56). Like Hopkins in Of One Blood, Hurston rejects strict divisions between peoples
and cultures and instead revises a well-known historical narrative to emphasize the absurdity
and the cruelty of the racial and cultural hierarchies that form the foundation of American
culture.
Hurston takes the idea of diversity seriously both in the text of the novel and its creation.
She relies on a variety of sources and incorporates elements from different cultures and
“stages” of social evolution in ways that thwart racist classifications of human societies. As she
presents an alternate history of the foundations of the European cultural lineage, Hurston “asks
questions about time, linearity, determinism, and the implicit link between past and present.
[She] considers the individual’s role in making history, and… foregrounds the constructedness
and narrativity of history” (Hellekson 453). Hurston rewrites the past in ways that confound
Hegel’s categorization and provides a model for a powerful political critique that remains

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grounded in humanity and community in the face of authoritarian projects that demand
conformity in the name of group cohesion.
Reading this novel through the lens of speculative fiction builds on the existing
conversations about African American literature’s diverse political projects. Hurston does not
just turn to the past to comment on her own time, she fuses signifiers from her present with
powerful myths to reinforce her call for a hybrid rather than a hierarchical community. Many
marginalized authors, including Hopkins and Moore, use the malleability of speculative fiction to
communicate their resistance to homogeneous time and its oppressive systems. In this chapter,
I will consider how Hurston uses speculative fiction’s conventions to introduce voices from
different temporal moments into Moses, Man of the Mountain, which underscores her message
about the polyphonic nature of African American literature. I believe that by broadening the
methodologies of African American literary studies to incorporate the tools of genre studies, we
can gain new insight into a text’s activist investments.
While the novel closely follows the major events of the Exodus narrative presented in the
Hebrew Bible, Hurston alters the story to incorporate a wider variety of sources and introduce
ambiguity at key moments. As Melanie Wright describes, the novel demonstrates Hurston’s
“willingness to identify Moses as a character of fundamental programmatic importance for the
African American community and at the same time adapt the story in a radical fashion, making
bold alterations to heighten the association of the biblical story with her own social and political
context” (52). The story begins, as it does in the Torah, with the Hebrews enslaved in Egypt.
When the Pharaoh proclaims that all Hebrew boys must die, Jochebed and Amram put their
newborn son in a basket on the Nile rather than surrender him to the Egyptians. In Exodus, their
daughter Miriam watches the basket until it is picked up by Pharaoh's daughter. In Hurston’s
account, however, Miriam becomes distracted by the Pharaoh's daughter bathing in the river
and forgets all about the basket. When Jochebed later asks about the fate of her child, Miriam
tells her mother that the Princess pulled the basket out of the water. This legend spreads among

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the Hebrews, but Hurston never resolves the ambiguity about the true fate of the child in the
basket or the true origin of Moses.
Where the biblical text skips to an adult Moses’s departure from Egypt, Hurston expands
on Moses’s childhood in the palace. Hurston invents an old Egyptian stable hand named Mentu,
who tells the young Moses of a great magic manual, the Book of Thoth. She also portrays
Moses as a beloved Egyptian leader and capable warrior until his jealous uncle spreads rumors
that Moses was born a Hebrew. Though Moses does not believe the rumors, it hurts his position
at court and gives Moses sympathy for the oppressed Hebrews. Hurston’s account then rejoins
the biblical narrative when Moses kills an Egyptian overseer who abuses enslaved Hebrews.
Moses flees to Midian, where he marries the Midianite woman Zipporah, as he does in the
Hebrew Bible. In this section Hurston emphasizes the importance of his friendship with
Zipporah’s father Jethro and portrays him as the one who teaches Moses about both “hoodoo”
and the God of Mount Sinai. In Hurston’s novel, Moses also finds the Book of Thoth and gains
the additional miraculous powers that Mentu promised. Jethro encourages Moses to become a
great leader, but Moses wants to live a quiet life with his wife and sons. As in Exodus, Moses’s
life in Midian is interrupted when he sees a burning bush and hears a voice on Mount Sinai that
orders him to free the Hebrews from Egypt and convert them to the worship of the God of Mount
Sinai. Hurston does not depart too greatly from this most well-known part of the Exodus
narrative and only changes small details here. Moses uses the rumor that he is Jochebed and
Amram’s lost son to collaborates with his supposed siblings Aaron and Miriam to prepare the
Hebrews to leave Egypt. He trains the Hebrews to conquer their new land and gains their
support by demonstrating the power of the God of Mount Sinai through the plagues.
As Moses leads the Hebrews toward the land of Canaan, he helps them in their military
victories and presents them with the law written on stone tablets. When some of the Hebrews
return to the worship of the Egyptian god portrayed as a golden calf, Moses orders his followers
to kill them. When Miriam complains about Zipporah, Moses curses her with leprosy until she

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begs him to allow her to die. Hurston spends more time than the Torah on Moses’s clashes with
Aaron and she portrays both characters as increasingly authoritarian. This culminates in another
major change in Hurston’s narrative. Instead of Aaron’s natural death in the Book of Numbers,
Moses kills Aaron before they reach Canaan to prevent him from taking power in the new land.
While the biblical Moses dies before the Hebrews can enter Canaan, Hurston’s Moses refuses
to enter the new land because he believes that the people will abandon his laws if they see him
weaken and die. Instead, he builds himself a monumental grave and sneaks away from the
Israelites to live out the rest of his days in Midian. He trusts that Joshua will be able to lead the
former slaves who Moses has spent forty years shaping into a nation.
Beyond her deviations in plot, Hurston alters the reader’s experience by revising the
well-known biblical story based on her own research and perspective. Instead of relying on a
single, accepted version of Moses, Hurston “holds in view a multiplicity of sources, without
constructing a hierarchy of importance between them” (Farebrother 340). Hurston wrote at a
time in which many of her Black contemporaries were engaging with new views of religion and
history. Marcus Garvey’s rhetoric around a united African state drew heavily from the same
Ethiopianist discourse that Pauline Hopkins used in Of One Blood, and new movements such as
the Nation of Islam and Rastafari offered Black nationalist reinterpretations of religion. Hurston
used her anthropological training to examine the Bible in a more academic way than these
religious groups, while also treating Christianity as a myth that she could study in the way that
anthropologists examined other cultures. In a context where “history is conceived as a smooth
straightforward evolution,” Hurston instead engages “the contradictions of historical progress
dialectically” (Lukács 174). She incorporates biblical and European traditions about Moses, but
she also emphasizes his role as a liberator in the African American tradition, draws on Hoodoo
and Haitian Vodou,10 and suggests that his legend also traveled to the Americas through Africa
10 The term “Vodou” has several alternate spellings, but I will use “Vodou” as the current scholarly term
for the Haitian religion studied by Hurston in the 1930s. This is frequently used in the lowercase, but I

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as the West African deity and Haitian loa Damballa. Hurston places these diverse traditions in
dialogue with each other to deny the primacy of the European narrative and reject Hegel’s
teleological model of progress. Hurston argues, in anticipation of both Paul Gilroy’s Black
Atlantic and Martin Bernal’s Black Athena, that the same Africans who were considered
“primitive” not only had their own complex civilizations in Africa but have always been active
participants in the creation of European and American culture.
Hurston highlights the hybrid nature of her contemporary culture by refusing to accept
strict divisions between people, races, and ideologies. Hegelian progress valued written history,
strong nations, and rational science, but Hurston’s revision of the Torah emphasizes the cultural
value of oral traditions, diverse communities, and magical practices. Across the many issues
she takes up in Moses, Man of the Mountain, Hurston writes “against enduring binaries that
divide individuals according to such hierarchies of difference as colonizer and colonized, black
and white, civilized and primitive” and in doing so “undercut[s] the notion of cultural purity in the
biblical story” (Farebrother 339). The ideology of colonialism relies on a hierarchy, where there
is always a superior civilization to conquer an inferior one. However, Hurston denies readers
this possibility through the creation of a polyphonic text where there is no pure form to be
superior. She asserts that cultural production begins in communities that are sites of contact
and exchange when they are not restricted by artificial boundaries and definitions. She bases
this theory of culture on Black folk communities and their hybrid practices, but applies it across
racial and geographic lines, which presents the African diaspora not as a marginalized group,
but as an exemplar of the way all human cultures work.
capitalize it the same as one would “Christianity” or “Islam.” Hurston often uses the spelling “voodoo” in
lower case, but that spelling is not preferred by scholars because of its associations with inaccurate and
offensive popular portrayals of the religion. Hurston also uses “voodoo” to describe the related but distinct
religion and practices that she studied in Louisiana, Alabama, and Florida, though I will prefer “Hoodoo” in
this context. Other scholars use “Root Work” or “Conjure” to describe this diverse set of practices. In
quotations I have retained the spelling and capitalization of these terms as the source presents them.

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History and Folklore
Hurston critiques several distinct manifestations of the narrative of progress in Moses,
Man of the Mountain, but her anthropological training gives her specific tools to push back
against a belief in the superiority of written culture. With the rising importance of the rational
study of history in the nineteenth century, many European and American thinkers began to
associate writing with a later stage of cultural evolution. The distinction between written and oral
cultures has been theorized by Geneviève Fabre and Robert O’Meally in the context of history
and memory, where memory “is by definition a personal activity, subject to the biases, quirks,
and rhythms of the individual's mind…. History, according to this paradigm, is closer to a
scientific field wherein the practitioners routinely insist on proofs and corroborating evidence” (5-
6). By Hurston’s time, this value system was well established in both academic and popular
circles. The study of history was considered a scientific endeavor, dedicated to separating fact
from myth based on written sources that were seen as more reliable than human memory.
Many nineteenth-century anthropologists embraced this belief and sought to record and
analyze oral and communal traditions. This attitude in anthropology “contributed… to the
intellectual justification of the colonial enterprise” by “promot[ing] a scheme in terms of which not
only past cultures, but all living societies were irrevocably placed on a temporal slope” (Fabian
17-18). However, in the early twentieth century some branches of anthropology and folklore
studies began to take a different approach to culture. Hurston’s mentor, the German
anthropologist Franz Boas introduced cultural relativism to the discipline, which proposed that
“norms, standards, and values vary with environment,” and revealed race as “a human construct
rather than an absolute, self‐evident category” (M. Wright 60). This new generation of
anthropologists, including Hurston, attempted to recuperate the “unreliable” memories of oral
culture into written culture through the work of scientifically trained professionals who wrote
down versions of folktales, minority religious practices, and traditional songs.

