Chesnutt’s Evolving Treatment of the Color Line Through Naturalism
in “A Matter of Principle” and The House Behind the Cedar’s
Charles W. Chesnutt, a well-educated mulatto man, lived his life on ‘the color line.’ Chesnutt’s skin was very light and was sometimes mistaken for a white man. Chesnutt chose to identify himself as a black man, but in his works, his characters move back and forth across the color line and struggle with the world they exist in. The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line was published one year before The House Behind the Cedars and included the short story, “A Matter of Principle,” where Chesnutt clearly begins to explore what options are available to a mulatto man and his family, which will later evolve in Cedars. Chesnutt incorporates his philosophy of literary naturalism to show John Walden, Rena, and Mr. Clayton in relation to their surroundings and as governed by their instincts, passions, heredity and environment.
The physical nature of a person carried great weight in the South. Both John Walden and Cicero Clayton are very light mulatto men with good educations, wealth, and clear ideas about how the world should work, mostly in their favor. The South Carolina society in which they exist considers the men black, despite their outer appearance and treats them as such. This treatment is often base and degrading causing the men to feel that they have been harmed by the small amount of black blood coursing in their veins. The reader is told that as a young boy, John Walden thinks that “the mirror proved that God, the Father of all, had made him white…having made him white, He must have meant him to be white” (The House Behind the Cedars 107) . The stories reveal John and Clayton’s u...
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...erican Literature." Literary Movements. (Updated 02/22/03). (Accessed 12/08/03). <http://www.gonzaga.edu/faculty/campbell/enl413/natural.htm>.
Chesnutt, Charles W. “A Matter of Principle.” The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line. NC: U of NC at Chapel Hill Electronic Edition, 1997.
Chesnutt, Charles W. The House Behind the Cedars. NY: Penguin, 1993.
Chesnutt, Charles W. “Letter to George Washington Cable.” 25, July 1890. “To Be an Author.” Eds. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., and Robert C. Leitz, III. NJ: Princeton UP, 1997.
Duncan, Charles. The Absent Man: The Narratives of Charles W. Chesnutt. Athens: Ohio UP, 1998.
Works Consulted
Keller, Frances Richardson. An American Crusade: The Life of Charles Waddell Chesnutt. Utah: BYU P, 1978.
Wonham, Henry B. Charles W. Chesnutt: A Study of the Short Fiction. NY: Twayne Publishers, 1998.
George Browm Tindall, David Emory Shi. American History: 5th Brief edition, W. W. Norton & Company; November 1999
Robinson, Daniel. "Getting It Right: The Short Fiction of Tim O'Brien." Studies in Contemporary Fiction. 40.3 (1999): 257. Expanded Academic ASAP.
The work, the Souls of Black Folk explains the problem of color-line in the twentieth century. Examining the time following the civil war the author, W.E.B. Dubois, explains the African American experience of living behind the “veil”. To fully explain the experience of living behind the veil, he provides the reader with situations that a black race experiences in reconstruction. This allowed the readers to metaphorically step into the veil with him. He accomplishes this with the use of “songs of sorrow” with were at the beginning of each chapter, and with the use of anecdotes.
Gates, Henry Louis, and Nellie Y. McKay. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2004. Print.
"Unit 2: Reading & Writing About Short Fiction." ENGL200: Composition and Literature. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2011. 49-219. Web. 19 Apr. 2014.
May, C. E. (2012). Critical Survey of Short Fiction: World Writers (4th ed.). Ipswich: Salem Press.
Studies In Short Fiction 18.1 (1981): 65. Literary Reference Center. Web. The Web. The Web.
