Charles W. Chesnutt's Subtle Critiques Of The Plantation Tradition

Sameer Kapur
Ieva Padgett
English 210W-001
February 24th, 2015
Charles W. Chesnutt 's Subtle Critiques of the Plantation Tradition Prior to the American Civil War, Southerners were seen as a very distinct type of people. Regardless of the many depictions and stereotypes people had towards the Pre-Civil War South, one could not argue with the fact that Southerners possessed their own unique set of values and cultural ideals. As the South was plunged into social, economic, and political turmoil following the Civil War and the ban on slavery, the culture of the "Old South" was thrown into contestation. In response to this threatening movement, Southern authors popularized the plantation tradition genre of Southern writing. This genre, catapulted
Notably, Chesnutt was of mixed-raced, a phenomenon that would be heavily reflected in his work. Being a mixed-race man from the North, Chesnutt thought of the plantation tradition genre to be somewhat skewed, as it did not give a fair representation of African-Americans. However, Chesnutt’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin and Company, declined to publish his “non-plantation tradition,” and swayed his works in the direction of this genre in order to increase readership. Under these circumstances, Chesnutt introduced his own version of the plantation tradition genre, which can be seen in his short story collection called The Conjuring Woman and Chesnutt’s short story “The Passing of Grandison.” On the surface, Chesnutt 's short stories seem to embody the various elements of plantation tradition, yet they are subtlety subversive to it as his stories critique the racial ideologies embedded in the
The first option was to write traditional plantation tales that would be published and receive positive feedback from white readers. His second option was to sacrifice commercial sales and write groundbreaking but unpopular stories that would clearly denounce the traditional depiction of African-Americans and portray them as superior or equal to whites. Chesnutt chose a middle ground, where he wrote stories that followed the conventions of the plantation tradition, yet he subtly critiqued the traditional view of African-Americans. Chesnutt’s success in changing contemporary sentiment towards African-Americans is difficult to determine, but one can easily imagine how the faint messages Chesnutt made regarding race could fail to register with most white readers. In a speech Chesnutt gave in 1928, he said "My books were written, from one point of view, a generation too soon. There was no such demand then as there is now for books by and about colored people." Social change often is only realized well after the movement, as is the case with many of Chesnutt’s literary works. His messages regarding race-relations may not have been fully heard during his lifetime, but his influence on twentieth-century African-American literature and the advancements of African-Americans in the United States are