“The Vast Scheme of Compensation and Retribution”: Science, History, and Morality in Furnace Blasts and Of One Blood

Abstract: This article uses the short-lived essay series Furnace Blasts, published pseudonymously by Pauline Hopkins in 1903, as a lens for reading Of One Blood, or The Hidden Self . I contend that Of One Blood and the two essays that constitute Furnace Blasts share a set of distinct scientific, historical, and political concerns whose interrelation has not been fully analyzed. I address critical perceptions that Of One Blood ’s experimental elements are best understood as narrative commentary on racial scientific and other identity discourses of the era. Furnace Blasts and Of One Blood , I argue, work together to theorize what protagonist Reuel Briggs calls a “vast scheme of compensation and retribution” that connects the psychic complexity of individual subjectivity, the vicissitudes of world history, and the blurred lines between theology and science in an idiosyncratic manner that, while interested in racial politics, is irreducible to it. With Furnace Blasts as an intertext, I provide new interpretations of the moral dimension of scientific and psychological research in the novel, of the function of ancient Ethiopia as an instructive historical example for contemporary racial politics, and of the narrative moments in which the novel attempts to ground its spectacular elements in the realities of turn-of-the-century American life.