Charles Chestnutt
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The historical and sociopolitical context of Charles W. Chesnutts The Marrow of Tradition is the legacy of Reconstruction, and – more specifically – the circumstances surrounding what H. Leon Prather calls the “Wilmington Racial Massacre and Coup of 1898.” This tradition is what the title of the novel primarily refers to – a tradition whose marrow is colonial racism. Eric Sundquist, in his To Wake the Nations, gives The Marrow of Tradition the recognition it deserves, as “probably the most astute political-historical novel of its day,” not just in its rendering of the Wilmington Racial Massacre, but in its illumination of the sociopolitical context that produced both the massacre and the novel itself (13). Precisely because Chesnutt was so heavily constrained – as a writer and as a black man – by the same material conditions he sought to illuminate and critique, his great, ambitious novel of protest also became agonizingly self-critical. The work of historical revision it contributes to, however, was – and continues to be – invaluable. Raymond Williams writes that “tradition” is the “most evident expression” of the hegemony of the dominant class, “an intentionally selective version of a shaping past and a pre-shaped present”; therefore, “the most accessible and influential work of the counter-hegemony is historical . . . recovery [and] redress” (115-16). Williams also writes, however, that “creative practice” of this political-historical kind is always a “difficult remaking of an inherited (determined) practical consciousness . . . a struggle at the roots of the mind” (212). The Marrow of Tradition is the product of this “struggle” within Chesnutts own mind; the tragedy of the novel lies in his recognition of the futility of his labor, how the hegemony of Southern “tradition” is perpetuated in the very marrow of white (and black) consciousness in the South.
The novel begins with the birth of Theodore Felix Carteret, who embodies Major Carterets “dearest hope” – “to have children to perpetuate the name of which he was so proud, to write it still higher on the roll of honor” (2). And the historical and socioeconomic meaning of the Carteret family “name” and the Majors desire to “perpetuate” it are succinctly encapsulated some pages later; the Major, now the editor of the Morning Chronicle,