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Hurston was personally invested in this project because of the prominence of Black folk
culture during her childhood in Eatonville, Florida. When many anthropologists understood their
subjects as “a living anachronism, a throwback to a prior stage of human evolution,” Hurston’s
positionality and training helped her understand how “ways of being in the world that were
profoundly different from those of European colonizers were represented as anachronisms—
premodern, primitive, and superstitious” (Lim 16). Hurston challenges what Fabian calls the
denial of coevalness through her engagement with living African diasporic communities across
the United States and the Caribbean. She was able to understand her personal experience
through the “spy-glass of Anthropology,” which helped her make connections to other cultures
and understand the way in which cultural practices developed. However, her immersion in the
communities she studied also showed her the failings of anthropology and its tendency to
exoticize its subjects. This unique perspective helped her in Moses, Man of the Mountain as she
blended the Black folk practices of her childhood with white Christian theology (Mules 1).
Hurston’s anthropology is both participatory and familiar, so the diverse traditions incorporated
into her fiction are not an exotic curiosity, but her lived experience.
This was an important perspective in a context that dismissed Africans and their
descendants as both historians and historical subjects. Many academics believed “that the
whites (or some other ‘advanced’ group with power or privilege) had the history while the blacks
(or some other ‘simple’ group without power or privilege…) were stuck with nothing but
impulsive, affective memory” (Fabre and O’Meally 8). Hurston’s experiences helped her bridge
the gap between institutional scientific standards and cultures that relied on knowledge systems
that did not place the same value on rationality. She does not attempt to demystify folk culture
but presents “superstitious” perspectives as equally valid to scientific ones. She describes the
ritual of her initiation into New Orleans Hoodoo, for example, by scientific standards. However,
eventually words and rationality fail, and she admits “I had five psychic experiences during
those three days and nights. I shall not detail them here; but I knew that I had been accepted

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before the sixty-nine hours had passed. Strangely enough, I had no sense of hunger—only
exaltation” (“Hoodoo in America” 359). Like Moore’s protagonists, Hurston does not try to
explain or demystify her experiences, but instead presents her perspective on an encounter with
alterity. She refuses to valorize the universalized “temporal code… of Newtonian science and
modern historical consciousness” over “the heterogeneous times of the supernatural, the
folkloric, and the popular [which] are devalued as merely local and archaic” (Lim 31).
While Moses, Man of the Mountain incorporates both science-based biblical scholarship
and Hurston’s own academic training, it is ultimately an ambiguous, speculative novel rather
than a professional history. Like Connecticut Yankee, it does not share a meticulously
researched vision of the past but imagines a history that is meaningful for the author’s own
political context. I read Moses, Man of the Mountain as an anthropological project for Hurston, in
which she rewrites the cultural landscape of ancient Egypt in order to reconsider both historical
narratives and her contemporary society. Like other alternate histories, Hurston’s ancient Egypt
is “shaped by (and reflected upon) emerging techniques for understanding the past,” one of
which was anthropology (Carver 4). Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict were two other protégés
of Boas, who became famous for studying and publishing about indigenous American and
Pacific Island cultures. However, unlike these peers Hurston does not go to an exotic people
and make their traditions available to the American public. Instead, she uses her training to
position Christianity as an object of study. Many of the changes she makes to the Exodus story
in Moses, Man of the Mountain remove explicit references to God or divine intervention in the
world, which secularizes Christian traditions in the same way as European science sought
explanations for the mythology of other cultures. Like Frazer’s The Golden Bough, Hurston’s
speculative anthropology compares Christian mythology with “primitive” religions. However, she
rejects Frazer’s emphasis “on the lower or less developed forms of nature” that viewed
“primitive societies as providing the explanation for current modes of life” (Vickery 25). Instead,
Hurston’s project takes a myth central to European identity and incorporates information from

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“primitive” sources, including the rich history of African American interpretations of Moses, to
paint a fuller picture of the history of Christian tradition.
In contrast to the belief that “the historian's primary allegiance is to ‘the objective
historical truth,’” anthropology as Hurston practiced it values both the written, rational practice of
history and the oral traditions of memory that fall outside Enlightenment standards (Novick 2).
Hurston’s scholarly practice in Mules and Men (1935), Tell My Horse (1938), and her other
nonfiction works seeks to preserve and spread oral traditions in written form. This is especially
important in the African diasporic context, because white enslavers spent centuries enforcing
the view that writing was only for “sophisticated” civilizations by systemically denying enslaved
persons the freedom to read and write. In response, African Americans developed a
sophisticated oral culture, to the point where “the spoken narrative of folklore is as vital as the
written documentation on which many histories of African American religion are based,” and
provided access to a “reality that endures in shared, communal recollections of the past”
(Chireau 6). Hurston addresses the importance of oral tradition in Moses, Man of the Mountain,
in a dialogue between a Hebrew and an Egyptian. The Egyptian begins by asking:
“‘Why should I trust people without monuments and memories? It looks bad to me—
a people who honor nobody. It is a sign that you forget your benefactors as soon as
possible after the need is past.’
‘We don’t build monuments, but we do have memories.’
‘How is anyone to know that? Take for instance your great man Joseph. As long as
you have been in Egypt you have not raised one stone to his memory.’
‘Look at it another way. Perhaps we do not need stones to remind us. It could be that
some folks need stones to remind them. It could be that memorial stones are signs of
bad memories. We just don’t trust our memories to stones.’” (Moses 35)

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While the Israelites have a different context for their lack of “history” than African Americans, the
Hebrew’s defense of unwritten, non-monumental history resonates with experiences of the
African diaspora.
Throughout the novel, Hurston puts this into practice by incorporating folktales and oral
history into her written text, which is itself derived primarily from the written account of the
Torah,11 thus fusing oral and written traditions. Her willingness to recombine these traditions
itself a folk practice, “since slave communities were illiterate, they were, therefore, without
allegiance to any official text, translation, or interpretation; hence once they heard biblical
passages read and interpreted to them, they were free to remember and repeat them in
accordance with their own interests and tastes” (Weems 34). Here, Weems argues that what
critics see as the main failing of oral memory is actually its greatest strength. Folk traditions
democratize history and undermine the ability of a central authority to use the past to
manipulate people. Indeed, Hurston often associates “oral tradition with the ‘truth’ and
monuments, or written history, with a revision of history” that serves powerful interests
(Thompson 409). This perspective derives from the African American folk tradition’s counternarratives to both secular and religious histories. Hurston explains in the introduction to Mules
and Men that “even the Bible was made over to suit our vivid imagination. How the devil always
outsmarted God and how that over-noble hero Jack… outsmarted the devil. Brer Fox, Brer
Deer, Brer ’Gator, Brer Dawg, Brer Rabbit, Ole Massa and his wife were walking the earth like
natural men way back in the days when God himself was on the ground and men could talk with
him” (3). These characters drawn from Christian cosmology are repurposed to function in an
African American social context where subversion is often more effective than conventional
displays of power.
11 Which scholars now largely believe to be itself based on earlier oral tradition, though it is not clear how
widely spread this theory was in the early twentieth century.,

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This revisionary practice was also important in a Black Christian context, which Hurston
would have seen as the daughter of a minister, and around which she organized her first novel
Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934). Melanie Wright identifies the typical format of an African American
sermon in the early twentieth century as “open[ing] with a biblical text from which they are
formally derived; what follows may be a seemingly independent work of poetic creativity. As a
text, the Bible is at once both valued and transcended” (48). Moses, Man of the Mountain builds
on this tradition and transforms the familiar story of the Exodus to speak to both the experience
of freedom from slavery and the centrality of the African diaspora to European and American
culture. Prefiguring Gilroy, Hurston links the Exodus, the foundational event of European law, to
Africa. Like Hopkins, Hurston sees the movement of knowledge and people across Africa and
eventually to the Americas as essential to the formation of European society.
One way in which Hurston demonstrates the importance of African wisdom in her novel
is through the influence of the Egyptian servant Mentu on Moses. Mentu explicitly argues that
his folklore is more important than the priests’ institutional knowledge. He tells the young Moses
that the priests “know what is in the books. That is learning, not wisdom. Learning without
wisdom is a load of books on a donkey’s back” (Moses 74). This distinction is similar to that
which William Dillon Piersen makes between different kinds of knowledge when he describes
African diasporic folktales as “not intended by their narrators as historical truths in the way
modern scholars understand historical truth; rather, they were about a deeper reality, the realm
of moral truth” (xi). Even as an adult, who has access to all the priestly books and knowledge,
Moses still values and relies on the stories he learned from Mentu. Interestingly, it is this
advocate of folklore who directs Moses to The Book of Thoth, which is “a book which Thoth
himself wrote with his own hand which, if you read it, will bring you to the gods” (Moses 73).
Later in the story, Jethro, who mostly teaches Moses through conversation, also highlights the
Book of Thoth as an important power. The Book serves as a bridge between written and oral
tradition. It is a written source of knowledge and power that is valued in stories passed down,

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according to Mentu, “by the father of the father of my father to the father of my father and the
father of my father has told it to my father” (Moses 73). It is Hurston’s ideal fusion of
knowledges, and therefore the source of Moses’s most powerful magic.
Hurston rejects epistemological binaries and hierarchies with an emphasis on the ways
in which different knowledges interact with and build upon each other. Throughout Moses, Man
of the Mountain, Hurston guides the reader to “resist[] the conventional wisdom of viewing
orality and literacy as opposite cultural modalities” and instead see them “as parts of a tightly
interwoven matrix of expression for a people who have nurtured a rich oral tradition and who at
the same time have set literacy as a persistently sought ideal’” (Fabre and O’Meally 9). By
interweaving oral tradition and written history, Hurston resists the separation and differential
valorization of these forms, but also highlights how much of written history is already hybrid
because of its reliance on more “primitive” forms.
Other Visions of Moses
The primacy of the written word was only one aspect of the early twentieth century’s
obsession with rationality. In religion, it also manifested in a rise in atheism, the proposal of
rational Christian theologies, and arguments for the inherent rationality of Christianity. Many
accepted Hegel’s proposed evolutionary progression of religion from “someone kneeling in
prayer before an idol” to “the Christian who worships truth in symbolic form,” culminating in “the
philosopher who immerses himself in eternal truth through rational thought” (45). The logic of
anachronistic space inevitably placed African religions in the most primitive category, while
European Christianity was the highest form of monotheism. Hurston’s adaptation of the Exodus
story rejects these hierarchical distinctions by “open[ing] out the story’s sources, [and] allowing
for non-Jewish influences… [which] counters the antagonism described in the Book of Exodus
between Egypt and Israel, and polytheism and monotheism” (Farebrother 339). In this radical
theological act, Hurston creates a version of the Exodus story in which no society has the most

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“rational” religion by Hegelian standards and even suggests that any attempt to enforce religious
purity results in violence.
As seen in Connecticut Yankee, one of the most important distinctions in nineteenthcentury religious categorizations was that between magic and religion. Frazer, like Hank
Morgan, accepted as fact that “man abandoned magic as a form of thought and action when he
discovered that it did not work and was endangering his existence” (Vickery 25). In Moses, Man
of the Mountain, however, characters do not abandon magic for a more “rational” monotheism.
In fact, Hurston’s novel makes clear that magic and religion are often difficult to distinguish from
each other, even for the various scholars who have tried to do so. Julia Zeppenfeld argues that
the Hebrew Bible makes a clear distinction between magic and religion, because “Moses is not
an independent magician, but a divine messenger in the Bible. Moses’ divine actions are in
stark contrast to the magical acts of the Egyptians. In the Bible Moses is not the initiator of the
plagues, but he rather obeys God’s order” (53). However, in Barbara Johnson’s interpretation,
the biblical condemnation of magic is undermined by the fact that “the story of Moses is loaded
with it. In Exodus, there is a battle of magics to make that point” (54-55). The most compelling
interpretation comes from Yvonne Chireau, who recognizes that in an African diasporic context
magic and religion are not entirely distinct. She explains that “the performance of magical acts in
African traditions is normally not mechanical but nearly always depends on a secondary
‘supernatural agency’ such as a deity, a spirit, or some otherworldly force” (39). Chireau argues
that the division of magic from religion forces a misrepresentation of African diasporic traditions,
which are necessarily a hybrid of diverse practices.
African diasporic religious practices in Hurston’s time were largely condemned as
“magic” and therefore “primitive” and incompatible with Christianity. Even sympathetic whites
“assailed spiritual practices like Conjure as evil and irrational superstitions” (Chireau 125). This
is not the case in Moses, Man of the Mountain, where the antagonistic and polytheistic Pharaoh
describes Moses’s powers as “hoodoo,” but so does Moses’s beloved monotheistic father-in-law

