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 his predecessors in African American fiction, Chesnutt gained a hearing from a significant portion of the national reading audience that was both engaged and disturbed by his analyses 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 The Atlantic 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