Exploring Talma Gordon by Pauline Hopkins

In the short story "Talma Gordon" by Pauline Hopkins, the author uses a murder mystery to criticize social issues of the time. She explores the themes of sexism, classism, and racism through the characters and plot. The story reveals how women were valued based on beauty and were expected to marry for wealth and status. It also exposes how the higher class could get away with more, while those of lower class were often overlooked. The true murderer is revealed to be someone of lower class, challenging the assumption that only the wealthy could commit such a crime. Lastly, the story addresses miscegenation, highlighting society's racist beliefs against interracial marriage. These themes are still relevant today and shed light on ongoing societal issues related to gender, class, and race. As dazzling daylight dropped slowly into summer twilight, a terrific midsummer thunderstorm was breaking through the sleeping town. Suddenly, a blinding flash of greenish-white flames mingled with a crash of fallen chimbers, and there arose columns of red flames. Captain Gordon's quarters were set aflame, and his servants, daughters, and his doctor called to him, his wife, and his child, from the other side only to be met with silence. Captain arrived on the scene, and axes were heard ringing as they began cutting away every obstacle, clearing an entrance to the room. In less than fifteen minutes, the fire was out, and the men began to bear the unconscious inmates from the ruins. Upon further inspection of their bodies, it was revealed that across the captain's throat was a deep gash that severed the jugular vein, and with this revelation, a murder scene was born. I'm Mateo Vlado, and what you just heard was a sort of rendition of a scene in the short story, Talma Gordon. And today, we're going to be looking at the great mind of the first black author of a mystery novel, Pauline Hopkins. As a black woman, Hopkins' literature never reached the same acclaim as other fictional authors of the time, like Mary Shelley or Edgar Allan Poe, who we now recognize for their works like Frankenstein and Telltale Heart respectively. Nor is she held to the same pedestal as her male activist counterparts of the time, like W.E.B. Ford, for a reason I'm sure we can all presume. But even with these discriminations working against her, she was very persistent in her activism, as well as exposure of sexist and racist ideologies, and she used issues that were relevant to her era as the backbone for a lot of her writing. She took to magazines like Colored American Magazine, which strengthened black literary voices in order to reach and uplift audiences that she knew would receive her messages. Now the short story was riveting, and it wins all of the suspense points deserved by an excellent mystery. But where Hopkins really takes the cake and sets a precedent is in her ability to mask real-life social criticisms as true mysteries which are embedded within an already extremely entertaining murder mystery. And so we all get the mystery the story wants us to read, the who killed the captain, the who done it. But the mystery Hopkins wants her readers to understand are those same social critiques that I mentioned she fought for in her real life. But of course before I get there, no good analysis comes without spoilers, so be warned. If you want to read this novel, I recommend you do that before listening to the rest of this podcast. And so with that said, I'm going to go ahead and refer to these next three critiques as the true mysteries of the short story. And so the first true mystery is the mystery of femininity, or rather sexism. So during the era, women's fates were placed in the hands of men, and if you weren't of a certain beauty standard, you were valued less as a woman. And so even if these women were rich before marriage, the wealth would go to the man after marriage. And so Hopkins drives home both of these stigmas and criticizes them in her story through the revelation of the captain's incentive to have a male child. He knew society wouldn't fare well with his two daughters inheriting the wealth, and so he needed an heir to not only the wealth, but the power that came with his family name. And the daughters, of course, just couldn't do that. They weren't cut out for it due to this same ideology that many people held at the time. And so with regards to the beauty standard, after Thelma is taken to court for the accusation of, or being accused of, the murder of her family, she's ruled as being not guilty, but the crowd starts murmuring, and somebody says, a poor woman would not have fared so well at the hands of the jury, nor a homely one either, for that matter. And so through both of these parts of the quote, the poor woman part and the homely woman part, homely suggests ugly. And so they're saying that because of her beauty, she was given essentially pretty privilege, and it's one of the only reasons she was able to not be accused of the murder. And the second part kind of leads into the second true mystery, but the poor woman part kind of just shows that not only was she valued for her beauty, but she was also valued for her wealth. And so it leads into the, it sort of leads into the second true mystery, which is classism. And so in the introduction, the initial introduction of the murder of Captain Gordon, Hopkins writes in that the chief of police kind of says that, it's of my opinion that the deed was committed by one of the higher classes, which makes the mystery more difficult to solve. And so by adding this in, Hopkins is insinuating and again criticizing the fact that people of a higher class were able to get away with more. So because this murder was so clean cut, it had to have been done by somebody of a higher class, a higher wealth. And this would make the mystery of course, almost impossible to solve. And so this ties into the final reveal of the true murder of the mystery, who is Cameron. And Cameron is the child of Captain Gordon's sailmates. And so Captain Gordon killed a sailmate because he didn't want to know, he didn't want him knowing where he had buried the treasure. He didn't want anybody to know. And so due to greed, Captain Gordon essentially kills Cameron's dad, you know, Captain Gordon's sailmate. And Hopkins uses this as a critique again, through the irony, because Cameron isn't of a high class. But again, at the beginning, we were under the assumption that this had to have been somebody who was of higher class. There's no way that someone of lower class could get away with it. So in this second underlying mystery, the murder is solved. But by the end of the story, we're so invested in the cover mystery that Hopkins is able to sneak attack us with the answer to the mystery that was presented to us from the beginning, the final true mystery. So why was the doctor who was narrating the story the whole time telling this story in the first place? Of course, it's because of miscegenation. The daughters find out that they're actually of black descent. And you know, Toma Gordon, who is a white passing woman with black descent, marries the host of the Canterbury Club meeting, the doctor. And this final mystery completely criticizes the ideologies of society at the time, exposing anti-intermarriage beliefs as racist ones that have no true valid arguments. So these mysteries are all still common agendas that many people have today. And many women, especially black women, are still looked down upon and underestimated. And miscegenation and wealth discrepancies haven't just disappeared. They have really transitioned, taken on greater forms of colorism and classism. And by familiarizing ourselves with authors like Hopkins and their stories, we're allowed to expand our understanding of the roots of many of the societal issues that we continue to face revolving economics, sex, and race to this very day.