In the story, “The Wife of His Youth,” Chestnutt describes the racial discrimination in America. The author utilizes the primary characters as a gateway to reveal hypocrisy in declaring social equity and identity. Mr. Ryder runs away from his black heritage to become a part in a white society, while his wife from slavery uses her past to assert her faithfulness to her husband. The writer uses Mr. Ryder to reveal hypocrisy in social equity. Sam Taylor was a light skinned slave before the civil war. While his wife was at home cooking, he was always at the field working. During the civil war, he managed to escaped and moved up to north. After being free in north he decided to change his name to Mr. Ryder and joined the group called Blue Veins. Blue
There is some evidence that connects our protagonist's line of thinking with his upbringing. Our protagonist's mother tells him, "The best blood of the South is in you," (page 8) when the child asks whom his father is. Clearly, his mother was proud of (and perhaps still in love with) this genteel white man who gave her a son. So his bold pronouncements make much sense in light of his own condition.
Internal conflict caused by culture is a concept that Edward Hall explores in his book “Beyond Culture”. In this examination of intercultural interactions, Hall argues that people are born into the cultural prison of one’s primary culture. He then goes on to claim that from people can only be free of this prison and experiencing being lost in another (Hall). For Coates, this cultural prison is the permeating fear resulting from the blackness of his body. His internal conflict is therefore created when seeing the world of white, suburban culture. Because this world of pot-roasts and ice cream Sundays seems impossibly distant from the world of fear for his black body, Coates comes to feel the contrast of cultures. He tells his son, “I knew my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was not” (21). As a result of the shocking divide, Coates comprehends the burden of his race. Coates therefore feels “a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an biding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape (21). The quality of life between the culture belonging to Coates’s skin in contrast to the culture of suburban America creates for Coates a sense of otherness between himself and the rest of the world. Disillusioned, Coates avidly pursues answers to this divide. Coates thereby embarks on a quest to satiate this internal conflict of cultures, beginning his journey towards
...by Charles W. Mills, the author attempts to provide an explanation for the way that race plays a role in our society, and how it has reached this particular point. Not only does Mills’ work provide some explanation in regards to this matter, but other notable texts and documents connect to his ideas as well, such as Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s, “Racial Formation in the United States,” and the remarks made by Abraham Lincoln in “The Lincoln-Douglas Debates.”
James, Johson Weldon. Comp. Henry Louis. Gates and Nellie Y. McKay. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2004. 832. Print.
A dialectic is the process of synthesizing truth by holding contradictory ideas in tension. Since Richard Wright’s short story “Long Black Song” and Zora Neale Hurston’s short story “Sweat” have opposing arguments they must engage in a dialectic. Both stories examine the oppression of the African American race, but they find different sources for its difficulties and demise. In “Long Black Song”, Silas, while expressing his frustration for the superiority of the white men, articulates that the black woman is the source of African American difficulties. In “Sweat”, Sykes’s encounter with death reveals that the African American man’s arrogance is the cause of the demise of the African American race. Wright’s short story “Long Black Song” and Hurston’s short story “Sweat” engage in a dialectic, in which “Sweat” repudiates “Long Black Song”, and produce the truth that one’s hubris that is the source of the difficulties of one’s race and the demise of oneself.
Evans, Robert C., Anne C. Little, and Barbara Wiedemann. Short Fiction: A Critical Companion. West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill, 1997. 265-270.
Music is a form of entertainment for many people. It has the ability to affect our emotions whether that be making us happy, sad, or just mellow.. It can even cause us to alter physically in some fashion.. Music can have an overwhelming outcome on the emotional, social, intellectual, and physical status of an individual. However, I think that music has the biggest impact on the emotional state of a person. Music can provoke emotions such as: depression, misery and joy. There are several different aspects of music that contribute to how a song is interpreted. Among them is the tempo, which is the speed of the song. If a song is sad, the tempo is often slower. If a song is meant to be happy, the tempo is quick and upbeat. If the motive of the song is to bring about fear, it is either extremely slow, or grave and can transition to allegro which is a quicker tempo and can get the adrenaline pumping. Another factor of interpretation is the key it is in. A key is, “a particular scale or system of tones” (Dictionary.com). There are 24 different keys in music; 12 major keys and 12 minor keys. Each key can be put together in some form or fashion to create a tune that appeals to a different