“The Wave of a Magician’s Wand”: Romance, Storytelling, and the Myth of History in “The Wife of His Youth”

In “Superstitions and Folk-lore of the South” (1901), Charles W. Chesnutt lamented the hostility of modern rationalists to folk traditions: “the scornful sneer of the teacher, who sees in [superstition] a part of the livery of bondage, [has] driven this quaint combination of ancestral traditions to the remote chimney corners of old black aunties, from which it is difficult for the stranger to unearth them.”¹ Chesnutt’s phrasing here is cagey: is he a stranger or friend to these old black aunties? His tone throughout the piece reflects this ambivalence. He writes in the abstract voice of the historian or anthropologist reporting cultural progress, yet he inserts asides suggesting personal investment in these Southern communities and intimacy with these speakers. He even projects himself into their subject position, repeatedly using the phrase “I imagine” to speculate about their interior lives (157). Chesnutt is an urban intellectual rather than a rural storyteller, yet he seeks a method of combining their archetypal fables with his modern, skeptical perspective. Not wishing to share the “scornful sneer of the teacher” yet unable to lose himself to folk belief, Chesnutt makes the negotiation between these two perspectives the unspoken subject of his inquiry. Can myth and magic survive in the glare of modern rationality, or will this tradition hide in the chimney corner with the old black aunties?

Chesnutt’s solution to this problem is to offer himself as the hybrid inheritor of dominant accounts of history and of half-forgotten superstitions that reflect a counter-memory that has almost but not quite been forgotten.² Chesnutt dramatizes this cultural forgetting and recovery through a personal tale of recollection. He confesses that his popular short story collection The Conjure Woman related superstitions that he did not realize he remembered: “after I had interviewed half a dozen old women, and a genuine ‘conjure doctor;’ . . . I discovered that the brilliant touches, due, I had thought, to my own imagination, were after all but dormant ideas, lodged in my childish mind by old Aunt This and old Uncle That, and awaiting only the spur of imagination to bring them again to the surface” (156). Imagination allows him to recover and animate the cultural inheritance of myth and folktale in modern fiction writing. The expert voice that exhorted sociologists to record this dying history has changed into an immersive one, embracing the tales that indelibly marked a “childish mind” and reinventing them for a new audience that might be equally thrilled and impressed by them. This shift in voice in Chesnutt’s essay models the re-enchantment of the world for disenchanted modern readers. When Chesnutt says “I imagine,” he implicitly demands that his reader do that as well, and this act is not one of escape into childish things. Chesnutt implies that the modern rationalist wants to move past these folktales at least in part to move past the legacy of slavery (or to shed “the livery of bondage”) and erase the memory of the “old mammies [who] would tell the tales of Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Fox to the master’s children” (160). For Chesnutt, such a forgetting is neither possible nor desirable. He will preserve this cultural memory in his fiction.

One of Chesnutt’s most famous short stories, “The Wife of His Youth” (1898), also employs the device of amnesia to demonstrate the competition of bourgeois rationality and other forms of cultural memory. In this story, an old black woman, ’Liza Jane, arrives in the home of a young-looking, light-skinned man, Mr. Ryder, on the eve of his engagement to a desirable young woman, and she reminds him of his life in the antebellum South. Mr. Ryder recalls (rather belatedly) that he was married to her when he was a free hired man and she was a slave. Ryder narrates the story of their shared past to an assembled company of other middle-class, mixed-race Northerners who have come expecting to hear his engagement announcement. Instead, he uses his public platform and social...