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Tuesday, April 05, 2005
An Historical Chesnutt
Admittedly, it was aeons ago in time as the internets know it. But let me return for a moment to the embarrassing story broken recently by Holly Jackson in The Boston Globe. As readers of the excellent Scott McLemee may remember, Jackson reported that Emma Dunham Kelly-Hawkins, author of Megda and Four Girls at Cottage City, and one of the novelists included in Henry Louis Gates’s Schomburg Library of Nineteenth Century Black Women Writers, was, as it turns out, not Black at all. Which cleared up a small literary mystery. For reasons that remain lost to history, some years ago Kelly-Hawkins gained the reputation of being a forgotten Black woman novelist. The fact that her uninspired novels feature young white woman undergoing the trials of courtship and Christian belief thus became a provocative question, and in recent years the republication of her novels inspired a minor academic cottage industry devoted to probing the issue. McLemee delivers a concise and embarrassing summary: Kelly-Hawkins’s novels questioned the codes of whiteness; fantasized about a world beyond race; undermined the idea of race altogether. Now the industry is over. Kelly-Hawkins was white, Christian, genteel. Not so surprising that her characters were too.
It’s a painful tale, but, of course, also a delightful one for anyone (and who isn’t?) given to academic schadenfreude. If there’s anything better than seeing academics make fools of themselves, it’s seeing just how industrious they can be in the effort. Lots of good fun and high dudgeon ensued in the blogosphere and much discussion about whether Jackson’s revelations showed a literary academy that had bankrupted itself in the neglect of aesthetics and the pursuit of historical or political relevance.
In the round of charge and countercharge, though, some interesting points got lost.
One is that Holly Jackson is herself a literary scholar—a Ph.D. candidate (at Brandeis) no less. Another is that her discovery was the product of impressive archival scholarship and a helping of plain good luck. If you were tempted to think that any fool could have avoided the mistake of misreading Kelly-Hawkins, it might be sobering to know that Jackson only corrected the mistake after a lot of scrupulous detective work and some serendipity.
In fact, if the story brought a shock of recognition, for me it was of the there-but-for-the-grace-of-god-go-I variety. Given how slim the historical record is for a lot of the writers rediscovered in the recent expansion of the literary canon, it’s surprising that there aren’t more such embarrassments.
What the whole contretemps shows, I think, isn’t that literary academics went wrong by becoming historicists rather than aestheticists. It’s that they’re (we’re) often not historically minded enough.
For decades and decades now, since long before Theory or political correctness, literary scholarship has given short shrift to philology. Literary academics are trained to appreciate and interpret literature, and they can be astonishingly inventive at the task. Indeed, the whole tendency of postmodern theory (Rorty, Butler) and of a lot of postmodern fiction (Pynchon) has been to stress the virtue of reinterpretation for its own sake. Keeping the ball bouncing, as Pynchon has it. In this context, you get points for ingenuity. But not often for the kind of work that Jackson so admirably did--getting down in the archive and looking for historical fact.
I mention all this because, well, it happens to fit my grand unified theory of literary academia. But really because I think it helps explain the relative neglect of a writer McLemee, rightly praises as an alternative to Kelly-Hawkins--Charles Chesnutt. As McLemee notes, Chesnutt’s fiction “actually contains all the irony and paradox that critics have laboriously contrived to uncover in Kelley-Hawkins’s novels, with their earnest tedium.” (See his fine review of the Library of America republication of Chesnutt here.) By any standard, he’s a great example of the success of the literary reclamation movement of recent years—a talented and accomplished African-American literary artist who achieved brief public success at the turn of the century before disappearing from view, quite directly because of the intensely racist politics of the day. Chesnutt’s career was all but literally cut short by the rise of Jim Crow, an outcome only the more poignant because he saw it coming and wrote subtly and with penetration about the political developments that were conspiring toward his doom. He seems like the perfect candidate for canonization and a natural analog for someone like Zora Neale Hurston (about whom, I suppose there’s not much doubt: literary history and American culture are better for her rediscovery). So, why hasn’t Chesnutt received the attention he deserves?
The short answer, I think, is that he’s not in fact really the perfect candidate for canonization. Not because he’s not an impressive fiction writer—he is!—but because he is, well, dated. Chesnutt was a realist, in the school of his sometime patron (who abandoned him when the chips were down), William Dean Howells. Like Howells, another fine writer rarely read these days, and others among the turn of the century crowd who published in The Atlantic, Chesnutt valued subtly, irony, refinement and placed his political as well as literary hopes in the judgment of discerning elites and the virtuously restraining powers of custom. That turned out to be a bad bet. Come the lynching wave that broke over the south in the 1890s and the disenfranchisement campaigns that accompanied it and inaugurated the Jim Crow era, the gentle readers of The Atlantic had little to say. Subtlety and refinement proved to be flimsy reeds against the tide of racial fury that passed over the American south.
Chesnutt’s most ambitious, and uneven, novel, The Marrow of Tradition (1901)—acknowledges the fact. And it’s a heartbreaking book to read, especially knowing in retrospect that the novel was bound for undeserved obscurity. Marrow offers a fictional account of the Wilmington race riot of 1899—more like a coup d’etat--in which radical white racists overthrew the legally elected government of the city and ran a prominent African American editor out of town. Interestingly, though, Chesnutt’s emphasis falls not on the terror of the riot, but on the complex social interactions that characterize the town before racial violence utterly transforms it. Depicting a wide canvas of white and black characters joined by blood, custom, commerce, and professional affiliation, Chesnutt shows it all then wiped away in a single convulsive moment of terror.
