Charles Chesnutt's Cultural Exchange: Race and the Reading of Melodrama in "Her Virginia Mammy"

Abstract

Late nineteenth-century African-American literature is undergoing a renaissance, signaled by both the re-publication of fiction and non-fiction at academic presses and increased scholarly attention to works of such turn-of-the-century writers as Frances Harper, Pauline Hopkins, and Charles Chesnutt.1 Within the last fifteen years, many critics have successfully situated these texts within African-American cultural traditions. Yet expressive forms like sentimentalism and melodrama that are central to much popular mainstream literature and to Harper's, Hopkins's, and Chesnutt's writing have not drawn as much serious attention. In spite of Hazel Carby's, Carla Peterson's, and Claudia Tate's intelligent treatments of sentimental and melodramatic AfricanAmerican women's texts, great doubt remains about whether melodrama's formulas can bear the weight of the serious issues, such as racial disharmony and social alienation, that turn-of-thecentury African-American writers insistently portrayed. Countering such limiting appraisals is necessary if we are to see individual works and their possible cultural effects more completely. Closely examining Chesnutt's Her Virginia Mammy (1899), a short story about a biracial woman's passing into white society, sheds light both on melodrama's complicated narrative mechanisms and on its complex address to readers. Indeed, like other melodramas of cultural transgression, such as Sui Sin Far's The Wisdom of the New, Chesnutt's story illustrates melodrama's capacity to speak to different audiences by presenting and affirming conceptions of character and moral values that would seem to be diametrically opposed. In many ways, however, Her Virginia Mammy seems to confirm many critics' and readers' assumptions about melodrama's tendency to offer a formulaic, unambiguous rendering of experience that plays to audience members' facile emotions. Like other melodramas of racial passing, Her Virginia Mammy foregrounds a biracial protagonist's efforts to suppress her complex racial heritage and to identify herself as white. And like such popular maternal melodramas as East Lynne, Stella Dallas, and Imitation of Life,