Charles Waddell Chesnutt and Joel Chandler Harris: An Anxiety of Influence

Harold Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence refers to one generation of writers having to slay (in Oedipal fashion) their literary forebears. In other words, writers must carve out their own unique literary spaces and escape the influence of their predecessors. Bloom’s theory has become a central concern to critics evaluating Charles Waddell Chesnutt’s conjure tales. Generally following the patterns of the post-Reconstruction plantation genre and closely following the frame of Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus tales in such collections as Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880), Chesnutt had to walk a tightrope between literary distinction and marketability, between writing that reflected his identity as an African American man and writing that would be bought by the predominantly white reading public. As anxiety-producing as this might have been, Chesnutt’s concern seems minimal next to the anxiety his genealogy has stirred in literary critics. Chesnutt is alternately hailed as the first serious African American writer of fiction and spurned for following Harris and other plantation writers in perpetuating the myth of the glorious South and the stereotypical contented slave. To some degree, most critical essays on Chesnutt touch on this link to Harris; thus, Chesnutt’s identity as a writer is largely determined by how critics interpret Chesnutt’s response to Harris’s influence.

The significance of Chesnutt’s literary career lies, in part, in the 1887 publication of his short story “The Goophered Grapevine” in the Atlantic Monthly. Subsequent stories were published by the magazine and eventually collected in The Conjure Woman (1899) and The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line (1899). Because he was the first African American author to be published in such a prestigious magazine as the Atlantic Monthly and to be praised by the dean of American letters, William Dean Howells, Chesnutt has often been called the father of African American fiction. His popularity at the time rested largely on his use of the plantation genre; yet as he moved to more overtly racial themes in his novels, The House Behind the Cedars (1900), The Marrow of Tradition (1901), and The Colonel’s Dream (1905), Howells’s enthusiasm and that of the general (white) reading public waned. With the financial and critical failure of The Colonel’s Dream, Chesnutt quit writing in 1905 and returned to his legal career. Rediscovered and reinterpreted throughout the century, Chesnutt became a particularly important figure for two major periods: the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts movement. As during the previous two movements, today’s concern over a multicultural pedagogy means reevaluating Chesnutt, for to embrace him as a literary forefather is, to some extent, to define African American literature.

Just as his initial success came from the similarities between his first work, The Conjure Woman, and Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus tales, much of the evaluation of Chesnutt has focused on his first work. The stories in The Conjure Woman are linked together by the common theme of conjuring and by the frame tale in which a Northern couple, John and Annie, are entertained by the former slave, Uncle Julius MacAdoo. John acts as the narrator for the frame; thus, Julius and his tales are delivered and critiqued through a white voice. John notices Julius’s attempts to manipulate the Northerners for his own economic gain while his wife responds to the tales sympathetically—seeing beyond the fantastic to the real human suffering of slavery. In the first story, “The Goophered Grapevine,” a slave named Henry who eats from the forbidden grapevine finds himself transformed; his life cycle becomes linked to the vine’s. As the vine grows strong in the springtime, so does Henry. And when it withers in the fall, so does Henry. The slave owner takes advantage of this transformation by selling Henry in the spring and buying him back for almost nothing in the fall. According to the frame narrator, John, Uncle Julius has told this tale in order to scare John from buying the vineyard, from which Julius has been harvesting grapes...