Chesnutt and Realism: A Study of the Novels (review)

Studies in American Fiction249 egory of "classic American realism"? By not going outside the boundaries of the canon, the book does reinforce the fantasy of a literary tradition unfolding along its own exceptional lines and without dialogue with, or accountability to, the "other" texts being produced in their "present." Is there no "realism" or crisis of "liberal identity" in The Souls ofBlack Folk or Sui Sin Far's short stories or Ruiz de Burton's The Squatterandthe Don? Given Barrish's powers as a teacher and critic, it would have been wonderful to read his interpretations of how such texts can bear upon our current predicaments. University ofWisconsin—MilwaukeeGregory S. Jay Simmons, Ryan. Chesnutt and Realism: A Study of the Novels. Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press, 2006. 288 pp. Cloth: $39.95 The recent publication offourpreviouslyunpublished novels by Charles Chesnutt provides fertile ground for new holistic examinations ofChesnutt's novels interms ofthematic, generic, and aesthetic elements. Ryan Simmons's ChesnuttandRealism:A StudyoftheAfove/ssignals this new era in Chesnutt scholarship; it traces the development of Chesnutt's use ofrealist strategies throughout his career as a novelist to attack racism in post-bellum America and motivate his readers to participate in progressive civil rights reform. Simmons explores each novel with a shifting definition of realism that reflects Chesnutt's own developing sense of the importance of truthful storytelling, paying particular attention to the way Chesnutt's depiction of moral and political aspects of contemporary race relations is meant to lead readers to "an understanding of such issues that must not be merely abstract " (3). Simmons works with an unorthodox definition of realism that acknowledges Chesnutt's tendency to feature implausible events and symbolic characters, while foregrounding the novels' realist aversion to escapism and their insistence that readers "shift perspective so that they acknowledge, understand, and respond to the world's realities rather than averting their eyes"—a definition of realism which "implicitly demands change" (5). Responding to those who would take issue with Chesnutt's inclusion as a major figure in the realist canon, given the strong political register of what are often read as his "purpose novels," Simmons asserts that "[c]entral to Chesnutt's realism is the conviction that understanding reality rightly requires action" (15), thus denying the mutual exclusivity of realism and political directive. Among the book's most significant contributions to Chesnutt criticism is the first chapter's analysis of the seldom-discussed "Northern novels ," A Business Career (1898), The Rainbow Chasers (1900), and Evelyn's Husband(\903), which seemingly evade race politics altogether. Simmons 250Reviews makes the compelling claim that some ofthe main characters in these novels might be—unobviously—ofmixed race, but that the racial backgrounds of these characters remain equivocal, or submerged, for both the novels' other characters and their readers, since the revelation would have proven unpalatable to a contemporary audience. By analyzing these lesser-known novels for their subversive (though perhaps timid) suggestions about the interpretive nature of race, Simmons convincingly unites them with Chesnutt's major works, especially the more overtly polemical treatments of racial and class conflict of The House Behind the Cedars (1900) and JAe Marrow ofTradition (1901). Chapter 2 continues to emphasize Chesnutt's "realist" approach to his audience throughout his detailed analyses of The HouseBehindthe Cedars and the novella Mandy Oxendine (1897). The discussion here ofthe 'tragic mulatta' device in Mandy Oxendine perhaps does not quite sufficiently account for the "absurdities" and "tidy resolutions" ofits suspense plot; the suggestion that Chesnutt "cleverly attempted to write the novella in a way that would be palatable at a superficial level" while "rewarding] closer reading with uncanny depths" (60-62) seems somewhat apologetic. The argument about The House Behind the Cedars is far more salient, as Simmons makes the intriguing claim that since Chesnutt sets the novel in the past, his contemporary readers become "future readers," aware of the failures of Reconstruction and un-innocently implicated in the further progress of civil rights efforts. Simmons's most persuasive moments can be found in Chapter 3, "Simple and Complex Discourse in The Marrow ofTradition!' Here, Simmons elucidates his earlier claims about Chesnutt's refusal to explore racism in abstract terms. The Marrow...