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Vernacular Soliloquy, Theatrical Gesture, and Embodied Consciousness in The Marrow of Tradition
- Author(s):
- Nicholas Rinehart (see profile)
- Date:
- 2018
- Group(s):
- GS Prose Fiction, LLC 19th-Century American, LLC 20th- and 21st-Century American, LLC African American, LLC Late-19th- and Early-20th-Century American
- Subject(s):
- American literature--African American authors, Performance art--Study and teaching, Fiction, Narration (Rhetoric), African Americans--Social life and customs, African Americans
- Item Type:
- Article
- Tag(s):
- Nineteenth-Century African American Literature, American novel, Theory of Narrative, African American literature, Performance studies, Novel (genre), Narrative, African American culture, African American
- Permanent URL:
- http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6CP26
- Abstract:
- Charles Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition (1901) is overwhelmingly understood as an historical novel. Critics have again and again focused on its journalistic historicity; its ambivalent racial politics; its attitudes towards assimilation, separatism, vengeance, and resistance; and Chesnutt’s alleged biographical identification with various characters. This generalized preoccupation with the explicitly political or historical contours of the novel frequently precludes closer scrutiny of Chesnutt’s formal literary strategies. This paper shirks that tendency by considering The Marrow of Tradition not just as an historical novel, but also as a novel of consciousness. Viewing the novel from the perspective of its representation of consciousness both reframes its historiographical bearing and opens up new ways to understand Chesnutt’s fiction and nineteenth-century African American literature. It argues that the location of black consciousness in the novel is the soliloquy, and demonstrates that the soliloquy should be understood as a form of “embodied consciousness”: a narrative mode endowed with the expressivity of theatrical gesture. It further examines these performative gestures in relation to additional patterns in the novel: first, the destructive circulation of written, material texts; and second, recurring images of corporeality and physical breakdown wherein one’s capacity for speech is endangered. As they are invulnerable to such formal compromise and breakdown, Chesnutt’s soliloquies together produce a counter-archive of vernacular memory and reveal how dramatic form functions in the novel more broadly.
- Metadata:
- xml
- Published as:
- Journal article
- Status:
- Published
- Last Updated:
- 5 years ago
- License:
- All Rights Reserved
- Share this:
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