Abstract

In this paper, I explore Charles W. Chesnutt’s efforts to depict and recreate Black folk humor as an act of joy that contests popular but divisive representations of Black Southerners. At the turn of the 20th-century, Americans had decidedly mixed feelings about Black folk from the South. While the dominant culture pined for the docile, reliable slaves of the plantation South, Alain Locke and other African American literati simultaneously praised the cultural authenticity of the folk and secretly worried that some of their old traditions might undermine the aspirations of the New Negro. While many scholars have studied Chesnutt’s efforts to capitalize on the nation’s fascination with the folk in The Conjure Woman (1899), few extended studies exist of the other short story collection that he published the same year with less success, The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line. I analyze Chesnutt’s 1887 short story “Appreciation” within the context of the mainstream magazine Puck in which it first appeared, and then juxtapose it with a similar story, a possibly revised version, “The Passing of Grandison,” which appeared in The Wife of His Youth, to argue that Chesnutt asserts that Black folk experience joy, and even pleasure, in satirizing romantic perceptions of them as static and simplistic shared by Blacks and whites. Although the comedic mode is the same in both stories, the social target and the readership of the publications in which they appeared were not. Indeed, I also explore whether Chesnutt’s willingness to use satire as a form of intraracial critique is one of the reasons The Wife of His Youth has not been more embraced by readers and literary critics.

Keywords

Charles W. Chesnutt, passing, satire, Black readers, the South, Puck

Pages

52-70

DOI