Chesnutt and Realism: A Study of the Novels

Introduction: Of Race and Realism

In this book I propose to initiate a new line of discussion about the cultural work done by American literary realism, and about the pressures and possibilities surrounding racial discourse in this nation, by examining the novels of an author whose career neatly matches the period traditionally associated with American realism. Charles W. Chesnutt’s career as a published writer of ¤ction ran from 1885, when his ¤rst short stories appeared, to 1930, when a ¤nal story appeared in The Crisis. His career publishing novels was much shorter, from 1900 to 1905, although several of the novels he wrote were rejected by publishers before and after that period. During these years, he lived in Cleveland but traveled in both the Northeast and the deep South, including his former home of North Carolina, where he researched the events that inspired The Marrow of Tradition. The geography of Chesnutt’s life and career offers a compelling metaphor for his position as a writer: as someone who is both Northern and Southern , and as a person of mixed race, Chesnutt attempts—and, in my view, largely achieves—an equilibrium, crafting narratives on the basis of an insider’s insight and an outsider’s objectivity, an auspicious blend for a practitioner of realism. His narrators tend to have a canny, slippery quality, simultaneously adopting and skewering the particular perspectives they may seem to hold. Like writers who followed him—including monumental African American authors of the twentieth century such as Hurston, Ellison, and Morrison—Chesnutt recog1 Introduction
Of Race and Realism nized reality to be problematic, always contested, and undertook risky experiments to put forward a statement about reality that would help pin it down but would also be capable of shaping it. These experiments are best explained in relation to American literary realism. While Chesnutt has often been characterized as a writer in the realist tradition , neither the critics who attempt to read him into this tradition nor those who try to read him out of it have always served his achievements well. In the former camp, the danger is that his ¤ction will be seen as merely imitative, an application of the doctrines of William Dean Howells and others to new territories , especially those concerning race. In this book I argue that the opposite view is more correct: Chesnutt was aware of and used realist ideals and techniques but also was himself a substantial contributor to those ideals and techniques . He not only applied realism to new topics but redirected and sharpened what realism was and could be. The second view—that Chesnutt does not qualify as a realist at all—has proved no more useful in gauging Chesnutt’s methods and career. The problem, actually, is similar to that exempli¤ed by many in the pro-realist camp. If the question becomes “does Chesnutt meet the standards set up by Howells and other canonical white writers for realism?”then (regardless of whether one’s answer is yes or no) the effect is almost inevitably to make Chesnutt appear a minor ¤gure, mimicking—with greater or lesser degrees of success—the techniques of his more important peers. Instead, Chesnutt ought to be considered a major contributor to the realist movement, both for his challenge to white audiences to consider realistically the nature of American race relations and for his career-long narrative experiment to determine how an entrenched majority might be compelled to see the social world more accurately and completely. Though Chesnutt was acutely aware of the limitations faced by African Americans during his lifetime in attempting to shape social reality, his career is de¤ned by its insistence in cha¤ng against these restrictions. It was fundamental to him to expand the possibilities of what could be said, and therefore what could be known and done, always while working with (and within) available historical materials. And this work, the work of a realist author, was performed in constant awareness of the material effects that textual representations had upon the lives of African Americans. As he wrote in 1889, early in his literary career, “[t]o a white man [the ‘Negro problem’] may be a question of personal prejudice, a question of political expediency, a question of conscience, a question of abstract justice, a question of wise statesmanship—any one, in fact, of a hundred questions. But to the man of Negro blood it is . . . the question of life itself”(Essays and Speeches 57–58). His novels are meant to lead...