“The Boarding House of Genre: Space, Tenancy and Narrative Form in Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces”

Abstract: In Contending Forces , Pauline Hopkins uses the boarding house as a model for transforming the romantic novel at the turn of the twentieth century. This essay argues that the social and architectural space of the boarding house maps onto the novel’s ability to incorporate alternate discourses by “renting out” narrative space to genres like naturalism, historical narrative, and political oratory. Unlike mid-nineteenth century boarding-house fiction, which framed the boarding-house as a site of familial and class dissolution, Hopkins treats the boarding house as a place in which social ties are forged and repaired. The novel thus functions formally as a “boarding house of genre,” bringing together disparate discursive and aesthetic modes under one roof while untethering the romance from its historical investment in homeownership. The novel thus leverages the built environment to index a historical juncture between Black political thought and the changing aesthetic and political meanings of the novel.