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Jethro. Hurston refuses to draw clear distinctions between magic and miracles. Instead, she
connects some of Moses’s most prominent biblical miracles with non-monotheistic magic
traditions. Mentu claims that the Book of Thoth grants anyone who reads it power to “enchant
the heavens, the earth, the abyss, the mountain, and the sea” (Moses 73). The novel never
confirms if this is true, but the reference to power over the sea resonates with Moses’s later
parting of the Red Sea. The text does note that, when Moses reads the Book of Thoth, he gains
abilities because “a divine power was with him,” which echoes the African belief that magical
acts are performed through divinities (Moses 154).
That Moses receives so much power from the Book of Thoth rather than directly from the
god of the Israelites further complicates Hurston’s cultural landscape. The Book of Thoth
suggests “an Egyptian origin for Moses' magic (and for Hurston, as for many of her
contemporaries, that meant black),” an assertion that may have been shocking to the public but
did not put Hurston “out of line with historians and anthropologists of her day” (Meisenhelder
127-128). Magic was often linked to Africa at this period in part because racist hierarchies made
this connection to point to the “primitiveness” of the people of the continent. They took the magic
out of context rather than considering it, as Hurston does in her anthropology, as a part of a
broader set of religious practices. However, as Chireau explains, this relationship had a very
different connotation in African diasporic communities, since “blacks in America viewed Africa,
the spiritual site of the ancestral homeland, as having special significance” (55). In her essay
“Hoodoo in America,” Hurston describes a practitioner of Hoodoo who “says that his remote
ancestors brought the power with them from ‘the rock’ (Africa) and that his forbears lived in
Santo Domingo before they came to the region of New Orleans” (357). This power flows from its
African source to the Caribbean and then to New Orleans. Hurston’s use of words like “hoodoo”
emphasizes the Africanness of Moses’s power and thereby challenge white Christianity’s claim
on Moses as a European hero.

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The use of African magic by a Jewish leader who holds an important place in Christianity
reflects Hurston’s desire to complicate the distinctions between “primitive” and “civilized”
religious traditions. Where Twain removed real magic entirely from his mythological past,
Hurston instead distributes magical abilities much more widely. Every culture in Moses, Man of
the Mountain has some form of magic, and Moses’s power is based on the combination of these
diverse practices. This portrayal of Moses reflects Hurston’s belief that the alternate history form
allows space “for the attribution of different characteristics to the same entity: different thoughts,
actions, and experiences that might plausibly have belonged to it had it faced different
conditions. This might at first glance seem like the eradication of what was formerly thought to
be the person’s character, but instead it tends to produce an expansion of that category”
(Gallagher 12). When she distributes magic practices among the various groups in the novel,
Hurston, like Moore, complicates any attempt on the part of the reader to sort people into a
Hegelian hierarchy. Europe’s religious ancestors, the Hebrews, believe in the power of amulets
and charms, the technologically advanced Egyptians practice magic, and the monotheistic
Jethro knows hoodoo. Hurston insists on the value of these religions and rejects the view of
“supernatural belief [as] underwritten by notions of anachronism and primitivism: certain folks, in
this account, have yet to be disabused of their belief in ghosts. This phrase, ‘yet to be
disabused,’ signals the teleological foreclosing of futurity, the all-is-given premise that those who
begin by believing in marvels will, with the proper enlightenment, eventually outgrow them.” (Lim
100-101). No one is too rational or too advanced to believe in magic, and its power to hurt and
to help throughout the novel is very real.
One provocative way in which Hurston confounds Hegelian hierarchies in the novel is in
her portrayal of monotheism. She begins by erasing much of the cultural history of the Hebrews
that appears in the Book of Genesis. In Hurston’s telling “the story of Hebrew faith begins with
Jethro and Moses. The novel makes no mention of the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,
and only fleeting reference to Joseph” (Pederson 449). The Hebrews initially practice Egyptian

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religion, and the God of Mount Sinai is referred to as a new God not an ancestral deity. At the
beginning of the story the Pharaoh prohibits the Hebrews from worshipping Egyptian gods, and
one Hebrew comments, “what other gods do we know anything about. It gives you a real empty
feeling not to have no gods anymore” (Moses 16). Hurston excises the Abrahamic covenant
from the story and portrays the Hebrews as polytheistic. Instead, she places the origin of
monotheism in Midianite culture. This choice is in line with the Kenite hypothesis that was a
serious theory in 1930s Hebrew Bible scholarship, but it also complicates the narrative of
progress by giving the most religiously “advanced” belief to a nomadic tribe that is not
traditionally seen as an important influence on European culture.
Even when this Midianite deity appears in the novel, Hurston continues to deny her
readers the exclusively monotheistic Moses story of Christian tradition. Instead, the God of the
Israelites plays a much more ambiguous role in the narrative. Compared to the Torah, the God
of Mount Sinai is barely a character and takes almost no direct action. Early in the narrative,
Moses does speak to a voice in the burning bush, but when he brings the people of Israel to
Mount Sinai and calls to his God, “the mountain was dark and silent. It seemed as if the first
man had never been on earth, so far as the mountain knew” (Moses 264). Hurston does not
deny the existence of God in this novel, but the divine presence is so minimal that it undermines
the Christian conception of an active and omnipotent deity.
By reducing the role of God in the novel, Hurston makes Moses the main actor and the
one responsible for the events of the Exodus. This is especially apparent in the incident of the
golden calf. In the novel, it is one of the only times the Voice has dialogue outside the burning
bush episode. While the major events occur in both Moses, Man of the Mountain and Exodus,
the details are notably different. In Exodus,
the Lord said unto Moses, Go, get thee down; for thy people, which thou broughtest out
of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves…. [M]y wrath [will] wax hot against
them, and… I [will] consume them: and I will make of thee a great nation. And Moses

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besought the Lord his God, and said, Lord, why doth thy wrath wax hot against thy
people, which thou hast brought forth out of the land of Egypt with great power…? Turn
from thy fierce wrath, and repent of this evil against thy people. (Exod. 32:7-14)
Here, God informs Moses of the events at the base of the mountain and threatens to personally
punish those involved. The offense is against God, and Moses intervenes to prevent the
destruction of the Israelites. After this conversation Moses descends from the mountain with the
tablets. In Hurston’s text, this order is reversed. Moses is halfway down the mountain with the
tablets when he notices the celebrations around the golden calf. He seeks the advice of the God
of Mount Sinai, who says “‘[t]hey have betrayed me. They have betrayed you…. Go stop them
before I get too tired of their ingratitude and kill them.’ The Voice was gone and the light was
gone and Moses turned cold and heavy and went down the mountain like God descending into
Eden” (Moses 288). The betrayal here is to both God and Moses, and while the Voice does
threaten to kill the Israelites, it does not actively pursue that plan. Instead, Moses takes the
place of God and orders their slaughter himself.
Moses is the most fervent believer in the God of Mount Sinai, but even he focuses on
human responsibility and action. When the Hebrews tell Moses that they were “under the
impression that you had found some god who was going to save us. They didn’t know they had
to join the army.” Moses responds, “God Himself can’t save people who won’t try to save
themselves” (Moses 201). Hurston’s nonfiction writings share this perspective on the role of
God. She describes in her autobiography, “[w]hen I studied the history of the great religions of
the world, I saw that even in his religion, man carried himself along. His worship of strength was
there. God was made to look that way too” (Dust Tracks 222). In both this section and Moses,
Man of the Mountain, Hurston does not deny the power of God, but still centers human
experience and action.
This brings Hurston back to magic, since she often deemphasizes the role of God by
ascribing biblical miracles to other sources of power. Before he is called by the God of Mount

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Sinai, Moses gains many of the powers that he uses in famous biblical episodes from the Book
of Thoth and Jethro’s Hoodoo. Moses’s power causes
the miracle of water turned to blood…. It was Moses who could bring on or drive off the
cattle disease. It was Moses, too, who saw in the little puff of white smoke that rose from
the incense on the altar the symbol of the Presence behind the clouds on the crest of the
holy mountain and he developed the smoke into a thick white mass that hung stationary
and huge above the altar (Moses 150)
These powers all echo abilities that Moses uses to free the Israelites, which suggests that the
plagues, the pillar of cloud and fire, and other acts that the Torah understands as divine
miracles are repeatable magic that is at Moses’s command. This passage highlights the
ambiguous nature of magic and divinity in the novel. Hurston calls these acts miracles, but her
repetition of “it was Moses” puts the emphasis on his actions, rather than a deity’s.
Hurston’s focus on the power of Moses rather than the power of God is in line with
Moses’s portrayal in African diasporic religions. Throughout the Americas and the Caribbean,
enslaved Africans and their descendants created new spiritual systems, including Vodou,
Hoodoo, Obeah, and Santería that combined West African and Christian practices with other
elements in their physical and cultural milieu. Hurston argues that any demand for purity in
these religions is a denial of their history as inherently hybrid forms. The multiple origins of
these religions provides a model for how Hurston understands Christianity throughout Moses,
Man of the Mountain. She does not believe that there is just one source for religious truth.
Instead, she claims that “there are other concepts of Moses abroad in the world. Asia and all the
Near East are sown with legends of this character. They are so numerous and so varied that
some students have come to doubt if the Moses of the Christian concept is real” (Moses 7).
Hurston further decenters Christian mythology through her focus on Moses’s role as a
divinity in these religions. She asks “[w]ho had the power to command God to go to a peak of a
mountain and there demand of Him laws with which to govern a nation…? Who else has ever

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commanded the wind and the hail? The light and darkness? That calls for power, and that is
what Africa sees in Moses to worship. For he is worshipped as a god” (Moses 7). In the tradition
of African diasporic religions, Hurston distinguishes between Moses’s status as “a god” and the
power to call down “God,” which references the “intermediary spiritual beings, coexisting with
the supreme (yet otiose) creator deity in most African religious systems” (Chireau 38). It is
therefore possible for Moses to be simultaneously a powerful hoodoo man, a god, and the
servant of a supreme deity. Hurston bases her portrayal of Moses not just on the Hebrew Bible
and Christian traditions, but also on a version of Moses that she claims traveled from Egypt,
across Africa, and from there to the Americas. She explains:
In Haiti, the highest god in the Haitian pantheon is Damballa Ouedo Ouedo Tocan Freda
Dahomey and he is identified as Moses, the serpent god. But this deity did not originate
in Haiti. His home is in Dahomey and is worshipped there extensively…. And this
worship of Moses as the greatest one of magic is not confined to Africa. Wherever the
children of Africa have been scattered by slavery, there is the acceptance of Moses as
the fountain of mystic powers. (Moses 8)
This passage reflects the complex worldview of African diasporic religions, where different
traditions converge in a cosmology that connects West African deities with Jewish prophets.
Hurston focuses on this hybridity because of her familiarity with the function of European
science “as a filter for appropriating non-European expertise while rejecting indigenous belief
systems” (Delbourgo and Dew 21). However, Hurston’s own anthropological training had
demonstrated that cultural transmission is never one-sided, and European and American
societies can never erase the African influence on their culture.
Throughout Moses, Man of the Mountain, Hurston prioritizes the moments of contact and
combination. Just as “the Haitian gods, mysteres, or loa are not the Catholic calendar of saints
done over in black as has been stated by casual observers,” neither is her Moses simply an
African adaptation of a Christian myth (Tell My Horse 92). She does not deny the Christian

