Friday from the Archives: “The Marrow of Tradition: Charles Chesnutt’s Novel of the South”
by Joyce Pettis in NCLR 1994
Add Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition to your America 250 Summer Reading list. Our 1994 issue special feature was dedicated to the 1898 Race Riot, a coup perpetuated by white Wilmingtonians against the Black leaders and middle class that had established during Reconstruction. Chesnutt’s thinly veiled novel educates the reader not only on the riot itself, but the cultural context leading up to it. Educator Joyce Pettis wrote:
“In the Wilmington race riot of 1898 and other riots and racial incidents throughout the South and Midwest that election year, the embroidery of tolerance was savagely ripped away to reveal problems for which Chesnutt, apparently, discerned no easy remedy. Thus, Marrow reimagines the social texture of Wilmington (called Wellington in the novel) over several months in 1898 before the elections and the race riot. But its context is reliant on the socially and politically conflicted decades of 1876-98. It explores the post-war period of social, political, and economic adjustment for all people, and the jockeying for power by some.”
Marrow was published in 1901, only three years after the tragic violence. Pettis identifies issues we are grappling with (still? again? perpetually?) today in Chesnutt’s book. She outlines, “One level of Chesnutt’s social critique targets the notion of gentlemanly qualities and assumptions about their origin as inherited or acquired. The recognition factor becomes a significant and cleverly integrated part of the extended masquerade episode: Can moral people be identified in their communities, Chesnutt asks, merely by their skin tone and their family origin, or must their character, regardless of origin, be their measurement? What he reveals through masquerade is the exceeding superficiality and narrowness of measurements and assumptions that disregard character in favor of other biases, especially those based on outward appearances.”
What will the literature of today say about our own continuing struggles to embrace the stated founding doctrines of our country? How do we use literature to examine past stories to change the future for the better of all Americans? What stories are you writing to be read over a hundred years from now?
Read the rest on Gale Literature. Add the 1994 issue to your collection today!
