"A Catalogue of Wrong and Outrage": Undermining White Supremacist Discourse and Spatial Practice in Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition

In The Marrow of Tradition (1901), Charles W. Chesnutt presents a fictionalized version of the events leading up to the november 10, 1898, massacre in Wilmington, north Carolina. On that date, just two days after an election won by the white supremacist arm of the Democratic Party (thanks to ballot stuffing and voter intimidation), a mob of armed whites shot black citizens on the streets of Wilmington. The city's white elite then staged a coup, forcing the resignation of local Republicans and expelling influential black citizens from the city.¹ Chesnutt's novel charts the buildup of "race antagonism"—race difference constructed as an us-versus-them relation, where "they" threaten "our" way of life—until "The Storm Breaks" in chapter 32.²

The Marrow of Tradition contains four interwoven plots. First, there's a political plot involving the white supremacist editor Major Carteret, who uses his newspaper (the Morning Chronicle) to launch a campaign to restore the city to white Democratic rule. There's a genealogical plot involving Carteret's wife Olivia and her black half-sister and near-twin Janet Miller. In a related professional plot, Janet's husband, Dr. William Miller, returns from an extensive education to set up a black hospital. Finally, there's a courtship plot involving a dissolute aristocrat, Tom Delamere, and an upstanding young man, Ellis, fighting for the hand of Carteret's sister Clara Pemberton. The last plot takes a dark turn when Tom murders his aunt in black face and frames his father's servant Sandy, who is nearly lynched for the crime. The rest of the plots come together during Chesnutt's rendering of the Wilmington massacre. Carteret realizes that his inflammatory rhetoric has created a monster beyond his control and he returns home in disgust only to find his only son suffering from an unrelated medical emergency. Major Carteret must ask Miller for assistance, though the former had earlier barred the latter from his home. Miller refuses, revealing that his son was killed in the riot. Olivia heads to the Miller household as a last resort and Miller leaves the choice to his wife, who shows mercy.

Ever since W. D. Howells, the voice of American realism, deemed it "bitter, bitter" in a lukewarm review, Marrow has been dogged by the question of genre.³ While the depiction of the riot is realistic, there are other elements that seem to push the novel outside the boundaries of realism. Chesnutt changes the name of the city to "Wellington" and alters key historical facts (his riot occurs before the election), something a card-carrying realist might not do. Joseph McElrath and Andrew Hebard claim that Chesnutt's novel owes more to the Southern chivalric romance or the historical romance than it does to the realist tradition.⁴ Other critics have highlighted the melodramatic, gothic, and even epic elements of some of Marrow's plot elements.⁵

My overarching claim, however, will be that Marrow is the realist novel par excellence. In a classic study, Kenneth Warren shows that American literary realism began as an attempt to spread "democratic struggles" to new areas of civil society via the representation of everyday life, a "conflation of aesthetics and politics" that carried an important "promise": "as realism secured a position as the dominant aesthetic in the nation's most prestigious magazines the unfinished business of black political liberation would emerge from the relative oblivion that had enveloped it following the abandonment of Radical Reconstruction."⁶ However, "the insistence of writers like Henry James on seeing the political in terms of its social manifestations" unintentionally abetted the contemporaneous defense of Jim Crow segregation by stoking fears of undifferentiated social spaces.⁷ Chesnutt merges aesthetics and politics, the social and the political in realist fashion, but also plays up the crucial distinctions between white supremacist ideology and the original "promise" of American literary realism. Marrow thus marks a return to the beginning for realism that is also a decisive step forward, aesthetically and politically.

A key to Chesnutt's...