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version of the Moses story, but she acknowledges it as merely one piece of a more complex
tradition. Hurston shows how different cultures interact with and influence each other, without
setting up a hierarchy among them, and she prefigures Black Athena by “suggest[ing] the
indebtedness of Judaism to Egyptian religious beliefs and practices” (Meisenhelder 128). Her
portrayal of magic and power in the novel argues that African religion is not inferior to
Christianity, but actually the source of Europe’s legal and religious tradition.
As she revises the conventional narrative about the origins of monotheism, Hurston
questions the very foundation of the hierarchy that puts rationality at the pinnacle of human
achievement. She does not allow monotheism to be the cultural better. Over the course of this
novel, Moses “consumes the wisdom of Egypt, and Africa is figured as a source of wisdom and
literacy. In this way, Hurston adapts a foundational legend that represents the revolutionary
development of Judaism out of the polytheism of Egypt; instead, Moses’ spiritual power is
predicated upon a fusion of Egyptian and Hebrew culture” (Farebrother 341). Throughout the
novel, Hurston points to both the falsity of binaries between polytheism and monotheism and
between magic and religion and instead emphasizes the rich variety of cultural influences on
Moses’s life. While Pauline Hopkins has a much more reverent approach to Biblical narrative in
Of One Blood, both Hopkins and Hurston reject the religious and cultural binaries that uphold
the racist standards of white European culture.
(De)Constructing Race
The Exodus myth is a resonant choice for this kind of revisionary project. Historically,
African Americans, especially those who were enslaved, have identified with the experience of
the ancient Israelites. Many viewed Exodus as “God's love letter to African Americans and a firm
promise that He would liberate and deliver retributive justice,” and this “corporate identification
with Biblical Hebrews also served as a foundation for establishing group identity” (Pederson
439-40). This is important for Hurston’s version of the Exodus narrative, and scholars such as

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Melanie Wright interpret the novel as about an African American Moses. Though Hurston does
adapt African American language, cultural practices, and aesthetics into her portrayal of the
ancient Israelites, a closer examination reveals that Hurston refuses to allow any clear-cut
identifications with her contemporary racial categories. In this novel, Hurston draws on Boas’s
theories of cultural relativism and her own experience of the richness of Black cultures around
the world to throw racial barriers into utter confusion and thereby prove their meaninglessness.
Throughout the novel, Hurston challenges the belief that race was a self-evident
category that could be used to easily classify people. This is most notable in her physical
descriptions of various characters, which are not consistent with clear racial categorizations.
The only character in the novel specifically referred to as white-skinned is Jochebed, when
Amram describes “the thick red hair of his wife, her white face,” which is a striking choice given
the history of identification with the Hebrews in African American traditions (Moses 22). The only
other time in which a character’s skin tone is explicitly described is when Miriam objects to
“Zipporah of the tawny skin. Zipporah of the flowing body. Zipporah of the night-black eyes.
Zipporah of the luxuriant, crinkly hair that covered her shoulders like a great ruff of feathers”
(Moses 133). While it is possible to generalize these statements into a broader understanding of
the appearances of the various groups, it is absurd to claim that the enslaved Israelites are
white by the standards of American culture. Furthermore, Hurston gives the Hebrews, Mentu,
and the Midianites all African American vernacular speech, which dissociates that dialect from a
particular race and shows that speech patterns are not biological but cultural. At the same time,
Hurston’s decision to have many different characters speak in this dialect continues her project
of emphasizing African American cultures and modes of communication. Hurston deliberately
complicates any direct parallels of specific races in the novel with races in the real world.
One way in which Hurston accomplishes this is by portraying multiple different forms of
racism. Just as Moore destabilizes hierarchies by revealing the constructedness of gender,
much of Hurston’s political project rests on race as a cultural product rather than a biological

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reality. The Hebrews in the novel, like African Americans, are made into an “alien race,” leaving
them “disarmed and prevented from becoming citizens” (Moses 12). Though they were always
an ethnic group within Egypt, the Hebrews only become a race when they are legally and
culturally othered by the Egyptians. Hurston demonstrates this in Egyptians’ reaction to the
rumor of Moses’s Hebrew heritage. While still a prince in Egypt, Moses is married to a woman
from Ethiopia, which suggests that she is Black. However, when she hears rumors that Moses is
a Hebrew, she responds with racist vitriol. She tells Moses, “[t]he very idea of me being married
to a Hebrew makes me sick at the stomach. Don’t you dare to come near me” (Moses 86-87).
This reflects Hurston’s belief that race is not “a set of rules to be enacted by individual members
of distinct groups, but [the product of] the specific way in which actors create and produce
beliefs, values, and other means of social life,” and that this repeated performance builds the
racial categories of a society (Fabian 24). Egyptianness is constituted by the exclusion and
hatred of Hebrews just as cultural power in the United States was constituted by the exclusion
and hatred of Black Americans.
This early section of the novel owes much to the same late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century African American passing narratives that Hopkins uses in Of One Blood. The
uncertainty about Moses’s ethnicity reflects Boas’s belief that “it is impossible to distinguish one
‘race’ from another,” and Hurston’s “work with Boas formed an important reinforcement for
earlier commonsense observations, enabling her to counter [racial] pseudoscience on its own
ground” (M. Wright 60-61). Moses’s conversation with his Ethiopian wife is not the only
reference to passing narratives that appears in the novel. When the Hebrews hear the rumor
that Moses is Jochebed and Amram’s son, they brag that “Pharaoh hates Hebrews…. He
passes a law to destroy all our sons and he gets a Hebrew child for a grandson. Ain’t that rich?”
and assert that “[t]here is plenty of Hebrew blood in that family already. That is why that
Pharaoh wants to kill us all off. He is scared somebody will come along and tell who his real
folks are” (Moses 50). Like the passing narratives of African American authors such as James

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Weldon Johnson and Frances W. Harper, these conversations demonstrate that race is
constructed and performative. There is no way to know who is “secretly” a Hebrew, but Egyptian
culture is so completely organized around the marginalization of the Hebrews, that rumors of
Hebrew blood could destabilize even the Pharaoh.
Despite these resonances with the African American experience, the Hebrews later try to
enforce racial purity in their own community. Aaron and Miriam complain about Zipporah as
“that dark complected woman [Moses] done brought and put up to be a Queen over the rest of
us” (Moses 282). In the Book of Numbers, which was the source for this section, Aaron and
Miriam object to Moses’s “Ethiopian wife,” but they do not explain their objection or mention the
wife’s skin color. In the novel, when Aaron tries to correct Miriam that Zipporah is a Midianite,
not an Ethiopian, Miriam responds, “her folks could still come from Ethiopia, couldn’t they? Tell
me! Look how dark her skin is. We don’t want people like that among us mixing up our blood”
(Moses 297). The Egyptian court did not object to Moses’s wife who was actually an Ethiopian,
because she was not a Hebrew. But Hurston puts anti-Black racism in the mouths of the
Hebrews, despite the long cultural connection between African Americans and the experiences
of the Hebrews. Interestingly, Moses explicitly calls out the inconsistencies of Miriam’s racism,
and reminds her that “[n]obody here don’t care anything about my wife’s color. Haven’t we had
the mixed multitudes with us ever since we started from Egypt?” (Moses 299). Moses, Man of
the Mountain does not address racism through straightforward allegory, but by challenging the
very basis of race itself. This shakes the entire foundation of the evolutionary worldview. If race
is not inherent, then white Europeans and their descendants cannot be inherently superior.
This racial ambiguity is most complexly embodied in the figure of Moses. Hurston
refuses to place Moses within the novels’ racial landscape, and instead makes him “the
statement par excellence of Hurston's denial of race as an objective category” (M. Wright 64). In
the Torah Moses is an ethnic Hebrew, raised in an Egyptian household, and cared for by
Hebrews, which gives him a clear, if hybrid, identity. In Hurston’s telling, Moses is not nursed by

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a Hebrew woman, may not be ethnically Hebrew, and lacks a Hebrew cultural context. For most
of his childhood there was no doubt that he was Egyptian, but the court is quick to believe the
rumors of his Hebrew heritage. To further complicate his racial legacy, Moses’s primary
influences are the Egyptian folklore of the servant Mentu and the beliefs and practices of Jethro
and the Midianites. Hurston builds on African diasporic traditions of Moses to create a narrative
where he “cannot function as a measure of racial purity but signifies a hybrid iconographic
genealogy…. A collage of Voodoo, Christianity and Judaism, the image of Moses surpasses
the sum of its cultural parts. For Hurston, culture, like blood, makes no claim to a functional
racial purity” (Thompson 397).
The novel demonstrates the arbitrariness of racial classifications by never revealing
whether Moses is the biological child of Jochebed and Amram, the biological grandson of the
Pharaoh, or an adopted child from elsewhere. Hurston tells the story of the baby in the Nile and
then the rumors that the Hebrews believe, but she presents Moses’s Hebrew background as a
story, not a fact. Moses becomes a Rorschach test for the characters and readers alike as they
work through their attitudes toward race. Hurston leaves Moses’s parentage uncertain to show
how race is malleable and impossible to clearly define. This concept was especially daring in
light of the many attempts to concretize race in the 1930s, which included the concept of AngloSaxonism, the eugenics movement, the recently passed Nuremberg laws in Germany, and Jim
Crow restrictions in the American Southeast. Hurston rejects all of these models and retains
Moses’s ambiguity even at the end of the novel when Miriam says “[s]ometimes I think you’re
just that Egyptian Prince that took up with us for some reason or other. Then again I would
agree with some of them others that you was an Ethiopian” (Moses 321). Even after forty years
of trying to understand Moses’s race, Miriam has no answers, which puts Moses in the same
place as he was at the beginning of the novel.
The lack of answers does not mean that Moses’s relationship to race is static. When
rumors arise at court that he was born a Hebrew, Moses wonders if they are true, but the

