The Columbia History of the American Novel

in the Wilmington, North Carolina, Riot of 1898, the historical basis for The Marrow of Tradition, the Major, General Belmont, and Captain McBane are committed to a revolutionary ouster of the elected Fusion Party, which includes blacks. Chesnutt acutely unmasks the contrast between the Major's language of the 'logical' and 'reasonable' and his race- and classbiased views and practices. Chesnutt also consistently uses the plebian Captain McBane to expose the underlying realities Major Carteret's genteel language obscures. ''Burn the nigger,' reiterated McBane. 'We seem to have the right nigger, but whether we have or not, burn a nigger.''

According to the prevailing white view of blacks, 'no one could tell at what moment the thin veneer of civilization might peel off and reveal the underlying savage.' Through characters like Tom Delamere and Captain McBane, Chesnutt effectively turns this argument around. At the end the whites turn the town into a hell-on-earth in the name of 'civilization.' Chesnutt realizes that, in white eyes, the blacks who are defending themselves are not heroes; instead, 'a negro's courage would be mere desperation; his love of liberty, a mere animal dislike of restraint. Every finer human instinct would be interpreted in terms of savagery.'

Deepening these concerns are the contrasts between Josh and McBane and Josh and Doctor Miller, two other double relations. McBane, the son of an overseer, has made his money exploiting convict labor. He is driven by a sense of social exclusion that intensifies his racial hatred. Chesnutt illuminates the class antagonisms within -179- the ruling group as well as its use of the press to manipulate the opinion of ordinary white people. The implications for American democracy are sobering. McBane is blunt, violent, forceful. He has lost an eye in a fight with a convict and 'his single eye glowed ominously.' Before the end of slavery he has also killed a slave, Josh's father. Josh's desire for retribution motivates him as powerfully as race hatred drives his antagonist.

The spectacle of Josh, a looming 'great black figure,' also plays off against the moderation of the light- skinned Doctor Miller. Miller believes 'the meek shall inherit the earth' and that armed 'resistance will only make the matter worse — the odds against you are too strong.' Josh, in contrast, affirms, 'I don' call no man 'marster.'…I'd ruther be a dead nigger any day dan a live dog!' When Miller refuses to assume leadership, Josh takes over. 'A gun is mo' dange'ous ter de man in front of it dan ter de man behin' it…. We'd ruther die fightin' dan be stuck like pigs in a pen!' Although he is killed at the end, he takes McBane with him. 'A pistol-flame flashed in his face, but he went on, and raising his powerful right arm, buried the knife to the hilt in the heart of his enemy.' In imagining and doing justice to Josh, Chesnutt had to overcome his own personal preference for the beliefs of Doctor Miller. In creating Josh he also taps into imagery and energies deeply threatening to the white readers of his period. The symbols of the gun, the knife, and the defiant refusal to accept injustice contribute to make Josh the most sustained instance of black militancy between Frederick Douglass and Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas.

The final double relation involves the two half-sisters, Olivia Carteret and Janet Miller, on opposite sides of the color line. Their father, Mr. Merkell, had secretly married, freed, and willed his property to Julia, his black mistress. In a story that gradually unfolds as the novel progresses, we learn that Polly Ochiltree has destroyed the will and marriage license that would have established Julia and Janet's claims to legitimacy and half the estate, the money that is now financing Major Carteret's newspaper. 'I saved the property for you and your son!' Polly tells Olivia. 'You've got the land, the houses, and the money.' Mrs. Ochiltree charges Julia with pollution but the pollution the novel dramatizes is the moral blight of whites whose entire material edifice is built on what they have stolen from blacks. -180- No wonder Olivia Carteret's son is sickly and nearly dies in the presence of Janet Miller.

Chesnutt further complicates the material of domestic fiction by probing the deepest sources of Olivia Carteret's 'nervous condition,' which dates from the time of Aunt Polly's revelations. As the custodian of conscience, white women like Olivia were basic to the moral structure of the South. Olivia comes to 'dimly perceive' that the crime Aunt Polly has revealed epitomizes the larger crime of slavery, 'which, if the law of compensation be a law of nature, must some time, somewhere, in some way, be atoned for.' Her troubled conscience is her share of the larger dilemma.

