The Two-Faced New South: The Plantation Tales of Thomas Nelson Page and Charles W. Chesnutt
1998; University of North Carolina Press; Volume: 30; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1534-1461
Autores Tópico(s)American Literature and Humor Studies
ResumoIn the aftermath of the Civil War, the plantation system could no longer provide a viable vision of the future for the United States. Before the war, white southerners failed in their attempts to reshape the American dream into one of plantation security; after it they found themselves compelled to transform their vision of their region and once more try to find a place for their society in the nation from which they had seceded. These southerners faced the choice of mourning a lost past or setting out to remake themselves for the future. Amazingly, they did both. Paul Gaston points out that one of the great ironies of southern history is the simultaneous rise of the myth of the Old South and what he calls the New South creed (167). South of 1877-1913 (Woodward's dates for the origins of the New South) often seems able both to long for a lost idyllic past and to yearn for a utopian future in a way that ignores the tensions between the two. No one exemplifies that capacity for contradiction, or the conflicts that lay within it, more fully than Thomas Nelson Page. Page's idealized memories of a lost Cavalier society helped shape, perhaps more than those of any single person, the vision of the Old South that the nation embraced as it tried to put Reconstruction behind it and prepare for the coming century. At the same time Thomas Nelson Page struggled to find a place for both the dream of progress and the plantation paradise in his New South, Charles W. Chesnutt was engaged in his own very different struggle to come to terms with the American dream and the plantation myth. His position as a popular writer at the turn of the century depended on his ability to fulfill his reader's desires, and his willingness to challenge their expectations only subtly. On the other hand, his position as the first great African American fiction writer depends largely on the subversive quality of his writing, his ability to explode myths about American history and racial supremacy in ways we can see perhaps better than even Chesnutt himself. In many ways Page and Chesnutt stand opposite each other as southern plantation writers: Page the grand perpetuator of the plantation myth, Chesnutt its subverter; Page the white supremacist, Chesnutt the crusader for racial justice.(1) Despite these differences, both men struggled with the same contradictions: the competing claims of the Old South and the New, and the desire to be palatable to a national audience while remaining true to their political beliefs. By comparing plantation tales by both, we see acted out the tension between popular images of the South and its political and economic reality. For example, Page's Marse Chan, his first published tale, offers pure nostalgia for a lost and irreplaceable edenic South, and by comparing that story to Chesnutt's first, The Goophered Grapevine, we see how carefully Chesnutt places himself in the genre of the plantation tale and how cautiously his crusade begins. Other stories from Page's In Virginia and Chesnutt's Conjure Woman problematize the ideal South. Ole `Stracted shows Page taking African American characters to the brink of economic independence but no further, while The Conjurer's Revenge and Sis' Becky's Pickaninny show Chesnutt's strategies for elevating his audience and how far he is willing to go in challenging that audience's ideas about racial equality. Page and Chesnutt found literary success during a time which saw both a northern craze for southern romance(2) and vigorous economic exploitation of the South by northerners. While it contains a certain irony, the North's postwar embrace of the Old South seems easily understandable. No longer a political or economic threat, after the war the dreams of the plantation South could be indulged as pure fantasy. Lucinda MacKethan notes that the pastoral mode is most powerful in the midst of urbanization. In the same way, nostalgia is most appealing to a society encountering tumultuous change. …
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