In A Matter of Complexion: The Life and Fictions of Charles W. Chesnutt (St. Martin’s, Feb.), the Bowdoin College literature professor chronicles the life of novelist Charles W. Chesnutt.
How did Chesnutt’s style compare with the broader literary movements of his era?
Chesnutt wrote during what literary critics now call the birth of American realism, alongside authors like William Dean Howells and Mark Twain. He was writing very much in that style, but because he was writing from a different perspective—that of someone living among poor Black people in the South—the vernacular that he used followed a different method. With realism, the objective was to transcribe the way people really spoke, instead of the caricatures in, say, sentimental fiction from the previous era. The cool thing about Chesnutt was that he worked as a stenographer and a shorthand legal reporter, so he’d been doing that for years, and that’s how he came to literature. He understood the oral patterns of the Black vernacular in a way that other realists like Twain and Howells didn’t.
Race featured prominently in Chesnutt’s writings, even as he lamented that Black writers were often “burdened with the responsibility of defending and uplifting his race.” Can you untangle how Chesnutt thought about the relationship between fiction and race?
He was trying to show what race was doing to people on both sides of the color line by writing about the ways in which race negatively shaped the lives of his characters. He does this in his novel The Marrow of Tradition, which, insofar as it has a main character, follows a white supremacist, Major Carteret. You get inside Carteret’s head as Chesnutt’s trying to work out who this guy is, expecting not that you’ll feel sympathy for him, but that you’ll see how he’s boxed in by his commitment to race.
Why do you think Chesnutt isn’t as well remembered today as the Harlem Renaissance writers he influenced?
The Harlem Renaissance really did take over, and Chesnutt didn’t fit in with those writers, partly because he saw them as celebrating race in a way that was having a negative effect on what he understood as progress, which he equated with the dissolution of the color line. He saw the Harlem Renaissance celebration of Black culture as a step backward. Critics today have used the Renaissance as a beginning for African American literature, and Chesnutt was not part of it. In one of his final speeches, Chesnutt calls himself a “pre-Harlem, postbellum writer.” He couldn’t quite find a spot for himself, and so he was seen as fathering a renaissance, even as he was ambivalent about doing so. I think he isn’t remembered because critics and teachers don’t know exactly where to place him.
