Essay Questions

In what way is Chesnutt’s book an authoritative example of the transformation of literary tastes from romance to realism which defined turn of the century America?

Along with Chesnutt’s book, the year 1899 brought the publication of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, McTeague by Frank Norris, Stephen Crane’s novella The Monster and the serialization of Heart of Darkness. The 20th century was prepared to kiss goodbye forever to the sentimentalized view of real life which dominated 19th century fiction. As Chopin did with sexuality and gender, Chesnutt introduced realism to the stories of slavery and plantation. While many of his readers didn’t realize it at the time, they were being introduced to a vision of plantation life that devastated the silly but dangerous precedent set by the beloved Uncle Remus tales and their view of slave life so sentimentalized that many northerners actually became convinced slaves were treated like a part of the family.

How does Chesnutt avoid didacticism yet still manage to persistently (and subtly) reveal the fundamental essence of slavery being dehumanization?

If there is one that Chesnutt is not, it is didactic. He wields his subtle brilliance at irony like an invisible sword that slices through expectations before the reader even realizes its been pulled from its sheath. These stories persistently and effectively convey the necessity for dehumanizing slaves in order to allow people to treat them as slaves. To wit: one character is transformed into a tree in order so that male and female slave may not be separated from each other. In another story, a man is first turned into a mule and then when the attempt is made to return him to human form, the conjuring is incomplete and he is left with a club foot as a reminder of his time as an animal. A slave mother’s newborn infant is traded by her owner for a horse. When wrongfully accused of theft, a slave is forced to wear the stolen ham around his neck which is referred to as “Dave’s Neckliss.” Dave is never the same afterward and eventually comes to believe he actually is a hunk of pork. At nearly every point along the way and in an astonishing variety of ways, Chesnutt works his plots to the point where a slave faces another humiliating example of being dehumanized.

How does Chesnutt construct his “framing story” to mirror the process of white readers understanding the true meaning at play in the tales told by Uncle Julius?

Each of the stories begins and ends with the narration of John. He and his wife Annie are two white northerners who have bought an old southern plantation house at which an old man named Uncle Julius was previously a slave. John relates an event which stirs a memory from Julius who then launches into a flashback narrative told in deep and difficult slave dialect. When Julius ends his story, the narrative switches back to John and invariably there is a distinction between how John reacts to the story and how Annie reacts to it. In most cases, John’s reaction mirrors the reaction of a first reading which misses the nuance and irony. Annie, on the other hand, represents either the reading of a more critically engaged audience or—more likely—the perception of someone who has gone back to read the story a second time. Few white readers either then or now would be likely to get the complexity of any individual story on a first reading. And most readers—no matter their color or background—can even hope of fully understanding all the hidden meanings and subtly shaded codings of meaning that Julius delivers in his seemingly simple tales.