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narrative reports that he “found nothing to convince him that he was. But one thing had come
out of it—he found a new sympathy for the oppressed of all mankind” (Moses 92). In this
passage, Hurston highlights Moses’s personal history and his broader sense of right and wrong
rather than any sense of race pride or obligation to a specific group. Hurston emphasizes
Moses’s choices over his biology, which “contradicts the habit of categorizing people in terms of
race and ethnicity throughout the twentieth century. In the novel the discussion about race and
ethnicity leads to displeasure and isolation” (Zeppenfeld 59). When the Egyptians think Moses
might be a Hebrew, he is ostracized at court. When the Hebrews believe him to be an Egyptian,
they say that he is just like Pharaoh. Moses himself does not care what race he was born, and
every instance of someone caring is a moment of cruelty.
Regardless of Moses’s actual heritage, his life has been deeply shaped by race and
racism. After Miriam dies, Moses wonders “[i]f she had not come to the palace gates to ask for
him and to claim him as a brother, would he have left Egypt as he did? He doubted it. He never
would have known Jethro, nor loved Zipporah, nor known the shiny mountain, nor led out a
nation” (Moses 323-324). In this passage, Hurston retains the importance of race as a construct,
but rejects it as a biological reality. It is a tool that can be put to a variety of uses, as seen in
Moses’s relationship to Aaron. He does not initially approach Aaron as his brother, but Aaron
demands that “Moses must recognize him as a brother. Moses refused at first to even listen, but
Jethro persuaded him that the connection might be useful down in Egypt. He could make the old
legend serve him” (Moses 166). Here race and kinship become a political strategy. Moses
creates his own racial affiliation in order to tie himself to established leaders of the Hebrews.
Despite this strategic racial identification, Moses is frequently denounced as an Egyptian
by the Israelites, including Aaron. Moses notes that part of his conflicts with the Israelites is that
“few if any accepted the story of his kinship with Miriam and Aaron. He was still an Egyptian
noble to them. If he wanted to cast in his lot with them, well and good. But blood was thicker
than missionary zeal and he would bear watching” (Moses 177). This section phrases Moses’s

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association with Egypt as “blood,” but the fundamental concern is that he was raised as an
Egyptian prince and therefore will treat the Hebrews as Egyptian nobles treated them. Even
without a cultural connection to the Hebrews, Moses’s rumored origins continually destabilize
any other racial affiliations he might have. At the very end of the novel, when Moses kills Aaron,
he still asks himself “[i]s this my brother? Is this pitiful old carcass blood of my blood? Maybe
this is me myself in other moods. Who am I to judge him?” (Moses 336). This moment
complicates the question of race by conflating Moses’s emotional identification with his
uncertain ancestry. He asks if Aaron is biologically his brother, but also reflects on the ways in
which leadership forced them into a kinship that he cannot disavow.
Throughout the novel, Moses’s uncertain heritage turns him into the living embodiment
of multiple origins. By the end of the novel, he remains “neither Jewish nor Christian, neither
Egyptian nor African, neither black nor Assyrian, but at the same time he is in some way all of
these. It is thus very difficult to identify with him as a religious figure or a racial exemplar”
(Pederson 446). Instead, Moses’s race is political. The Hebrews claim that Moses is Jochebed
and Amram’s son, because it makes them feel important. Moses is accepted as Egyptian until
he grows too powerful, and his uncle decides to turn the court against Moses by identifying him
as a Hebrew. This constant ambiguity around Moses’s race and the lack of clear racial parallels
for any real-world ethnicity highlights Zeppenfeld’s point that the novel’s “representation of
ethnic hybridity challenges the notion of a community based on a simplified categorization of
ethnicity” (48). Hurston dismantles the existing system of racial identification and imagines
identity as “as a project with mobile starting places and negotiable trajectories, leaving open the
creative and collective work of… collaborative imagination to generate (rather than ‘discover’)
the truth of core values important to those involved in the processes of imaginative negotiation”
(Castiglia 110). The evolutionary hierarchies of racism and eugenics are incompatible with
Hurston’s definition of race as fluid, malleable, and constructed.

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The Violence of the Nation
Hurston’s focus on fluidity and hybridity does not just criticize racial classifications, but
also the importance of law itself. The myth of progress in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries viewed complex systems of laws as a sign of superiority under the belief that
societies, like organisms, develop into increasingly complex forms. The concept of a nation
unified by shared laws and authority is essential to Hegel’s teleological view of history. He saw
each nation as “a link in the chain of the world spirit's development…. The particular character
of the national spirit varies according to the kind of awareness of spirit it has attained” (Hegel
53). In this view, the national project becomes the vehicle of progress, but Hurston, objects to
the nationalistic emphasis on state power over individual freedoms. Moses, Man of the
Mountain expresses Hurston’s concerns about the corruption of even well-meaning leaders by
nationalism and state power, which ultimately derives from violence.
This critique of nationalism is most obvious in Hurston’s portrayal of Egypt. Pharaoh’s
paternalistic attitude is notably like that of many white Americans who held kidnapped Africans
and their descendants as slaves. The narration explains that Pharaoh, like Hank Morgan, is
incensed when his people turn against him. He the rails that enslaved Hebrews “instead of
setting to work with glad hearts, happy that they have been given a chance, even in a small
way, to make some sort of pay back on their huge debt to Egypt… were congregating in
Goshen and planning protests against his mild and beneficent decrees!” (Moses 32). The
condition of slavery and the tight control Pharaoh exercises over the Hebrew’s religious,
physical, and reproductive lives heightens the existing connections between the experiences of
the Hebrews and enslaved African Americans. However, Hurston also alludes to more
contemporary figures who used racist laws and rhetoric to retain their power. Farebrother and
other scholars have noted that the Pharaoh acts “as a dictator who justifies his victimization of
the Hebrews through a newly invigorated race-based nationalism” and then interpret this
portrayal “as a critique of events in Germany leading up to the Second World War” (336).

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Hurston had already seen far-right leaders take power in Europe and begin to implement
violently nationalistic laws, and her own experiences with ethnonationalism in the United States
had shown her the dangers of such political movements. The language in the early part of the
novel, such as Jochebed’s remark that “Pharaoh’s secret police don’t never stop prowling,”
evokes both twentieth-century dictators and nineteenth-century slaveholders (Moses 18).
Hurston shows that Pharaoh’s rule is based on fear and intimidation, and he persecutes
the Hebrews as a way to maintain his control over Egyptians. Pharaoh also has imperial
ambitions, and in contrast to the openness of Moore’s characters, he is “not interested in the
ways of other peoples…. It would be time enough to consider how the people in those far-off
countries lived after he had conquered them” (Moses 76). Like other dictators, Pharaoh
considers himself to embody the state, and therefore the achievements of the nation reflect on
him personally. He becomes obsessed with glory and neglects the well-being of his own people.
This fictional nationalism has the same failings as real-world nationalisms. Hurston explains that
If Pharaoh relented and let the Hebrews go, he would rid himself of the worry and
humiliation he was suffering. But on the other hand he would have to face a danger
more sure and certain right away. The nobles would never permit him to save his face at
their expense…. If the house of Pharaoh had not preached and practiced hatred and
vengeance for generations, he could save himself by a show of generosity and dismiss
the slaves. (Moses 206-207)
As part of her condemnation of nationalism and dictatorship, Hurston notes that the logics of
racism are self-defeating. When a culture organizes itself around oppression, the foundation will
crumble at any threat to the established hierarchy. While Hurston is here commenting on Egypt,
the comparisons she has already drawn between Egypt and racist governments in her
contemporary world make this a pointed critique of ethnonationalism in the twentieth century.
In his youth, Moses rejects the Egyptians’ nationalistic model of leadership. Early in the
novel, “he followed the household servants about asking what and how and why until they tried

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to devise means of directing his attention elsewhere. Then it was the gardeners and the grooms
who caught his imagination” (Moses 53-54). He wants to be a part of the community, and he
listens to the people who are not deemed socially important. This is most obviously shown in his
close relationship with Mentu, who teaches Moses “a philosophy of human connection with
Nature rather than control over it” that informs Moses’s youthful disdain for “the egotistical
desire to transcend the human and to defy the natural that characterizes the Pharaoh's
endeavors” (Meisenhelder 120). When Moses leaves Egypt, this compassion helps him to
imagine a better kind of nation, “where there would be more equality of opportunity and less
difference between top and bottom” (Moses 100). As he frees himself from the oppressive and
legalistic court of the Pharaoh, Moses engages in utopian thinking about an ideal society and
specifically about an equal community. His idealism at this point has the potential to form “the
basis for ethical judgment and [is] encouraging the shaping and expression of ideals necessary
to social engagement and change. [However, i]dealism, always present, implicitly and explicitly,
in critique, is not enough. Imagination is what makes idealism a social practice” (Castiglia 3).
Tragically, Moses’s ideals do not manifest imaginatively, and, like Hank Morgan, he
becomes an authoritarian leader obsessed with national glory. While Twain paints Hank as
fundamentally corrupt, Hurston offers this moment of genuine possibility before it is foreclosed
by Moses’s later decisions. Moses, Man of the Mountain is not just about the Israelites’ escape
from Egyptian nationalism, but about the foundation of a new nation with its own oppressive
laws and hierarchies. Hurston condemns the racist nationalisms of ancient Egypt and 1930s
Germany and also criticizes the prominent Black nationalist movements of the early twentieth
century. She anticipates Gilroy’s later observations about the transnational Black community,
and they both adopt a perspective that
seeks to celebrate complex representations of a black particularity that is internally
divided: by class, sexuality, gender, age, ethnicity, economics, and political
consciousness. There is no unitary idea of black community here, and the authoritarian

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tendencies of those who would police black cultural expression in the name of their own
particular history or priorities are rightly repudiated. (Gilroy 32)
In the interwar period, many African Americans joined movements like Garvey’s Universal
Negro Improvement Association and Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, which offered a
“vision of a rising tide of color: the inevitable resurgence of the world’s non-white majority, the
rise of a black empire, and the dawning of a new golden age” (Stephens and Ewing 6-7).
Like her Black conservative contemporary George Schuyler, whose novel Black Empire
(1936-1938) sharply criticized Black nationalism, Hurston’s own political stance clashed with the
vision of these movements. She believed that “there is no such thing as Race Solidarity in
America with any group…. Our interests are too varied. Personal benefits run counter to race
lines too often for it to hold” (Dust Tracks 179). Though this led to some of Hurston’s later
conservative positions, it reflects the same perspective on race and nation that she expresses in
Moses, Man of the Mountain. Hurston does not just “pit the ‘bad’ race-based nationalism of
Hitler and Pharaoh against the ‘good’ cultural nationalism of Moses; she reveals that both
nationalisms set limits and prescribe behaviour, and even require sacrificial victims”
(Farebrother 350). In addition to its portrayal of the horrors of ethnonationalism in Europe and
the United States, Moses, Man of the Mountain also dramatizes the inherent violence of even
well-intentioned national projects.
As the architect of the Israelites’ state, Moses’s change from an idealistic youth to a
despot is representative of the dangers of nationalism. Through the character of Moses, Hurston
“criticizes male dominance, the notion of solitary leading figures, and an uncritical acceptance of
existing concepts” (Zeppenfeld 48). Moses remains compassionate in the openly nationalistic
court of the Pharaoh, but his attitude starts to change due to his closeness with Jethro in Midian.
After he gives up his chance at the throne, Moses tells Jethro that “[a]ll I ever want to do is to
herd your sheep, talk with you and take comfort in the arms of my wife, and bring up the sons,
which I hope for in abundance, to be good and gentle. I want to sit on the side of Mount Horeb

