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Remolding the Minstrel Mask: Linguistic Violence and Resistance in Charles Chesnutt's Dialect Fiction

Rued, Nichole M
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1431971758

Abstract Details

2015, Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, English/Literature.
When Charles Chesnutt entered the American literary sphere in the late 1800s, the nation was rife with racial turmoil following the Civil War. Both North and South attempted to rebuild economically and socially, making technological innovations such as the Transcontinental Railroad, and instituting Jim Crow laws aimed at limiting black social and economic mobility. Along with such rebuilding, though, came revisions of history—particularly, of slavery and the plantation system—through popular culture: literature, the continuing popularity of blackface minstrel shows, and film. The blackface minstrel stage and writers like Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page worked to romanticize slavery’s narrative in writing plantation fiction: works set on the plantation, written largely to represent the writers’ versions of black speech and culture. Harris and Page’s works put forth a longing for a past that consisted of white benevolent paternalism and black subservience. Charles Chesnutt draws on the plantation fiction tradition in his works and uses several of the same mechanisms, like the representation of black speech and often, the plantation setting, in order to subvert the plantation myth. In the project that follows, I examine the role of Chesnutt’s dialect representations in The Conjure Tales and The Marrow of Tradition. I argue that rather than simply participating in dialect fiction, Chesnutt innovates within it; he uses dual meanings in the respellings of his words, legitimizes black orality, and represents a spectrum of dialect differences. This undermines the happy darky stereotype and de-hierarchizes racial structures constructed by plantation fiction and the plantation myth. Chesnutt breaks minstrel and dialect fiction tropes; while he draws on the exaggerated black speech of minstrelsy and plantation fiction, he effectively disrupts its subjugation of blacks and forges a unique, coded version of black dialect.
Bill Albertini, Dr. (Advisor)
Jolie Sheffer, Dr. (Advisor)
Robert Wallace, Dr. (Committee Member)
84 p.
Literature
Chesnutt; Charles Chesnutt; signifying; minstrelsy; dialect; dialect fiction; literature; African American literature; slavery; blackness; vernacular; plantation fiction; conjure tales

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Rued, N. M. (2015). Remolding the Minstrel Mask: Linguistic Violence and Resistance in Charles Chesnutt's Dialect Fiction [Master's thesis, Bowling Green State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1431971758

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Rued, Nichole. Remolding the Minstrel Mask: Linguistic Violence and Resistance in Charles Chesnutt's Dialect Fiction. 2015. Bowling Green State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1431971758.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Rued, Nichole. "Remolding the Minstrel Mask: Linguistic Violence and Resistance in Charles Chesnutt's Dialect Fiction." Master's thesis, Bowling Green State University, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1431971758

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

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This open access ETD is published by Bowling Green State University and OhioLINK.