Race Question, Racial Tensions and Contractarian Thought in Charles W. Chesnutt's Fiction (original) (raw)
Violence/Accommodation Binary in Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition
Arab World English Journal, 2021
The present paper examines the divergent attitudes of black characters toward racism in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Traditions (1901). Chesnutt wrote his novel to reflect his opinions on how African Americans should act to improve their situation. To situate the study within the historical and cultural context of Marrow, Black intellectuals’ views, namely Washington and Du Bois, about the complicated problem of ‘color’ were explored. To analyze the contrasting views and actions of Chesnutt’s black characters, the paper uses the lens of postcolonial theory. Although Marrow is not set within a colonial context, postcolonial theoretical frameworks can be used as models to re-read this novel because they deal with intersections of races, classes, cultures, and the oppressor/ oppressed relationship. The paper concludes that Chesnutt has entertained the possibility of a hybrid or third race— as referred to within postcolonial framework—that may succeed where both races (pure white...
OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center , 2015
When Charles Chesnutt entered the American literary sphere in the late 1800s, the nation was rife with racial turmoil following the Civil War. Both North and South attempted to rebuild economically and socially, making technological innovations such as the Transcontinental Railroad, and instituting Jim Crow laws aimed at limiting black social and economic mobility. Along with such rebuilding, though, came revisions of history—particularly, of slavery and the plantation system—through popular culture: literature, the continuing popularity of blackface minstrel shows, and film. The blackface minstrel stage and writers like Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page worked to romanticize slavery’s narrative in writing plantation fiction: works set on the plantation, written largely to represent the writers’ versions of black speech and culture. Harris and Page’s works put forth a longing for a past that consisted of white benevolent paternalism and black subservience. Charles Chesnutt draws on the plantation fiction tradition in his works and uses several of the same mechanisms, like the representation of black speech and often, the plantation setting, in order to subvert the plantation myth. In the project that follows, I examine the role of Chesnutt’s dialect representations in The Conjure Tales and The Marrow of Tradition. I argue that rather than simply participating in dialect fiction, Chesnutt innovates within it; he uses dual meanings in the respellings of his words, legitimizes black orality, and represents a spectrum of dialect differences. This undermines the happy darky stereotype and de-hierarchizes racial structures constructed by plantation fiction and the plantation myth. Chesnutt breaks minstrel and dialect fiction tropes; while he draws on the exaggerated black speech of minstrelsy and plantation fiction, he effectively disrupts its subjugation of blacks and forges a unique, coded version of black dialect.
Charles Chesnutt Racial Relation Progression Throughout Career
2011
Charles Chesnutt began his career with an ideology that race should not be a category in which to judge others. He felt that through literature he could help influence society and help create a less racial centric civilization. His career began with positive reviews from short story publications in multiple magazines. However, most critics and readers at the time did not know of Chesnutt"s racial background. It was not until his second collection of short stories that Chesnutt revealed the truth about his heritage. After his success with The Conjure Woman and The Wife of His Youth (both published in 1899), Chesnutt began to assert his political agenda more aggressively into his writing. His second novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901) received very poor reviews; critics were repulsed by Chesnutt"s revolutionary philosophies concerning the racial caste system. The poor reception of Chesnutt"s three novels forced him to retire from a literary career. Years later, during the Harlem Renaissance, a time of prolific African American writers, Chesnutt was disappointed in the baseness of black characters in literature. He scolded Harlem Renaissance writers for their lack of strong black characters, but Chesnutt"s short stories that were published in The Crisis also lacked the racial uplift that he so desperately sought. Chesnutt"s intensity of racial relation literature had dwindled over time and he left it to the next generation of writers to fulfill the social agenda that his literature was never able to achieve.
The Novelist's Predicament Today
英文学評論, 1970
There may have been times in the past when the serious novelist's proper subject and concern were, in more ways than not, compatible with the commonculture, when his creations could further the creative processes of the society he lived in, but that unfortunately for the serious novelist at least, is not now the case. At his best the novelist today is undermining the concerted efforts of his society. He is the reader's enemy, seeking it often seems to annihilate good with bad indiscriminately. His best work is subversive, and yet it is to the best in his work, the act of sabotage, that his readers must be won. The fact that contact between the serious novelist and the reading-public has broken down so badly in this century seems to me plain evidence that the price in cultural revolution demanded
active throughout the mid-nineteenth century, wrote literature generally regarded to be part of the Romantic Movement and often dealt with themes related to New England Puritans and their society. On the other hand, Chesnutt was an African-American author who wrote literature for less than a decade, between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, that explored the complexities of race relations in both the pre-and post-Civil War American South. While superficially unalike, these authors both concerned themselves with the perceived social and moral injustices of their hometowns' pasts. Born in Ohio and subsequently relocated to North Carolina at the age of eight for the remainder of his youth, Chesnutt spent most of his formative years in same region that his forebears were enslaved and that all of his conjure stories are set. Similarly, as the grandson of a judge in the Salem witch trials, Hawthorne had not only a casual interest in the history of his birthplace, but also a personal connection to the atrocities in that history and wrote about them often in his stories. It is true that Chesnutt and Hawthorne did not write about the same regions of the United States and each of these regions did have unique problems, and that this may account for the fact that these authors do not tend to be studied in conjunction; however, both of these authors confront the ugly histories of their towns and attempt to upset the oppressive power