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and ask Nature some questions” (Moses 136). Jethro wants Moses to become a great leader,
but Moses “made no move in that direction even when he was urged. He just had no wish to
govern his fellow men” (Moses 145). Jethro sees Moses as one of Hegel’s world historical
individuals, who should “seize upon this higher universal and make it their own end” because
“they draw their inspiration from… that hidden spirit whose hour is near but which still lies
beneath the surface and seeks to break out” (82-83). When Moses relinquishes his power as an
Egyptian prince and intentionally steps out of the historical narrative, he also rejects Hegel’s
belief in the value of a centrally organized nation over a loose community of individuals.
Jethro’s ambitions seem even more sinister when he encourages Moses to spread the
worship of the local Midianite god to other people, which recalls the interrelated projects of
colonial powers and Christian missionaries. Jethro encourages Moses to free the Hebrews
because “we could convert ’em, maybe. That really would be something—a big crowd like that
coming through religion, all at one time” (Moses 117). Jethro does not only want to save the
Hebrews from Egypt for humanitarian ends, but to further his own power and prestige. He
targets the Israelites because, like many of the Black nationalist leaders of the twentieth
century, he understands how tempting it is to offer “power for the powerless, roots for the
rootless, and inclusion for the excluded” (Dawahare 12-13). While these movements in the
1930s did not occur in the context of slavery, they were focused on poor and disenfranchised
African Americans, and nearly all of the early recruits to the Nation of Islam were impoverished
(GhaneaBassiri 224). Over time, Moses comes to share Jethro’s opportunistic view of the
Hebrews as “potential converts and subjects, people likely to accept a new religion,” and this
instrumentalization is what eventually allows him to become a despot (Meisenhelder 131).
While the long-term consequences of Jethro’s influence are disastrous, his leadership is
better than Pharaoh’s in many ways. Jethro explains that “in Egypt the rulers don’t have to go
near the people, but here a chief is looked on as the sort of father of his tribe” (Moses 121).
However, his approach to community is paternalistic and manipulative, more like Hank Morgan’s

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colonial rule than Jirel’s sacrificial compassion or Reuel’s dedicated service. Jethro looks after
all his people, but he only befriends Moses, because Moses is powerful and educated enough
for Jethro to consider him an equal. This is a sharp contrast to Moses’s own preference for
spending time with the illiterate servants in the palace. Meisenhelder reads Jethro’s leadership
style in the context of Mentu and Jethro’s different uses of vernacular language. She notes that
language “for Mentu is important for the deep and meaningful communication it fosters, it is for
Jethro merely an instrument of control. The folk idiom his people speak is not a sign of group
identity and poetic creativity but a tool that can be used to mold popular opinion” (131).
Moses quickly adopts this strategy of manipulation when he finally accepts leadership of
the Israelites. He explains that he wants the Pharaoh to refuse to free the Hebrews because:
we have come and demanded the people in the name of a god that neither Pharaoh nor
the Hebrews ever heard about before…. If they went out from Egypt before I showed
them signs and wonders it wouldn’t be a week before they would be building altars to
Egyptian gods. So what would be a better chance to show his powers than for Pharaoh
to refuse and for me to beat him down with powers? That’s what I aim to do. I don’t want
his consent, really. It would spoil everything I planned. I mean to whip his head to the
ground and then lead out with a high hand. (Moses 184-185)
Like Jethro, Moses does not begin with threats and commands, but manipulates events to
produce the reactions he wants. This is a less hierarchical and legalistic approach than
Pharaoh’s, but it is still incompatible with individual freedom and human dignity.
Despite Jethro’s influence, Moses retains much of his compassion in the early days of
his leadership. When Joshua suggests that they abandon anyone who objects to leaving Egypt,
Moses replies “we can’t do that, nice as it would be. They just don’t think. They are trying to go
on what they know and that ain’t enough” (Moses 201-202). He also rejects race-based
nationalism, and when a “great horde of mixed-blooded people grabbed up their things and
joined the hosts of Israel. ‘Let us be free too,’ they begged and Moses said yes to them” (Moses

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226). He begins with good intentions, but his failure reflects the degree to which freedom is “a
practice, not a promise” (Castiglia 182). As Moses becomes more invested in the project of
nation-building, he abandons his ideals. He no longer values individualism and community as
Hurston did, and instead dedicates his life to making a great nation by twentieth-century
standards. At the end of the novel, Moses claims that he has succeeded because “Israel had
laws on tables of stone and Israel had a God… Out of a rotting mass of creeds he had made a
religion that had height and depth” (Moses 347). With monotheism and laws literally set in
stone, Israel is a true nation-state, ready to invade Canaan.
However, Moses is not the only leader who fails Israel. He may be flawed and cruel, but
the other options are no better. Since Moses has no connection to Hebrew culture, he relies on
his alleged siblings Aaron and Miriam to give him credibility in the eyes of the Israelites. Aaron is
vain, self-centered, and ambitious, often dividing the people to further his own power and
prestige. Even before they leave Egypt, he demands “clothes like an Egyptian noble with
ornaments. Then he wanted titles” (Moses 166). In contrast to Moses’s strategic and often cold
approach to leadership, Aaron is vain and not very clever. In a moment that shows the
relationship between racism and nationalism, Aaron uses Moses’s ambiguous race against him
when he tells the people, “[y]ou can’t put no dependence at all in no Egyptian, don’t care who it
is” (Moses 282). Here Aaron aligns himself with the Hebrews and defines their national identity
through exclusion of the Egyptian, just as the Egyptians defined themselves through exclusion
of the Hebrew. However, Aaron then immediately proceeds to organize an Egyptian ceremony
to the golden calf, which shows the incoherence of this attempt to police cultural boundaries.
Moses comes to despise Aaron because of what he sees as Aaron’s failure of
leadership. Moses tells Aaron, “you got ambition to be a leader without having anything else to
go with it…. You are much too sensitive to the wishes of the people but you are too unconscious
of their needs” (Moses 299-300). However, this criticism also reveals Moses’s failings as a
leader. The Israelites continue to rebel against Moses because he cares more about the nation

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than the well-being of the people. As one of the Hebrews observes, “it’s hard to love freedom if
it keeps you hungry” (Moses 309). Moses does not react sympathetically to these concerns. He
answers their concerns about hunger by saying, “I’ll stop planning the future for you for the
moment to satisfy your lusts. But it is getting a little tiresome, this always assailing me about
trifles” (Moses 310). While Moses lacks Aaron’s self-importance and ambition, he has lost sight
of the individuals who make up the nation.
Moses believes that his self-sacrifice makes him a better leader than Aaron and Miriam.
He tells Aaron “leaders have to be people who give up things. They ain’t made out of people
who grab things” (Moses 263). Theoretically, a focus on the greater good over any individual’s
desires is good leadership, but by the end of the novel, Moses “has sacrificed equality,
communion with Nature, openness to other people and to experience, and finally happiness” in
order to establish a strong nation (Meisenhelder 140). Moses comes to believe that he must
control the populace by any means necessary, but his “notion of the common good that takes
precedence over the interest of individuals… ends up being antithetical to pluralism”
(Farebrother 348). Instead of focusing on group identity, Hurston believes that “the
achievements and failures of individuals are important; when groups or races become the focus
of concern, inhumanity results.” (M. Wright 63). When Hurston wrote this novel, nation-states
were seen as the most civilized form of government. Europeans called for stronger nations at
home and organized former colonies into nations without considering the impact of their actions
on the people who lived there. For Hurston, who celebrated the individuality of her own
community even at the expense of their solidarity, Moses’s determination to turn the Israelites
into a nation marks him as despotic and little better than the Pharaoh he fought against.
Moses’s increasing commitment to the nation is marked by a corresponding willingness
to use violence. After he leaves his position as the Egyptian military commander, Moses vows to
“never fight again except in self-defense. It seems that fighting is a game where everybody is
the loser. I have simply abandoned the idea of force. I want to sit and think” (Moses 109). Here,

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Moses specifies “force” and “fighting” as the problems. He contrasts them with his peaceful and
solitary pursuits in Midian. However, this pacifism is at odds with the national project, and when
he returns to Egypt, he forms militias and forces the people to prepare for battle. He confronts
Pharaoh, saying “[y]ou have your army and I have my powers. I mean to attack you with what I
have. Our side is stronger than yours” (Moses 178-179). Here, he frames his conflict with the
Pharaoh as an “attack,” but when Joshua asks him to lead the Hebrew armies, Moses refuses.
He explains, “I done laid down the sword altogether…. But I’m going to fight them just the same,
and I don’t aim to touch a sword” (Moses 256). He endorses violence in the name of nationbuilding, but still refuses to engage in combat himself. Hurston reveals the hollowness of this
distinction through her description of the plagues. Moses unleashes “eye-for-an-eye justice and
then some, visit[ing] upon Egypt the plague of murder and does so knowing, indeed intending,
for this spectacle to be watched” (Thompson 408). Despite his earlier disavowal of force, Moses
begins the process of nation formation through spectacular and public violence
The violence required to liberate the Hebrews might still be considered self-defense, but
Moses goes far beyond that. The narrative describes how “Israel met nations and fought and
conquered and moved on towards Canaan. Moses lifted his rod and made a way out of no way
when it was needed and they moved on” (Moses 338). The biblical account tends to view these
battles as signs of the glory and power of both Israel and God, but by emphasizing Moses’s
earlier pacifism, Hurston gives this violence a different valence. The Torah portrays this as
necessary violence to liberate the Israelites’ ancestral homeland, but Hurston’s Hebrews have
no prior connection to Canaan. She discusses the colonialist nature of the Israelites’ conquest in
her autobiography, saying “[t]he Lord wanted His children to have a country full of big grapes
and tall corn. Incidentally while they were getting it, they might as well get rid of some trashy
tribes…. If the conquest looked like bloody rape to the Canaanites, that was because their evil
ways would not let them see a point which was right under their nose” (Dust Tracks 255). While

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Hurston’s depiction of the Israelites in Moses, Man of the Mountain is not inherently more violent
than that portrayed in the Torah, she intends it to be judged in a much more negative light.
This is reinforced when Moses turns the violence that had previously been directed
against the Hebrews’ enemies against the Hebrews themselves. In contrast to his earlier
embrace of the “mixed multitudes,” Moses ultimately “attains unity through the expulsion of
everything that would threaten his narrow religious vision for the nation. He is willing to sacrifice
individuals for the good of the state, including those who deign to question his authority”
(Farebrother 348). It is this attitude that leads him to call for a massacre of anyone who
worshipped the golden calf. While Moses defends the Israelites from God’s wrath in the Torah,
Hurston’s Moses tells his followers “[i]f this is to be a great nation, it must be purged of such
evil-doers, or all Israel must perish. You have your eager weapons, men. Spare not a soul who
is guilty” (Moses 292). Unlike his biblical counterpart, Moses does not put the call for violence
into the mouth of a God, instead, he calls for slaughter for the sake of the nation. This incident
reveals that “both Hurston's critique of fascist power and her model of black cultural nationalism
maintain as a necessary structural element the demonization and murder of the racialized other”
(Thompson 407). Moses does not define Israel as a community based on race, but he
nonetheless creates a single version of “Israel” that is religiously and ideologically pure. Much
like the Egyptians created their identity through the exclusion of the Hebrew, Moses excludes
and even kills anyone who disobeys him or fails to “correctly” engage in their new religion.
This exclusion is sometimes enacted through overt violence, such as this massacre, but
at other times it is perpetuated through codified religious practices and laws. Like so many
others, Moses falls “back on the idea of cultural nationalism, on the overintegrated conceptions
of culture which present immutable, ethnic differences as an absolute break…. Against this
choice stands another, more difficult option: the theorisation of creolisation, metissage,
mestizaje, and hybridity” (Gilroy 2). And so, after the incident with the golden calf, Hurston
explains that Moses “felt that only discipline would save what he had begun and so he

