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Writing at a time when publishing was the privilege of a white literary establishment and with a mostly white audience, Charles Chesnutt must have wrestled with the question of how to fictionalize a sensitive subject such as slavery without alienating a large segment of his audience.1 He must also have wrestled with the question of how to expose the cruelty of slavery to an audience that was morally implicated in a morally flawed institution, but whose patronage he depended upon for his writing career. His motive for writing must have been problematic as well. Thanks to his daughter, Helen M. Chesnutt, we know that his literary motive was political. In her biography of her father, Helen Chesnutt reveals that he saw the role of a black author as giving black people "recognition and equality" through literature and "accustom[ing] the public mind to the idea" of recognition and equality for black people (21; see also Gates 116, 271). For Chesnutt, writing literature was necessary not only for aesthetic satisfaction but also for the potential to ignite social activism; he believed that literature was to be used to create "a desired state of feeling" (21).
The objective of this essay therefore is twofold: to explore Chesnutt's political motives in "The Passing of Grandison" and to present the proposition that in this story Chesnutt uses fictional characters and their ethnicity to communicate a profound political message. Therefore, this essay looks at a story that seems disarmingly simple but contains engaging ideologies. In "The Passing of Grandison," Chesnutt presents a slave character whose strange behavior helps to dramatize the horrors of slavery as well as the triumph of the individual's imagination. Chesnutt's naturalism charms the reader; his craft invites a willing suspension of outrage and indignation. Just as Chesnutt's hero engages in his own struggles in a civilization fraught with contradictions, the reader also engages in a struggle to unravel interesting textual contrarieties.
The idea that Chesnutt privileges an African worldview in a peculiarly American story may be hard for some critics to accept. It may be argued that Chesnutt could not have set out deliberately to depict an Afrocentric worldview in the story of Grandison because he was writing for a white audience, and that since little public...