Charles Chesnutt and the Legacy of the Conjure Woman
2010; Volume: 43; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2165-2678
Autores Tópico(s)American Sports and Literature
ResumoAs Charles W. Chesnutt was honored in 2008, the 150th anniversary of his birth, with United States Postal Service commemorative stamp, it is fitting that the academic community should pause to reflect on his life in letters. Chesnutt is recognized as an indelible part of the American literary whole, noted as a lively, ironic raconteur whose work focused on the comic and tragic web of American race relations by Werner Sollors (49). Scholarship concerning how and why Chesnutt so adamantly interwove issues of race, class, and identity continues to proliferate the academy with steady focus on his popular works. This essay endeavors to celebrate Chesnutt's canonization not by means of grappling with ideas of race and power in his fiction, but rather by offering one perspective on how his most accomplished laid the foundation for subgenre of African-American literature to emerge (Duncan 83). Chesnutt's Conjure Woman has not been more influential than in its status as precursor to the late twentieth century literary innovation of what Ishmael Reed might call Neo-Hoodoo texts, but which here will be referred to as neo-conjure tales. I employ this particular term, rather than borrowing from Reed's aesthetic, to specifically link fiction published in the latter half of the twentieth century (and into the twenty-first) which makes use of African-based spiritual systems as trope to the orally transmitted folktales that were disseminated among the enslaved and took as their subject matter conjure and hoodoo. Neo-Hoodoo, on the other hand, refers to specific multicultural literary aesthetic, based in African Vodum, which seeks to differentiate art and writing from traditional western aesthetic values. (1) As the term suggests, the neo-conjure tale is reincarnation, an evolution of the conjure tale which has its origins in African oral traditions and the history of slavery. Chesnutt's 1899 publication, which collected seven conjure stories in one edition, serves as the major link in that chain of evolution. Chesnutt is rather modest in his essay Post-Bellum--Pre-Harlem about categorizing his work within the folktale tradition in an attempt to set himself apart from Joel Chandler Harris: name of the story teller, Julius, and the locale of the stories, as well as the cover design, were suggestive of Mr. Harris's Uncle Remus , but the tales are entirely different. They are sometimes referred to as folk tales, but while they employ much of the universal machinery of wonder stories, especially the metamorphosis, with one exception, that of the first story, The Goophered Grapevine, of which the norm was folktale, the stories are the fruit of my imagination, in which respect they differ from the Uncle Remus stories which are avowedly folk tales. (103) Richard Brodhead is also of the opinion that the tales in Conjure Woman are more accurately described as something other than folktales. He argues that Chesnutt's short stories easily fall into the postbellum local color tradition to which Mark Twain and Thomas Nelson Page belong. Situating Chesnutt among other southern regionalist writers, Brodhead supports his position by claiming, Chesnutt displays no resistance to [local color] conventions, makes no visible effort to revise them or struggle against their sway: all is compliance, so far as the surface appearance of these stories goes (6). Look beyond the surface, indeed. Conjure Woman, upon closer inspection, reveals that Chesnutt could cast literary spell of his own (12-13). His tales both conform to the local color/southern regional expectations and move beyond western literary altogether. Chesnutt certainly achieves mastery of [his] form's conventions as Brodhead suggests, but the more relevant question is: from what tradition of storytelling is he pulling? (6). An investigation into the narrative strategies Chesnutt employs reveals two different stories addressed to two distinct audiences. …
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