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chastened the people severely. They suffered epidemics of ailments and many discomforts. It
was then that he established the House of God” (Moses 293). Though Moses has served the
God of Mount Sinai since before he was called by the burning bush, he builds an elaborate,
hierarchical religion only after the Hebrews flagrantly disobey him. Moses’s creation of the
priesthood reflects Hurston’s belief that “a religion based on intimidation and coercion quite
logically leads to a society based on laws and commandments. When power loses its rich
associations with understanding and degenerates into force, orders rather than conversations
become central” (Meisenhelder 137). The creation of this hierarchy echoes Hank Morgan’s
refusal to engage in his new temporal community in Connecticut Yankee. Like Hank, Moses
claims that these systems of control and punishment are necessary to his political project. He
justifies himself to Joshua by saying “[y]ou can’t have a state of individuals. Everybody just can’t
be allowed to do as they please. I love liberty and I love freedom so I started off giving
everybody a loose rein…. [But i]f you do, you encourage all the stupid but greedy and ambitious
to sprout like toadstools” (Moses 340). This both makes it clear that Moses has changed his
philosophy on leadership over the course of the novel and directly goes against Hurston’s own
calls for freedom and diversity in any community.
Hurston was personally aware of the danger of religion in nationalist movements. One
important manifestation of the rising tide of Black nationalism in the aftermath of World War I
was a proliferation of new religious movements. These emergent groups “generally were not
apologetic or deferential to white society in large part because they were innovative products of
African America and not black offshoots of white organizations” (GhaneaBassiri 194). Even
leaders like Garvey who kept their movements ostensibly secular, often relied on biblical
imagery, including the image of Moses as the deliverer of the oppressed. Garvey’s appeal
rested on the idea that “the scattered sons and daughters of Africa would be united once again,”
and that Garvey would lead them to this promised land (Stephens and Ewing 3). The interwar
period also saw a resurgence of Ethiopianism and a literal interpretation of the same Psalm that

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inspired Hopkins’s speculation: “Princes shall come forth out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon
stretch forth her hands unto God” (68:31). This rhetoric was adopted by many smaller religious
movements, and eventually Rastafari in the 1930s, which attached the pan-Africanist use of
“Ethiopia” to the nation-state governed by Emperor Haile Selassie. While the Nation of Islam
and its predecessors did not advocate for a new Exodus to Africa, they claimed that they would
“restore blacks to their original religion, language, and culture through Islam and in doing so
restore them to their original divine nature” and mastery of the world (GhaneaBassiri 224).
Hurston’s perspective on religion helped fuel her skepticism of these nationalist
movements and their use of religious language for political ends. She understood “the Godconstruct [as] an anti-democratic, imperialistic invention,” and this novel emphasizes the
violence of Moses’s religious project, where “individual humans are ultimately like lab mice,
insignificant beings with which a political leader can experiment in order to determine the
viability and practicality of his arbitrarily constructed system of law” (Lackey 584). Hurston saw
this attitude in many of these movements, and her high value of individual freedom made her
especially aware of how liberation movements could use religion as a tool of oppression. She
understood that this kind of political movement “masks the arbitrariness of its own political
choices in the morally charged language of ethnic absolutism and this poses additional dangers
because it… ignores the restless, recombinant qualities of the black Atlantic's affirmative
political cultures” (Gilroy 31). Hurston saw these dangers clearly as both a scholar and someone
personally invested in the sanctity of the individual in the African American community.
She also gives voice to this concern in her emphasis on Moses’s traditional role as a
lawgiver in a novel that condemns law as an institutional form of violence. Hurston begins her
critique of legalism early in the novel when she associates Egypt and Pharaoh with laws and
their enforcement. Amram claims that the Pharaoh believes “that it makes a big man out of him
to be passing and passing laws and rules…. Long time ago he done passed all the laws that
could do anybody good. So now he sits up and studies up laws to do hurt and harm” (Moses

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15). Later, Moses leaves Egypt in part because he realizes that the law “is a sword with two
edges. Never mind whether it is directed against me honestly or not. That has nothing to do with
its power to injure me” (Moses 99). Here Moses directly connects the concept of law with the
ability to do violence, which also contributes to his early desire to not rule anybody. However,
Moses later institutes a complex system of laws, which does make him a more “advanced” ruler
by Hegel’s view of progress. As part of Hurston’s condemnation of Moses’s turn to violence, she
shows how he becomes increasingly obsessed with the law. By the end of the novel, he is
pleased that “Israel had laws on tables of stone,” making them permanent, inflexible, and
unchangeable (Moses 347). When he realizes that he is going to die soon, his concern is not for
himself or for the people, but for the laws. He asks himself “[w]hen he was sickened and
crumbled like ordinary men, what would become of his laws and statutes? No, Moses must not
die among the Hebrews…. He would end in mystery as he had come. Then his laws would
stand” (Moses 349). By this point, Moses no longer questions whether the laws’ endurance is a
good thing or if he is merely perpetuating this initial violence upon countless future generations.
After he has enshrined his power through law, Moses becomes even more willing to
commit physical violence himself, which aligns with his overall authoritarian posture. Where
Moore shows examples of the power of practicing openness toward the Other, Moses shows
how repeating violence eventually makes one into a more violent individual. He uses his
magical abilities to harm others, such as when he causes Miriam’s leprosy. Miriam eventually
comes to fear Moses for what she sees as his absolute power over her life and death. When a
mob of Israelites threaten Moses, Miriam predicts that “[h]e will lift that right hand and Israel will
suffer terribly. It is better to do as he says” (Moses 315). Though he will not use a sword, Moses
controls the Hebrews through both the law and more overt threats of violence. In the end,
Moses even picks up a blade again to kill Aaron, despite his earlier vow, and frames the act as
a priestly sacrifice for the nation. As Aaron begs for his life, Moses explains that “why should I
spare you? I did not spare the first-born. I did not spare Pharaoh. I did not spare myself….

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[N]othing and nobody has been spared to make this nation great. And since you wouldn’t give
yourself in any other way, Aaron, you will have to do something for Israel by denial” (Moses
335). Though Aaron is selfish, vain, and a poor leader, the moment when Moses kills this man
who might be his brother with his own hands is shockingly violent. Melanie Wright understands
this moment as the pinnacle of Moses's “Machiavellian streak. Prepared at first for strategic
reasons to ‘adopt’ Aaron as his brother, he slaughters him when he appears likely to thwart
Moses' plans” (49). Despite the allusion to Cain and Abel, Hurston frames the act as a political
killing. Aaron becomes a sacrifice on the altar of nationalism because he was not clever or
ruthless enough to be an effective dictator.
In the early chapters of the novel, the Pharaoh exploits the Hebrews so that he can build
lasting monuments for his personal glory. The Hebrews in the text argue against the necessity
of such grandiosity for national memory, and Moses flees the palace to escape this authoritarian
rule. And yet, Hurston ends this book as Moses finishes the construction of his own monumental
grave to ensure his legacy as a leader. Though he frees the Hebrews from Egyptian slavery, he
spends the rest of the novel “instituting extensive laws to transform this individualistic, free
people into a mentally enslaved and socially restricted group,” leaving them psychologically
broken (Meisenhelder 117). Hurston bases this critique in her own knowledge of not just white
nationalism, but also Black nationalist movements that were “shaped by the Victorian moralities
of the British Empire, and embraced a civilizationist discourse, [and] did not set out to overturn
Western conceptions of commerce, gender roles, faith, or culture” (Stephens and Ewing 6). Like
Connecticut Yankee, Hurston’s text warns the people of her own community that they should
think more carefully about the values and practices they perpetuate.
While Hurston’s text portrays dangerous nationalism, she does offer models other than
the nation with its violence and laws. She first shows Egypt as “a culture of artificial hierarchies
and brutal domination” under Pharaoh, but “Moses encounters through Mentu the values
Hurston frequently attached to black folk culture: human relationships based on equality and

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mutual support, human endeavor tied to natural human needs” (Meisenhelder 121). These are
the values that inform Moses’s earliest utopian ideals before he abandons them for the cruelty
of the law. Hurston provocatively suggests that the people of the African diaspora do not need
to create a nation that will give them power according to the racist systems of empire, but rather
that they should “construct a sense of their own selves by reconnecting with the intellectual,
emotional, and spiritual roots of their culture” (M. Wright 67). Throughout the novel, Hurston
rejects the national and the political in favor of the communal and the individual.
Conclusion
Hurston uses Christian mythology to reimagine these pressing political questions of her
own time and to raise questions about history and culture that challenge the myth of progress.
As Lothian notes, “[n]arratives of possible futures have given us languages through which to
understand our present. But the discourse of ‘the’ future has never been a singular one,” and
neither have narratives of the past (1). The story of Moses is a powerful myth that has been put
to a wide variety of political uses by diverse communities throughout history. Instead of
privileging any one of these accounts, Hurston creates a hybrid text that reinforces her own
values of diversity, individuality, and folk community over exclusive traditions and national
identity. Like Gilroy, she celebrates “the polyphonic qualities of black cultural expression [that]
form the main aesthetic consideration…. From this perspective, the achievements of popular
black cultural forms like music are a constant source of inspiration” (Gilroy 32). This construction
reflects Hurston’s investment in cultural relativism as a way of understanding religion and the
diaspora. But equally, Hurston brings to anthropology and religious studies her lived experience
of African diasporic discursive practices that encourage hybridization and adaptation of stories
and traditions that were not created to serve the needs of Black communities.
This alternative presentation of Moses destabilizes white Christians’ understanding of
their own traditions by putting them on equal footing with religions that they have historically

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marginalized and dismissed. Farebrother describes Hurston’s Moses as “a self-conscious
amalgamation of African, African American, and Caribbean myths: he is both the great liberator
and nation-builder represented in southern US spirituals and a mystical figure derived from
African American and Caribbean hoodoo culture, associated with magic and shamanism” (337).
Though Hurston retains much from biblical tradition, her experience of folklore and her
anthropological training both allow her to treat it as one more source of wisdom rather than the
unquestionable word of God. Instead, she offers her readers the idea that “the biblical concept
is not the only possible portrayal of Moses, but that there are various concepts which are
equally genuine” (Zeppenfeld 58). This insistence that the “irrational” and “unscientific”
repositories of memory and cultural production should be given equal weight to the written
histories is a radical rejection of the Hegelian definitions of civilization that dominated Hurston’s
world.
Many of Hurston’s white contemporaries saw African-derived religious practices in
particular as evidence of the backwardness and lack of evolution of Africans. However, Hurston
recontextualizes these diasporic traditions as genuine “strategies of recollection have been used
to transmit an Afrocentric wholeness” despite the “abject exclusion of African Americans from
the discourse of mainstream American history, culture, or society” (Dixon 19). The institution of
slavery throughout the Americas tried to quash religions like Hoodoo and Vodou, but the work of
practitioners and anthropologists have helped them persist into the present where they can
begin to rewrite the dominant cultural narrative and inspire new hybrid and communal forms of
social organization. Melanie Wright suggests that from Hurston’s perspective “the Moses story
might be seen as an incorporation of African history into what eventually became Jewish and
Christian tradition…. [This approach] resonates with (but is not identical to) the work of some
contemporary scholars who emphasize the African contribution to biblical text and tradition”
including Bernal (56). Hurston acknowledges the ways in which the African diaspora has

