America in Pieces: Chesnutt and Sectionalism

During the 19^th century, the people of the United States saw more changes in their country than the citizens of perhaps any other nation during any other century. In 1800, there were fewer than six million Americans; by 1900, the population had grown to more than 75 million. And as the nation grew, it matured. The beginning of the 19^th century was pocked with contentious factions and competing interests, each fighting to claim its place in this new nation. It was a century of uncertainty and tumult so severe, the country was almost divided. But in the end, what emerged was a strong and unified nation with a strong sense of self, ready to face a new century.

During the first half of the 19^th century, America, once an agrarian post-colony, became a global economic power through a transnational market built on the backs of slaves. Through this Market Revolution, America became a primary exporter of cotton, textiles, sugar and tobacco to the Old World. And while slavery ended with the Civil War (1861-1865), the post-war era of Reconstruction (1865-1877) sparked advancements in transportation, communication, and industrial development that, in turn, transformed the nation into an industrialized imperial power.

Section One of American Short Stories begins with Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," published in 1820. In March of that year, the United States Congress passed the last measures of what would become known as the Missouri Compromise, admitting Missouri, a slave state, and Maine, a free state, into the Union. Barely more than a month later, that same Congress amended earlier acts, outlawing the trans-Atlantic slave trade and imposing the death penalty on American citizens found to be involved in the importation of African slaves to the United States.

Sectionalism underscores nineteenth century America. The stories in Section One reflect the seemingly irreparable fissures in the national psyche. With the advent of the industrial revolution, it is a century marked by tensions of progress and modernization. The growth of cities adds tensions between the rural and the new urban conditions, and a nostalgia for simpler times, not to mention a poisonous nostalgia for plantation life. In the 1840s, a new form of popular entertainment began to grow in popularity among the Northern white working class; by the late nineteenth century, this minstrel show, in which white actors wearing "blackface" make-up enacted comic, grossly distorted caricatures of African-Americans, became the most popular form of theater in the United States. The spoken dialect of the performers in turn influenced the portrayal of African-Americans in contemporary prose, particularly as plantation nostalgia took hold in popular literature in the latter third of the century.

"The Passing of Grandison," Charles W. Chesnutt's story of ante bellum American regions and their very real differences, was published in 1899--just as the nineteenth century drew to a close. The differences shown between the Ohio and Kentucky of the 1850s where African-Americans are slaves in one state and free in another—and separated only by random land markers—typifies the American fiction of the era.

"The fact is, of course, that there is no such thing as Negro dialect," Chesnutt once wrote; "that what we call by that name is the attempt to express, with such a degree of phonetic correctness as to suggest the sound [of] English pronounced as an ignorant old southern Negro would be supposed to speak it."¹ Chesnutt, an African-American who was raised in the North, was uncomfortable with the tradition of "Negro dialect." Like "The Passing of Grandison," in much of his writing, he used such dialogue only sparingly. Even so, Charles Chesnutt, in line with his predecessors, consciously adopted the dialect and plantation settings that typified the racist literature of his day. However, these same stories have also been celebrated for their subversion of the plantation form and their unique ability to critique black-white relations during the Progressive era in the United States. Why then does Chesnutt write stories which embrace the dialect tradition? Why does he portray the benign master-slave relationship typical of the reconciliatory writers of the Reconstruction period?

By the time "The Passing of Grandison" was published, the conventions of the plantation story were well-established, popularized by the "Uncle Remus" stories of Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page's In Ole Virginia. Such texts established a model for the depiction of African-Americans in popular fiction. In many of the stories published in The Conjure Woman and The Wife of His Youth, Chesnutt employs the plantation story form--its simple structure, superficial racial assumptions, and conventions of dialect--but not the spirit of plantation fiction that became popular during Reconstruction -- a period of uncertainty and upheaval in the racial politics of American culture — and often conveyed a sense of longing for the ways of the "Old South".

The waning years of the Reconstruction during which Chesnutt, began to publish his plantation stories, marks the period in which widespread magazine accounts and popular fiction began to minimize sectional differences in the United States and re-invigorate the ante bellum myth of the Southern slave owner as gentle patriarch. The final escape of Grandison in "The Passing of Grandison" subverts the reader's expectations, but the myth of the benign slaveholder remains very much intact. Similarly, the conventions of black speech that marked the writing of the era are also upheld through the characters of Tom and Grandison.

Scholarly defenses of Chesnutt's stories tend to focus on the literary marketplace. Catherine and John Silk suggest that Chesnutt's dialect stories "serve to illustrate the limitations of oppositional art in an advanced capitalist society." Literature "that would pass," or be successful, writes Stephan Knadler, was literature "that was necessarily double-voiced ... that [signified] and to sp[oke] differently to its ideal and its typical (its liberal white) readers."² In order to publish stories that subverted the plantation form, Chesnutt first had to embrace it — perhaps, some may say, too perfectly. The question about a story like "The Passing of Grandison" then becomes: to what degree are the form and language used self-conscious or subversive? Are they simply functions of the literary market, still divided between regions, or is Chesnutt guilty of, to borrow a phrase from the novelist Richard Wright, "perpetuating the minstrel tradition" in order to serve the American selves?³ The various ways in which the reader must be prepared to read "The Passing of Grandison" embody the tensions and concerns of the cultures which fueled the American literature of the nineteenth century.

Notes

¹Quoted in Wideman, John. "Defining the Black Voice in Fiction," Black American Literary Forum 11:3 ( Aut 1977): 79.

²Silk, Catherine and John Silk, Racism and anti-racism in American popular culture: Portrayals of African-Americans in fiction and film (Manchester and NY: Manchester UP, 1990), 38. Knadler, Stephan P., "Untragic Mulatto: Charles Chesnutt and the Discourse of Whiteness" (American Literary History 8:3 [Fall 1996]), 428.

³From Wright’s 1937 New Masses review of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.

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