For Chesnutt, the point isn’t that the post-Reconstruction South before the creation of Jim Crow was an egalitarian or just place. But then, he was no egalitarian. (Musing on the possible alternatives to Jim Crow, his protagonist thinks that, if there must be social demarcation it should occur on rational grounds—those of class.) The point for Chesnutt rather seems to be that the paternalist, custom dominated South preserved some promise of a more tolerant, integrated future—if only white and black elites would work together to create it. As it turns out, that was just not going to happen.
For all his virtues, and they are many, after the history of Jim Crow, Chesnutt’s attitude looks plain antiquated—a path neither political nor literary history took. And that’s why he can be read with interest now, but not with the kind of emotional power that a writer like Hurston elicits. Frankly, I think, he cared little about culture or identity (the kind of stuff that the readers of Kelly-Hawkins obsess over) and a lot about society. As I say, bad bet.
I teach Marrow often to students who you might expect would latch on this kind of thing. But it never happens without prodding. Chesnutt just doesn’t make sense to them. One feature of the book in particular reveals the problem. Chesnutt’s novel includes a decadent scion of the plantocracy, Tom Delamere, who dresses up in black face and performs a cakewalk, first to entertain a visiting delegation of northern industrialists and then to conceal his robbery and murder of an old maiden aunt. The subterfuge is successful. When a young white journalist, Lee Ellis, sees Tom in black face, he immediately assumes that he’s a black man, even though he’s got good reason to do otherwise.
When they see that cakewalk, my students invariably say—a ha!—it’s the Elvis syndrome: white guys ripping off black culture. But that’s not Chesnutt’s concern. What matters to him about black face isn’t that it’s about love and theft (as Eric Lott might put it). What he cares about is the way white racists fabricate demagogic images of African-Americans to pursue illicit ends. The tragedy of his novel is indicated, among other ways, by the fact that Lee Ellis—the young journalist, a child of Quakers with no nostalgia for slavery, an ostensibly tolerant and educated man—is so easily duped, in good part because it fits his material interests and social ambitions. The terrible point for Chesnutt, in other words, is that an educated elite so easily falls for the illusions of race and culture, thereby neglecting their civic responsibilities. Hard though it is to imagine his perspective having much force in the contemporary world, on the evidence of the reception history of Emma Kelly-Hawkins, he had a point.
Comments
Has Chesnutt been neglected? I know you’re speaking in relative terms, but there are 264 entries in the electronic MLA index, 300 in JSTOR, and 106 in Project Muse (plus an additional eight for “Charles Chestnutt"). A Worldcat keyword search yields 573 results.
There’s overlap, obviously, there; and I’m not suggesting that the above constitutes “the attention he deserves” by any means. But that’s still an impressive amount of scholarship.
Jonathan,
I had the same question when I read that. I’m writing about Chesnutt and have an impressive pile of photocopies, but I think Sean’s general point speaks to the recent neglect of works written by Howells and other “genteel realists.” As someone working in that period and on some of those authors, I’ve noticed that more than (and this is a rough estimate) 75% of those citations consist of no more than a quick dismissal of Chesnutt as a “naive realist” (especially if the article’s about post-modern African-American fiction or identity) or a reference to his “specular whiteness,” etc.
Thanks, A. Cephalous. That puts what I mean exactly.
Sean:
I appreciate very much how your reading here avoids polemics, esp. the Sokal hoax trope other critics have pulled. All of us could afford to acknowledge our own falliability.
Could you possibly expand on a distinction you make? When you say, “he cared little about culture or identity (the kind of stuff that the readers of Kelly-Hawkins obsess over) and a lot about society,” I imagine the K-H reader who obsesses on culture & identity thinks they are talking about society, & thinks that the key for understanding society is through culture & identity. Could you please say more about this?
No doubt there’s a lot of parsing of the terms to be done, Lawrence. But I meant simply the classic distinction between culture and society, as in Raymond Williams, or, in the romantic tradition, between culture and civiliation.
For the purposes of talkign about a writer like Chesnutt, I think it’s enough to say that society is the stuff that can be treated by the novel of manners. In other words, “naive realism,” as Cephalous says. Culture, and race, in contemporary life are almost always cast as deep and mysterious by contrast--even when, as in literary academia, they’re being endlessly “probelmatized.” My point is that a writer like Chesnutt can look trivial in a context where culture seems an ineffable, profound, and fatal inheritance, but that this is a casual misread.
Very intriguing. My personal opinion is that where history no longer applies (or can apply), then aesthetics ought to take over as a judging criteria. I certainly think that the mission to historically base literary works is a good one, but ultimately perhaps impractical. Of course in the case of mistaking an identity, it’s an exception. Yet these are just my thoughts, some of my responses to this really good post. Though I hope I read it right and got what you were trying to say.
Thanks for this. I was interested by the way that some reacted to the Kelly-Hawkins re-re-discovery by suggesting that there was nothing interesting to say about her anymore, and that she might as well be returned to the dustbin of history.
But here I take you to be saying that Chestnutt is also a good example of how African American writers read and interacted with contemporary white writers. To understand Chestnutt, as you put it, you have to understand Howells and the writers in the Atlantic Monthly. And who’s to say that Kelly-Hawkins might usefully add to our understanding of her contemporaries too?
Of course this observation does not justify the cottage industry of gymnastic scholarship that has been devoted to Kelly-Hawkins. But it does warrant a certain wariness around anyone who says that a writer, once discovered to be white, has nothing to tell us about the development of a black literary canon.
[Ed.—Obviously, for that last sentence in the penultimate paragraph to be properly rhetorical, there should be a “not” inserted after “might."]