A Marriage between Tricksters: Literary Heritage in Charles W. Chesnutt's "The Wife of His Youth"

Abstract

A Marriage between Tricksters:Literary Heritage in Charles W. Chesnutt's "The Wife of His Youth" Yuki Miyazawa Charles W. Chesnutt expresses his outlook on creativity very clearly in the essay "Superstitions and Folk-Lore of the South" (1901). He notes that his knowledge of conjuration, a folk belief prevalent among African Americans in the southern US, provided "literary value" instead of a "sociological bearing" for his stories in The Conjure Woman (1899): Imagination . . . can only act upon data—one must have somewhere in his consciousness the ideas which he puts together to form a connected whole. Creative talent, of whatever grade, is, in the last analysis, only the power of rearrangement—there is nothing new under the sun. I was the more firmly impressed with this thought after I had interviewed half a dozen old women, and a genuine "conjure doctor;" for I discovered that the brilliant touches, due, I had thought, to my own imagination, were after all but dormant ideas, lodged in my childish mind by old Aunt This and old Uncle That, and awaiting only the spur of imagination to bring them again to the surface. (865) Here, "data" signifies the knowledge of African American folklore that Chesnutt acquired during his stay in North Carolina. In his short story collection, Chesnutt uses his knowledge of folklore to directly address the African American conjure tradition as noted by many scholars.1 He employs this mechanism in "Stories of the Color Line" and in the novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901). Eric J. Sundquist argues in his extensive study of ethnicity in American literature that although Chesnutt mentions his "curt personal belief that conjure [is] 'superstition'" (295), [End Page 271] he simultaneously "circles back, by the path of personal and historical memory, to merge his narrative art with the stories of the black ancestors" (297). It seems that writing fiction functioned as a way for Chesnutt to preserve racial memory. Chesnutt writes about the African American culture of the South, using features such as dialect and a folklore-based plot. Yet, he writes in a form adopted from European culture, sometimes quoting English and American writers such as Shakespeare, Tennyson, and Lincoln. Considering his statement that "one must have somewhere in his consciousness the ideas which he puts together to form a connected whole" (865), the European elements to which the characters sometimes refer, together with the African American elements, must be contemplated. An appropriate example of this notion can be found in "The Wife of His Youth" (1898), a well-known story that represents the African American and European sides of Chesnutt's own background. In this story, the protagonist Ryder is a mixed-race man who escapes from the South and becomes a member of a progressive society in the North by virtue of his pale skin and acquisition of knowledge about English literary culture. Later, he reunites with a black woman who used to be his wife back in the South. As Sundquist notes, English literary culture, which is evident from Ryder's direct quotations of Shakespeare and Tennyson, and, in a broader sense, his cultivated character, might be no more than something "laden with idealized notions borrowed from European culture" (301). The simultaneous use of the African American folklore of the southern US and European texts in "The Wife of His Youth" reflects Chesnutt's origins as a product of an environment filled with diverse cultures. Chesnutt's utilization of the two cultures as a cornerstone of his fiction evokes the concept of "double consciousness" proposed by W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois, Chesnutt's colleague at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), states in "Of Our Spiritual Strivings" (first published in 1897 as "Strivings of the Negro People"), Chapter 1 of The Souls of Black Folk (1903), that an African American is born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, [End Page 272] this sense of always looking at one's...