[On November 18,
1865, Mark Twain’s short story “The Celebrated
Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” was first published in The New York Saturday Press (under its
original title, “Jim Smiley
and His Jumping Frog”). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy “Frog” and four
other local color short stories, leading up to a special weekend post on
teaching such American texts.]
On the dangers
and possibilities of working within a hugely popular genre.
I’ve written
about Charles Chesnutt a
great deal in this space, much of it through the lens of his best work and
my favorite American novel, The
Marrow of Tradition (1901). But in this
Valentine’s week post, I used the more intimate side of Chesnutt that we
find in his journals to highlight his striking and important goals and
ambitions for his writing career as a whole. While I would argue that Marrow alone is sufficient evidence that
he achieved those goals, the frustrating truth is that Chesnutt’s
writing career was cut short (he published virtually nothing for the final
25 years of his life); while there are multiple factors which contributed to
that situation, one major cause was the gaps between his ambitions and the
realities of the late 19th and early 20th century
publishing world and literary marketplace. Much like Paul Laurence Dunbar, the popularity
and demand for whose dialect
poetry made it more difficult for him to publish works in other styles and
forms, Chesnutt found to his frustration that many of his editors, publishers,
and audiences wanted from him only a particular, stereotypical and limited version
of African American writing and life.
Much of that
came from outside Chesnutt and was entirely beyond his control, of course. But
in one complicated way he did contribute to that pigeon-holing process: by writing
and publishing a number of early stories that seemed to fall squarely within an
existing, popular, stereotyping genre: the local color movement known as the
“plantation tradition.” These stories, which were published
throughout the 1880s and 90s and many of which were collected in The
Conjure Woman (1899), featured many of the plantation tradition’s
central elements: a Northern white narrator who journeys to the South; a
formerly enslaved African American storyteller from whom that narrator learns
about that region; threads of folklore and the supernatural interwoven with
those cultural and social contexts. Indeed, so closely did Chesnutt’s conjure
tales seem to resemble those included in Joel Chandler Harris’s foundational plantation
tradition text Uncle
Remus, His Songs and Sayings (1881) that Houghton Mifflin chose to put
two grinning rabbits on either side of the African American storyteller on the
Conjure Woman’s cover (despite no
such rabbits appearing anywhere in the text); not Chesnutt’s choice, and an
example of his frustrating relationship to publishers and publication to be
sure, but also a reflection of the genre in which he firmly located these early
works.
Yet as always
with Chesnutt, his decision to do so was thoughtful and important. And if we
read his first published conjure tale, “The
Goophered Grapevine” (which appeared in The Atlantic in
1887 before becoming the opening story of The Conjure Woman), we can see just how much he used the plantation
tradition genre in order to challenge and explode many of its stereotypical
elements. For one thing, the stories of slavery told by Chesnutt’s Uncle Julius
are consistently much darker than those told by Uncle Remus and his ilk, and
the supernatural elements only serve to highlight and heighten those realistic
depictions of slavery’s horrors. And for another, the relationship in the
present between Julius and John (the outside white narrator) is likewise more
nuanced and realistic than in most plantation tradition works—while there forms
a gradual fondness between the two (along with John’s wife Annie) as the
conjure tales progress, Julius also uses his acts of storytelling to advance
his own agenda, often (as in “Grapevine”) in implicit but clear contrast to
John’s goals. All of which is to say, if we read Chesnutt’s local color stories
on their own terms, rather than giving in to the publishing perspectives that
too often limited his reception and career, we find in them crucial
commentaries on and challenges to local color writing itself.
Special post
this weekend,
Benti
PS. Thoughts on
this story? Other local color stories you’d highlight?
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