Blood at the Root: Ida B. Wells’s and Pauline E. Hopkins’s Gothic Souths

In Gothic Images of Race, H. L. Malchow argues that during the 1800s the language of gothic fiction became deeply entwined with racial discourse. With its tropes of darkness and monstrosity, the gothic served as a vehicle for pseudoscientific ideologies that sought to dehumanize Black people. Yet these same tropes could also be weaponized against such radical othering. As Teresa Goddu and others have shown, abolitionist literature in the United States frequently drew on the grotesque and sensational aesthetics of the gothic to expose the horrors of slavery and render them viscerally visible. Gothic motifs persist as well in post-Reconstruction African American texts, where the American South is stripped of the chivalric aura crafted by the Lost Cause mythology and revealed instead as a landscape of terror and death. This is evident in Ida B. Wells’s 1892 exposé Southern Horrors—and its 1895 sequel, A Red Record—as well as in Pauline E. Hopkins’s 1900 novel Contending Forces. Despite the formal differences of their writings, both authors employ a literary aesthetic of fear not only to dismantle white supremacist narratives, but to articulate a social critique that maps the geographies of Southern racial terror. This essay draws on gothic theory to analyze Wells’s and Hopkins’s work, foregrounding how race and gender intersect in their representations of the late nineteenth-century American South.