Friday from the Archives: “competition would be crushed”: National and International Threads in Charles Chesnutt’s The Colonel’s Dream by Richard Ellis in NCLR 2015
Literature, as do all the arts, as do the humanities, reminds us of what has happened before, how what is happening now rhymes (or outright duplicates) what happened in the past.
Charles Chesnutt wrote in his 1903 novel The Colonel’s Dream about a entrepreneurial white millionaire who returns to the South, buys an old mill building, and attempts to help make the town vibrant again for all those living there, white and Black. Richard Ellis writes about how contemporary voices and ideas show up in the novel and how Chesnutt used them to argue for freedom. Ellis wrote, “Where Chesnutt’s second novel, The Marrow of Tradition (1901) had denounced the open violence that came to attend such a subjugation by portraying the 1898 Wilmington coup d’etat with a shocking directness, The Colonel’s Dream, by deliberate contrast, quietly explores the quotidian remorselessness of such subjugations and how this builds up explosive tensions.”
Published at the end of Reconstruction, Chesnutt decries the Southern “smoke and mirrors.” Ellis points out, “This is what makes The Colonel’s Dream such a complex, powerful exploration of the New South’s dilemmas. To drive home this point, let us turn back to the “opera house” in which Pinafore is sung, where Small and Grady speak and where Washington cannot. This opera house, the reader will realize, is no such thing. It is a large, echoing attic, sited above an old cotton warehouse. Here, the allusive symbolism is exquisitely yet painfully ironic. This echoic hall, Chesnutt carefully indicates, is “where an occasional lecturer or conjurer held forth” (264; emphasis added). The smoke and mirrors of Southern capitalist ideological discourse, extolling free enterprise in a profoundly unequal and recurrently unfree society, are captured in this juxtaposition. The old cotton warehouse has become both labeled as and used as a site of rhetorical performance, just as cotton has become a performative signal of the New South. Opera is not performed in this house, but the dirty business of formulating the New South’s supremacist aspirations.”
And now, 120+ years later, we can revisit Chesnutt’s novel in light of technology and media monopolies. What will the thirty story downtown skyscrapers of yore be fifty years in the future, as the cotton mills were in Chesnutt’s day? For not much else has changed. Ellis wrote, “My argument is that the depiction of the colonel as such a modern capitalist entrepreneur is very deliberate, and part and parcel of this is why The Colonel’s Dream depicts him in New York as contributing to the declining work experience of the working (wo)man internationally:
The clerks were not especially cheerful; the impending change
meant for them, at best, a change of masters, and for many of
them, the loss of employment. . . . What else could be expected?
The principal reason for the trust’s existence was economy of
administration; this was stated, most convincingly, in the prospectus.
There was no suggestion, in that model document, that competition
would be crushed, or that, monopoly once established,
labour must sweat . . . in order that a few captains, or chevaliers,
of industry, might double their dividends. Mr. French may have
known it, or guessed it, but . . . he must take what he could get, or
lose what he had. (85)”
Read Ellis’s essay on ProQuest. Add the 2015 issue to your collection today!
