Charles Chesnutt (1858-1932)

Charles Chesnutt (1858-1932) Edited by Nina Lee Braden

Early Life • Born in Cleveland, Ohio • Mixed race ancestry • Raised in Fayetteville, North Carolina. • Family ran a grocery store after the Civil War

Early Adulthood • Was teacher and later assistant principal of normal (teacher’s) school in Fayetteville • After marriage, moved with his family to Cleveland to find more favorable opportunities in the North. • Passed the Ohio state bar and launched a successful business career by setting up a court reporting firm followed by a stenography company.

Life and Career Contrary to the majority of his Black contemporaries whose works appeared in the Black press, “Chesnutt skillfully enlisted the white-controlled publishing industry in the service of his social message.”

His Audience: Black and White “More successfully than any of hispredecessors in African American fiction,Chesnutt gained a hearing from asignificant portion of the national reading audience that was both engaged and disturbed by hisanalyses and indictments of racism” (Concise Oxford 70).

Just a Local Color Writer? • Charles Chesnutt falls into the Local Color movement but goes beyond it. • Often condemnatory of racism • Social criticism • The American “Color Line” as the iron rule of existence • Early signs of Black Naturalism

Literary Output • First important narrative, “The Goophered Grapevine” (1887) was published in TheAtlantic Monthly • introduced a new type of story-teller, the crafty ex-slave, spinning a yarn in Black dialect about the Black lore of conjuring and voodoo,Black local color

Short Stories • William Dean Howells admired Chesnutt’s work and published many of his short stories. • Collections of his short stories • The Conjure Woman (1899) • The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line (1899)

Novels The House Behind the Cedars (1900) confronting the problem of passing; The Marrow of Tradition (1901) about the national racial hysteria that culminated in the Wilmington Riots of 1898; The Colonel’s Dream (1905) about the failed attempt to revive a Southern town devastated by racism and exploitation.

Major Themes • Black folklore, voodoo • The crafty black folk hero • Middle-class blacks contained by American racism • “Passing,” the problem of “miscegenation,” racial identity

Chesnutt’s Significance • The most influential African American writer at the turn of the century • “A pioneer Negro author, the first to exploit in fiction the complex lives of men and women of mixed blood” (Helen Chesnutt).

Later Life • A passion for writing, but literary career relatively short. • Returned to business in the early 1900s. • Though never entirely giving up literature, he refocused his attention on racial issues in other forms, serving his community • lecturer • political activist • powerful role model.

The Plantation Tale • White speaker’s prologue written in standard, sometimes elevated English. • Shift to an old Black uncle, reminded on any given occasion of a particular tale he knows. • Folktale told in heavy dialect of Black slaves in the pre-Civil War South. • Center on the conjuring practices of Black slaves or tales of shrewd talking animals. • Nostalgic for idealized peaceful, orderly days of slavery.

Why would Charles Chesnutt take up the form of the plantation tale? • Desire for commercial and critical success • Desire to appropriate and parody the form

Example: “The Goophered Grapevine” • What is the structure of the narrative? • How is Uncle Julius both similar to and different from Uncle Remus? • Who is the trickster figure in Chesnutt’s stories?

Gothicization of the Plantation Tale • Setting: things are in disrepair • Plot: conjuring powers of black characters • Theme: confrontation between rational and supernatural forces • How are supernatural powers used? • Which force prevails in the story? • How is slavery ultimately depicted?

Charles Waddell Chesnutt Charles Chesnutt, left, with brother Lewis; daughter Helen Chesnutt

Charles Chesnutt (1858-1932)