Elements of the Fantastic in the Short Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt

Jan Stievermann Elements of the Fantastic in the Short Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt Around the turn of the twentieth century, Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932) was one of the most prominent African American authors in the U.S., and the first to be widely respected by the white literary establishment.1 After a period of neglect, Chesnutt also found scholarly recognition as a founding fa- ther of African American fiction, who skillfully adapted conventional modes of Euro-American literature to engage with issues of race and expose the inherent violence of the segregation regime (see Render, Andrews, Duncan, McWilliams, Izzo, and Orban). His novels, especially The House Behind the Ce- dars (1900) and The Marrow of Tradition (1901), are increasingly appreciated as early black masterpieces in that genre. Chesnutt’s short fiction is even more widely read and celebrated. His reputation as a virtuoso of the short form rests on two collections of magazine stories, both published in 1899: The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line and The Conjure Woman. While the stories in the first collection blend elements of sentimentalism and social realism in the service of black protest, those gathered in The Conjure Woman are usually thought of as critical variations of the then highly successful “Ameri- can plantation tradition,” as exemplified by Joel Chandler Harris. These tales of plantation life in the antebellum and Reconstruction period struck a chord with Chesnutt’s (predominantly white) contemporary audience and helped to establish his reputation as an author. But the conjure tales also continue to at- tract academic scholars, who have long discovered the subversive modulations that Chesnutt applied to the topoi of the plantation tradition. This essay will argue that The Conjure Woman deserves our interest for yet another reason. With the short stories in that collection, Chesnutt pioneered the specific narrative form of what I call the “ethnic fantastic,” and he first ex- plored its critical potential (Stievermann, “Towards a Theory of the Ethnic Fan- tastic”). As will be discussed in the first section, I take the term “ethnic fantastic” to refer to a specific form of supernatural fiction—especially short fiction— that creatively combined a mode of narrative ambiguity originally developed by Euro-American writers with elements from ethnic minority religions and 1 My interest in the topic of this essay goes back to the first seminar I co-taught with Bernd Engler in the winter semester of 2002 on “The Fantastic in American Literature.” © Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 2019 | doi:10.30965/9783657701728_009 104 Jan Stievermann folk traditions. The second section will then examine Chesnutt’s specific use of this form in select examples of his conjure tales, leading to some concluding thoughts on the development of the “ethnic fantastic” in the twentieth century. 1. The (Ethnic) Fantastic In the U.S. the fantastic is not usually recognized as a distinct type of supernatural (short) fiction or a specific mode of narration. In common parlance and, unfortunately in a lot of scholarly writing, too, the fantastic and fantasy are often used interchangeably, with both terms used as catch-all categories for any kind of fiction violating the ground rules of literary realism and con- taining elements of the supernatural. Thus texts from a range of historical genres, including the Gothic, the literary folk tale, the Victorian ghost story, or, more recently, magical realism, and horror fiction have been variably and indiscriminately associated with both terms (Bowers). Expanding on insights from nineteenth-century literary authors, such as Charles Nodier, Fyodor Dos- toevsky, and Henry James, as well as from other scholars, notably Louis Vax and Roger Caillois, the Bulgarian-French structuralist critic Tzvetan Todorov first made a convincing case in his Introduction á la literature fantastique (1970; first translated into English in 1973) that the term fantastic should be re- served for a very particular mode of narration that over the course of the long nineteenth century became quite popular among authors of short fiction. In literary studies in Europe (in particular France and Germany), Todorov’s un- derstanding did gain some traction and a whole line of critics have worked with, revised, and expanded upon his definitions (see, for example, Pennig, Durst, Ruthner, Reber, and May). In the world of Anglo-American scholar- ship, on the other hand, this is not the case, although many of the paradig- matic texts that Todorov included in his definition were actually written in English. If my own work follows this Todorovian tradition (even though with- out accepting all of his assumptions or conclusions), it is because I believe that viewing the fantastic as something sui generis helps us recognize the aesthetic and epistemological effect as well as potential cultural work of a considerable body of supernatural fiction written across different periods by authors from very diverse backgrounds. According to Todorov and other scholars who have followed in his footsteps, the literary fantastic historically developed as an offshoot of realist fiction—in the broadest sense of the term—in the late eighteenth century. It is generally thought to have had its heyday during the long nineteenth century before the arrival of high modernism. Among the great authors of the Romantic period .

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