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5 ''A High, Holy Purpose" Dialect in Charles W Chesnutt's Conjure Tales For Charles W. Chesnutt, the questions of whether and how to incorporate Mrican American dialectal speech into his fiction were complicated by artistic, political, and commercial tensions imposed by the interrelations between post-Reconstruction social conditions and Chesnutt's personal goals as a writer. Publishing during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, Chesnutt faced unique challenges as an Mrican American artist. Perhaps most significant among these challenges was in his effort to have the antiracist messages he unabashedly promoted as a primary goal of his fiction accepted by the white-dominated publishing establishment and disseminated to the then predominantly white reading public. Chesnutt was from early childhood a precocious learner, voracious reader, and highly motivated student of academic subjects and personal selfimprovement , and the contents of his journals reveal that he wrote poetry and fiction beginning in his teens. In his early twenties, he began to consider seriously the possibility of making his living as a writer of fiction, and in a journal entry dated May 29, 1880, Chesnutt clarified his principal motive as an artist: If I do write, I shall write for a purpose, a high, holy purpose, and this will inspire me to greater efforts. The object of my writings would not be so much the elevation of the colored people as the elevation of the whites-for I consider the unjust spirit of caste which is so insidious as to pervade a whole nation, and so powerful as to subject a whole race and all connected with it to scorn and social ostracism-I consider this a barrier to the moral progress of the American people; and I would be one of the first to head a determined, organized crusade against it. (Chesnutt, Journals 139-40) 78 / Dialect in Charles W Chesnutt's Conjure Tales Given the racism Chesnutt experienced and wanted to work to eradicate, an important challenge for him was to determine how best to construct his message in order to "open the way" for Mrican Americans to achieve "social recognition and equality," a challenge he planned to meet, according to the May 29, 1880, journal entry, by "amusing [the white audience] to lead them on imperceptibly, unconsciously step by step to the desired state of feeling " (Chesnutt, Journals 140). A related challenge was to persuade the whitecontrolled publishing industry to disseminate the message. Capitalizing on the popularity of literary representations of Mrican American dialectal speech, Chesnutt deployed them as a central part of his strategy for persuading the publishers to support his work, encouraging readers to buy it, and "lead[ing] them on imperceptibly" toward "a moral revolution" (140). However , the complexity of Chesnutt's use of dialect and how it functions in his fiction cannot be accounted for sufficiently simply by way of attention to his stated political goals. Chesnutt's work as well as his personality are far more complicated than that. What is known of Chesnutt's own relationship with Mrican American dialectal speech raises interesting questions about his use ofvernacular styles in his fiction, and this information makes highly implausible any theory that Chesnutt meant to celebrate his own heritage and linguistic traditions through the dialect tales of his invented narrator, former slave Julius McAdoo. In 1873, at age fifteen, the exceptional young student discontinued his own formal education in order to become a teacher himself, earning his teaching certificate in 1874, a move Charles Duncan attributes to Chesnutt's desire to help improve his family's finances (xvii). However, the move probably also reflects the youth's powerful ambition, self-confidence, and desire to help improve the lives of Mrican Americans in Fayetteville, North Carolina , his home from age seven through twenty-five. Significantly, Chesnutt considered one of his major responsibilities as an educator to be to "reeducate others in the proper use of English," that is, in the variety he spoke, according to Richard Brodhead (Intro. to Journals 14). Brodhead further notes that as a young teacher, Chesnutt was acutely aware of the differences between himself and many of his Mrican American neighbors in and around Fayetteville, observing that at this time, "Chesnutt's response to the culture of his illiterate black countrymen is usually one of estrangement, embarrassment, and an anxious attempt to guard his distance from it" (23). Chesnutt's conjure tales-those works among his short fiction that took as their themes the...

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