Notes
Introduction 1. Stephen P. Knadler states, “[t]he critical obsession with naming either Dr. Miller or Josh Green as the novel’s hero shows a failure to understand the novel’s radical deconstruction of whiteness as a rhetorical performance” (441). 2. In the famous review in which he lamented the “bitter” tone of The Marrow of Tradition, William Dean Howells defended Chesnutt against the charge, still made today, that he subordinated a realist aesthetic to political ends: “[H]e does not paint the blacks all good, or the whites all bad. He paints them as slavery made them on both sides, and if in the very end he gives the moral victory to the blacks . . . it cannot be said that either his aesthetics or ethics are false” (“Psychological” 83). 3. Chesnutt also uses the phrase in the story “The Sheriff’s Children,” in which the narrator describes a moment of moral clarity in which “all the acts of one’s life stand out, in the clear light of truth, in their correct proportions and relations ” (Collected Stories 147). The formulation appears to show the in®uence of Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham, in which the Reverend Sewell remarks that “novelists might be the greatest help to us if they painted life as it is, and human feelings in their true proportion and relation” (162). 4. After the Civil War, Rohrbach indicates that “readers restricted their humanitarian interests to their own class and race issues” (116), and realist writers— motivated by the literary marketplace—let the antiracist dimension of realism fade 165 Notes from view. Thus her book is an attempt to ¤ll in the hidden in®uence of slave narratives and other abolitionist texts on realism. 5. In addition to the work by Boeckmann discussed here, see discussions of Chesnutt’s ¤ction in Bert Bender’s Descent of Love: Darwin and the Theory of Sexual Selection in American Fiction, 1871–1926 (1996), Brook Thomas’s American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract (1997), Michael A. Elliott’s The Culture Concept: Writing and Difference in the Age of Realism (2002), Sämi Ludwig’s Pragmatist Realism: The Cognitive Paradigm in American Realist Texts (2002), Kathleen Pfeiffer’s Race Passing and American Individualism (2003), and Henry B. Wonham’s Playing the Races: Ethnic Caricature and American Literary Realism (2004). 6. For additional insight on this point, see the letters of 1890 in which he accuses white author H. S. Edwards of plagiarizing his story “How Dadsy Came Through” (“To Be an Author” 57–64). Edwards’s reply that both he and Chesnutt must have borrowed the story from an African American folktale that was essentially in the public domain (“To Be an Author” 63 n. 2) was clearly unsatisfactory to Chesnutt , who nonetheless dropped the charge when it became clear that neither his in-®uential correspondent George Washington Cable nor the publisher of Edwards’s story, Richard Watson Gilder, would support him. 7. Although Chesnutt in this case was speaking to a largely black audience, he did not hesitate to challenge whites with similar comments. See, for example, the 1904 speech “The Race Problem,” in which he bluntly tells a mainly white audience that African Americans would not need to be informed about the injustices faced by—or the progress made by—their race, for “[t]hese things they know, better than you could. . . . They view their people as a whole,”and thus their vision is not limited by stereotypical images of blacks as waiters, bootblacks, and criminals (Essays and Speeches 197). 8. See Wilson, Whiteness 16–17. 9. See Thomas 156–63 for further discussion of Chesnutt’s response to An Imperative Duty in The House Behind the Cedars. 10. William L. Andrews has voiced a similar charge: “[T]he greatest erosion of verisimilitude in The Marrow of Tradition arises from the readiness with which Chesnutt could classify his characters under sociopolitical genera and species” (Literary Career 202). 11. McElrath adapts this idea from the arguments of scholar SallyAnn Ferguson , who has accused Chesnutt of subscribing to “the principle of unitary racial development” (“Rena Walden” 204) and correspondingly of ®attering whites’ racist beliefs about racial qualities at the expense of any genuine recognition of black people’s realities. Ferguson sees Chesnutt as prone to voicing, in both ¤ctional and non¤ctional writings, “racial propaganda” (204) in favor of the whitening of the race through amalgamation. 12. Speci¤cally, McElrath writes: “[J]ustice would reign in life-as...
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