Mrs. Carteret 'could, of course, remain silent,' but what then of her 'cultivated conscience, . her mentor and infallible guide?' In a quiet, deadly exposure of the moral confusion of an entire people, under the influence of her conscience Mrs. Carteret finally decides that to tell is to bring on bankruptcy and ruin, that she cannot even acknowledge Janet as her sister, but that 'sometime in the future' she would contribute to Doctor Miller's hospital. In examining Olivia's conscience, her ability — or inability — to deal with the basic moral issue of her family, region, and race, Chesnutt has undermined the inner sanctum of white legitimacy.

Between Josh at one extreme and Mrs. Carteret at the other, William Dean Howells understandably felt that for all its power of 'justice without mercy,' finally The Marrow of Tradition was 'bitter, bitter, bitter.' The judgment, however, says more about the sensitivity of Howells and his audience than it does about Chesnutt's novel. As Robert M. Farnsworth observes, in The Marrow of Tradition Chesnutt 'stepped over the bounds of racial decency and. . shook his white audience's faith in him.' Chestnutt published one more book and then gave up professional authorship for a successful career as the head of a firm of legal stenographers. For reasons quite different from those of James, Twain, and Howells, Chesnutt, too, finally found that the pressures of the period were inimical to the practice of realism.

Howells had earlier written an encouraging review of Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars, a ratification that counted, since Howells was the most influential middleman of culture in the post-181- Civil War period. As a critic and editor he introduced advanced European realists like Zola, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and George Eliot to an American audience. He similarly made the case for contemporary American realists as diverse as John De Forrest and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. He supported both Henry James and Mark Twain, 'supported' as a friend, as a critic, and as an editor who published and paid for stories and novels. He also mediated between the American West and East, between Twain's vernacular world and the Boston of Emerson and the Atlantic Monthly. Deeply encoded in his career and fiction is Howells's complex involvement in the worlds of literary art and the publishing business. This is a particular instance of the larger tension facing all of those realists who were compelled to render both the surfaces and the underlying energies of the new America.

In The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) Howells deals explicitly with the issues of realism and the morally threatening power of big money. He intertwines a series of stories centering on the ideal of selfsacrifice as this value emerges in the fictional sentimental novel Tears, Idle Tears, as it emerges in a love story within the novel The Rise of Silas Lapham, as it emerges in the story of the self-made millionaire, Silas Lapham, and as it emerges in the theory of realism of the minister, Mr. Sewall. Self-sacrifice is the cornerstone virtue of the nineteenth-century true woman. Howells exposes a false version of this ideal through Tears, Idle Tears, or Slop, Silly Slop. In this book the heroine sacrifices herself by giving up the man she loves because someone else has cared for him first. The details are realistic but the feelings and characters are 'colossal' and of flattering 'supernatural proportions.' In contrast, the realistic novel championed by Howells and Mr. Sewall paints 'life as it is, and human feelings in their true proportions and relation.' One test, then, is empirical, so that Howells looks at the world of experience, which in his practice is the world of middle-class America. Another test is metaphysical, since Howells assumes that finally ordinary American life will confirm ideals of beauty, decency, and truth. In The Rise of Silas Lapham, Howells tests and illustrates his theory partly through the love plot, which sets up precisely the situation of Tears, Idle Tears.

Irene Lapham, beautiful but culturally limited, falls in love with the patrician Tom Corey. Everyone assumes Corey is interested in Irene, whereas he has fallen in love with the older sister, Penelope. -182- Penelope has a lively wit, a gift for mimicry, and an independent way of seeing and storytelling. She is described as 'dark,' not because she is sultry but because in contrast to her sister's lovely color she is not beautiful. At first Penelope epitomizes the realistic novelist, sensible, acute at social observation, and intelligent about character and values. But the sentimental ethos of self-sacrifice retains considerable power; it infiltrates the consciousness of a character as sensible as the appropriately named Penelope. She succumbs, decides it would be wrong to accept Corey, but finally comes to her senses, marries him, and vindicates Howells's version of realism. Irene does, too. She suffers, matures, and, instead of either pining away or marrying, remains single, with the author's full approval.

But however much Howells seems assured in his view that finally everyone agrees on what is true and lifelike, in practice he recognizes important strains and qualifications. It is significant that the women in the novel collaborate in constructing the conventional love story of the beautiful but limited Irene and the handsome patrician, Tom Corey, as if Corey could not be interested in the lively realist, Penelope, the 'dark,' unglamorous one. By exposing their susceptibility to a false, sentimental way of seeing, Howells is illuminating an important crack in the