Charles W. Chesnutt'sThe Colonel's Dream:The Failure of Critical Realism

Abstract

C. Vann Woodward, in hisOrigins of the New South, suggestively links the economic revival in the South in the late 19th century with a literary revival, a revival that he judges as distinctly inferior to its economic counterpart: “For all the shortcomings and the comparative brevity of the revival … the Southern writers undeniably possessed solid virtues. Among them, however, one will search in vain for a realistic portrayal of their own times … the writers were too preoccupied with the quaint ‘types’ of the hinterland to notice what was going on in their own parlors” (164). Preoccupied with a nostalgic vision of region, Southern writers failed, it is generally agreed, to represent significant social changes in realistic terms. More recently, Jules Chametzky has echoed Vann Wood-ward's observation when he wrote that “local color and regionalism … became … toward the end of the nineteenth century, a strategy, largely, for ignoring or minimizing social issues of great significance” (21). Of course, not all local colorists ignored or minimized these issues – only those who I've taken to calling “weak local colorists.” Writers like Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris looked back, nostalgically, to a romanticized past; in flight from their present, they used the plantation past as a way of attempting to justify the status quo in the South at the turn of the centnry.