Abstract
This article explores an African American writer’s revision of a famous English poet Tennyson whose versified medieval portrait of the Arthurian legend appears in Idylls of the King as well as other poems. The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line (1899), a story collection by African American author Charles Chesnutt (1858–1932), addresses parameters contextualized in the aftermath of slavery such as esthetic notions of beauty tied to whiteness and intra-racial inequality. The final failure of two protagonists, a man and a woman, to fulfill their romantic aspirations of whiteness connects the collection’s titular story to “Cecily’s Dream.” In addition to the color-line theme, however, Chesnutt is motivated to refer to the poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892), including moments in which chivalric codes of honor, whiteness and flawed courtly love are idealized. Tennyson’s parabolic poems provide Chesnutt’s intertextual scheme to engage the implied reader by renewing, transforming and also subverting the motif of courtly love in these Arthurian idylls.
Highlights
The constructive, dialectical relationship between literary texts reflects a significant and diachronic need to relate to mythical foundations of culture
Tennyson’s and Chesnutt’s self-reflective impulses reveal themselves to be in a dialogue with many other canonical texts
This paper aims to show how two stories by Chesnutt are germane to and partially derived from plots and figures of Tennyson’s poetry by analyzing the intertextual significance of the reworked medieval materials in Tennyson which Chesnutt in turn revised in his frequently anthologized short story “The Wife of his Youth” as well as his lesserknown story “Cicely’s Dream.”3 The interpretation attempts a layered, 3 The number of scholars exploring “The Wife of his Youth,” which names and cites Tennyson, is plentiful while no scholar has given any attention to the literary reverberations of Tennyson in “Cicely’s Dream.”
Summary
The constructive, dialectical relationship between literary texts reflects a significant and diachronic need to relate to mythical foundations of culture. Tennyson’s and Chesnutt’s self-reflective impulses reveal themselves to be in a dialogue with many other canonical texts. In spite of his humble origins, Charles W. In the aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction, lynching and the reduction of civil rights for blacks became commonplace Chesnutt established his fiction as an agent of change to lift up white Americans’ behavior by entertaining white addressees while it only adumbrates the idea of racial social justice. Chesnutt’s stories do not employ vituperative discourse common to protest fiction to expose evil practices nor do they fervidly expound the case for equality. In “The Wife of His Youth,” the social circles of upper crust African
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