192
adopted and recontextualized Christian myths, and even suggests that the original myths are
themselves indebted to “primitive” African sources.
When combining these sources, Hurston was careful to find a balance that would let her
achieve her political objectives. She ensured that her work “both stands in continuity with the
biblical narrative and subtly subverts the authority of the voice of the ‘unmediated’ biblical
account, denying even that there can be such a voice. Hurston… argues that the biblical Moses
is simply one among many, a single manifestation of a diverse and dynamic body of ever‐
growing tradition” (M. Wright 81). Hurston addresses this idea of mediated/unmediated history
with an allusion to the composition of the original Torah in the novel. In the final chapter,
Hurston writes that Moses “sat in his tent day by day and wrote in his journal. The wanderings of
Israel were there set down by his hand” (Moses 338). According to tradition, Moses wrote the
Torah, and this line suggests that the Torah is Moses’s edited version of the story Hurston
presented. This reference to Moses’s journal immediately precedes his advice to Joshua about
nation-building, which explains the Torah’s more nationalistic account. This moment draws
attention to the act of writing and rewriting and the multiple versions of the story of the Exodus
from which Hurston created her own narrative that, like Moore’s stories, denies the linearity of
progress in favor of a “strange temporality” that “constitutes a critique of… conventional forms of
reproductive, bourgeois, and androcentric organizations of community” (Dimitriou 408n1).
Throughout the novel, Hurston scrambles clear binaries and hierarchies of social
organization, race, and religion. Popular readings of the Exodus story have framed this narrative
as one where the Israelites take an evolutionary step away from Egypt, but Hurston deliberately
mixes of the cues of “civilization” across cultures to prevent this. Though historically
The narrative of the Exodus emphasizes the temporal meaning of the religious
antagonism between monotheism and idolatry. ‘Egypt’ stands not only for ‘idolatry’ but
also for a past that is rejected. The Exodus is a story of emigration and conversion, of
transformation and renovation, of stagnation and progress, and of past and future. Egypt

193
represents the old, while Israel represents the new. The geographical border between
the two countries assumes a temporal meaning and comes to symbolize two epochs in
the history of humankind. (Assmann 7)
Hurston presents Egypt as a “civilized” empire, while the Israelites’ monotheism is less strict
than the binary Assmann sees in the Torah. In this work, “Hurston broadens the scope of the
Moses story, muddying notions of cultural provenance and drawing attention to intersection and
complication… that recognizes influences from diverse cultures, without privileging either oral or
written forms…. Hurston describes a mysterious fusion of Egyptian and Hebrew cultural
strands” (Farebrother 341). This reflects Hurston’s own experience of hybrid cultures and
provokes the reader into a reconsideration of both a familiar history and a familiar political
context.
Hurston celebrates this diversity and warns of the dangers of any movement that seeks
to constrain it, which also offers lessons for our own political moment. Hurston’s writing is a
radical move that shows her belief that “the enchanted mind was the best defense against the
forms of disenchantment endemic to modernity, enabling her to maintain hope in the midst of a
social order that produced despair in so many of her contemporaries. It allowed her to believe
that beauty and salvation were not for the next world alone but could be achieved in this life”
(Hyest 42). Hurston’s text engages with the past, but it speaks meaningfully to both her present
and our own. While she is not gentle in her criticisms, she engages with “practices of hope” that
do not “provid[e] an escape from harsh realities but… refus[e] to let the suspicion, conformity,
and techno-practicality vanquish what [she] perceived as the motivation and finest form of
resistance and resilience” (Castiglia 17). This novel shows both the promise of a diversely
imagined past and the dangers of a revolutionary project that replicates oppressive social
formulations. By building these speculations on a familiar biblical narrative, Hurston points the
readers in her own time and in ours toward the political and social practices that she believes
will create a caring community that is truly free.

194
Epilogue
One of the most enduring binaries in contemporary culture is that which is drawn
between past and future. When we view history through the myth of progress, we see
technological and social changes as opening up an ever-widening gulf between our present
experience and that of earlier cultures. This divide makes it easier to dismiss the experiences of
marginalized people as “primitive” or “unevolved” and thereby maintains racist and sexist
systems in our society. Yet the authors I have examined throughout this dissertation all offer
glimpses of worlds outside these binaries, where the narrative of progress that keeps us
temporally separated begins to break down. In their stories, these authors show how history is
often divided:
into an empirical science of events and that radical mode of being that prescribes their
destiny to all empirical beings, to those particular beings that we are. History as we
know, is certainly the most erudite, the most aware, the most conscious, and possibly
the most cluttered area of our memory; but it is equally the depths from which all beings
emerge into their precarious, glittering existence. (237-238 Foucault)
At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, popular culture in the United
States was obsessed, not just with empirical history, but with rationality as a guiding principle.
This allowed the white men who dominated society to claim that they were superior because
they were more rational than women and people of color, which gave their racism and sexism a
scientific veneer. However, the texts I consider in this dissertation present a counterargument to
this view of the world as they highlight both the radical and the precarious nature of history.
They invite us to consider time not as something that can be quantified and hierarchized, but
something as messy and unstable as race, gender, and the rest of human experience. They
propose that none of us, regardless of race or gender, are that different, for better and for
worse, than the people who came before us and those who will come after us. The historical
revisions offered by Twain, Hopkins, Moore, and Hurston put us imaginatively into community

195
with past times and peoples, making us recognize the coevalness of those gendered, racialized,
and colonized subjects who the narrative of progress turns into the Other.
This myth of progress has been one of the most important tools of imperialism and white
supremacy for the last two hundred years. When we conceive of the past as irreconcilably
different, it becomes that much easier to see those with whom we share geographic space as
Other as well. As Lim observes, “[c]onceiving of ordered events in time means taking each
element as a distinct unit that can be assigned a position in relation to the others, implying a
spatial-conceptual juxtaposition. Hence notions of temporal order—of a chronological past,
present, and future, of before, during, and after—are always spatial and quantifying in spirit”
(48). We can dismiss those who live different lives than we do as “primitive” or its more polite
descendant “developing” without considering how that temporalized distance impoverishes our
communities and reinforces oppressive systems. As we engage with the political questions of
history in the present and work for an acknowledgement of the histories that have been
marginalized and erased, we must also grapple with this underlying ideology. It is not enough to
imagine progress that includes Black, female, queer, and formerly colonized people while still
living in a culture beholden to homogenous time.
In this dissertation, I have presented some of the practices of hope that I have found in
speculative fiction from the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. In A
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Twain harnesses his cynicism about human nature
to issue a warning to the adherents in the cult of progress in the only way that he believes they
will hear it. He shows how the ideology of colonialism will cause untold suffering for the
oppressors as well as the oppressed and encourages his readers to examine their own biases
and “training.” Hopkins offers a vision of a utopian future that is not rooted in technology or
rationality, but in an embrace of the fullness of humanity as God’s creation. In Of One Blood,
she demonstrates how reimagining the past can be a source of political will in difficult times.
Moore presents a universe that is based in irrationality, where the boundaries of race, sex, and

196
time break down in ways that allow for genuine connection. Her pulp stories help us reconfigure
our own perception of time in new and queer directions. Hurston translates between the ancient
Moses myth and her immediate present to show the possibilities of a more diversely imagined
past that draws from communal rather than imperial narratives. She argues that we will only find
peace and true freedom when we acknowledge that any community is made up of individuals
who cannot be defined by any single racial or national identity. These authors together paint a
fuller picture of the ways in which speculative fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century’s resisted racism, sexism, and colonialism. They also speak to our present moment
where reactionaries try to impose on the world their historical narratives that perpetuate these
systems.
Instead of accepting the binaries that keep times and people apart, the authors I have
discussed in this dissertation offer models for a more fluid and hybrid temporal community that
can encompass the full diversity of both our present and our past. These narratives demonstrate
“how the shape and the content of symbols function as oppositional thought. The imaginative
eccentricity of literary form, at least as much as the stories authors tell, is what brings people to
literature, not just as an escape from everyday life but as the expression of a world differently
configured” (Castiglia 165). Through speculation, they radically imagine known history in ways
that undermine the very ideological underpinnings of colonialism and center the alternative
formulations of marginalized communities.
By reading these texts, we can learn new ways to remake our world that do not rely on a
single dominant narrative of progress. We can open our understanding of the past up to the
multiplicity of sources and methods that exist without condemning diverse critiques as
unscientific or presentist. And we can claim these voices and these speculations as part of our
cross-temporal community, which will be enriched through our acknowledgement of our own
closeness to the inhabitants of other times. In her work, Lothian expresses the hope that the
queer old futures she examines will “underwrite our present efforts to imagine possibilities for

197
the future, to enact transformations in the present, and to think critically about time” (4). I believe
that examining these early speculations about the past can help us create a queer community
across time that can help us as we struggle for liberation from the demands of homogenous
time.
The work of uncovering the speculative possibilities in literature is only beginning. This
dissertation considers a small group of anti-colonial texts from a specific period and nation, and
there is still much to discover the many intersections of history, speculation, and resistance.
This is an ongoing conversation as speculative fiction continues to permeate culture and a
greater diversity of artists take up the speculative mode. These case studies provide examples
of how authors in this time and place reimagined history to undermine the Hegelian notion of
progress that upholds our society’s oppressive systems. By discussing these works, I hope to
encourage other scholars to consider what practices of hope exist in texts that represent
different racial, gender, national, and temporal perspectives. I believe that the critiques raised by
old pasts can inform our approach to some of the thorniest questions of our future, and by
learning about more speculative tools of resistance, we can find new ways of existing and
resisting in our present.

198
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Asset Metadata

Creator Googe, Katie (author)

Core Title Speculating backward: speculative rewritings of the past as anti-colonial protest

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Degree Conferral Date 2024-05

Publication Date 05/21/2024

Defense Date 05/02/2024

Publisher Los Angeles, California (original), University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag 19th century literature,20th century literature,African American literature,American literature,anti-imperialism,C.L. Moore,Mark Twain,OAI-PMH Harvest,Pauline Hopkins,speculative fiction,Zora Neale Hurston

Format theses (aat)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Rowe, John Carlos (committee chair), Daniels-Rauterkus, Melissa (committee member), Tongson, Karen (committee member)

Creator Email googe@usc.edu,kgooge@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC113950162

Unique identifier UC113950162

Identifier etd-GoogeKatie-12981.pdf (filename)

Legacy Identifier etd-GoogeKatie-12981

Document Type Dissertation

Format theses (aat)

Rights Googe, Katie

Internet Media Type application/pdf

Type texts

Source 20240521-usctheses-batch-1157 (batch), University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the author, as the original true and official version of the work, but does not grant the reader permission to use the work if the desired use is covered by copyright. It is the author, as rights holder, who must provide use permission if such use is covered by copyright.

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu