Abstract
Critics have noted that in Charles Chesnutt’s works, the Gothic illustrates how past injustices of the American slave system haunt the postbellum present of his short stories and novels. Wooley’s chapter extends such an analysis by suggesting that in Chesnutt’s story ‘Po’ Sandy’, gothic figures link the affective response that the horrors of slavery should produce to reparative actions that acknowledge, and attempt to rectify, racial inequality in the United States. However, her reading of Chesnutt’s final published novel, The Colonel’s Dream, argues that the most gothic moment in that novel signals Chesnutt’s increasing pessimism concerning racial progress. As a result, the gothic figure comes to present not an opportunity for progress but the rejection of socio-economic justice for African Americans by the American South.
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Notes
- 1.
In a frequently referenced journal entry from 1880, Chesnutt notes that ‘I shall write for a purpose, a high, holy purpose …. The object of my writings would be not so much the elevation of the Colored people as the elevation of the Whites, − for I consider the unjust spirit of caste which is so insidious as to pervade a whole nation, and so powerful as to subject a whole race and all connected with it to scorn and social ostracism – I consider this a barrier to the moral progress of the American people’ (139–40).
- 2.
Goddu writes that ‘the gothic intrudes into the sentimental in order to register the full horror of slavery’ (142). Focusing on the details that Cassy gives to Tom about the Legree plantation, Goddu states that ‘[t]his section of the novel shows how the event of slavery is structured in gothic terms’ (143).
- 3.
Francesca Sawaya notes that these impulses are shaped by the colonel’s immediate and more distant experiences: as a businessman, his charitable acts are shaped by the conservative rationality of corporate capitalism (151); as a Southerner, he is limited ‘by his residual Southern high-mindedness’ and an evasion of ‘questions of justice’ when the answers to such questions are too intrusive or difficult (152). Perhaps most significantly, his efforts to reform the town evince the kind of paternalism through which, Susan Ryan argues, ‘benevolent hierarchies and racial hierarchies were mutually constitutive in U.S. culture’ (47).
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Further Reading
Bentley, N. (2009). Frantic panoramas: American literature and mass culture 1870–1920. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Bentley’s section on Chesnutt (in the chapter ‘Black Bohemia and the African American Novel’) situates his critique of realism within his awareness of the power of spectacle. While her focus is not on the Gothic, her argument that ‘the real role for the black person in public’ is ‘to perform his own nonexistence as a black citizen’ (199) aids gothic readings of dead black bodies, lynchings and minstrelsy, particularly the representation of such in mass culture.
Clymer, J. A. (2013). Family money: Property, race, and literature in the nineteenth century. New York: Oxford University Press.
Clymer’s chapter ‘The Properties of Marriage in Chesnutt and Hopkins’ shows how Chesnutt’s fiction assesses the impact of anti-miscegenation law on the economic rights of African Americans, making inter-racial marriage a site through which to see the possibilities, and limits, of inheritance as a form of redress.
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Wooley, C.A. (2016). Charles Chesnutt’s Reparative Gothic. In: Castillo Street, S., Crow, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47774-3_22
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