• 영미문화
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• 제18권1호
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• pp.93-120
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• 2018

Constance Fenimore Woolson is among those whom scholars have for long been trying to rediscover and add to the list of representative American writers. The primary methodology has been regionalism, based on the fact that most of her work portrays remote, exotic regions in and out of America. Still, Woolson remains obscure to general readers as well as literary critics outside a small circle of her scholarship. This essay attributes that obscurity to Woolson scholars' blind reliance on regionalism's nationalistic assumption in reading Woolson's multifaceted writing, and proposes to explore her nationally and regionally displacing view of the rigidly stereotypical and ideologically biased binary opposition between the center and the margin in postbellum America. The essay takes as an example the only story by Woolson that has never been reprinted or anthologized until very recently, "In Sloane Street," and examines why it resists the scholarly endeavor to regional categorization. The examination especially focuses on how the story exposes the Americanizing conceptualization of the region and its limits. The essay concludes with an attention to the story's ending where Woolson abruptly yet deliberately introduces a form of almanac as the main character Gertrude's mode of daily record. The attention to that uniquely hybrid genre in the American literary tradition, which encompasses the public and the private, the universal and the local, sheds light on Woolson's authorial intention to deconstruct the Manichean view of literary regionalism.

• 영어영문학
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• 제55권6호
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• pp.1163-1191
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• 2009

As many critics do, this article starts from the premise that Charles Waddell Chesnutt wrote The Conjure Woman with a distinct socio-ethical view to ameliorating white readers' racism. For this purpose of social activism, first, the author uses a racially submissive genre and narrator- antebellum plantation-dialect fiction and an old ex-slave Julius-in order to win the attention of white racists, who constituted the majority of the reading public of postbellum America. Chesnutt then allows this seemingly submissive ex-slave consecutively to wage narrative battles against a Northern white capitalist, John. This fiction's structure is thus based on interracial narrative conflict. Granted, the result of these narrative battles is Julius's defeat. Even though he sometimes has narrative success through his manipulation of either his white female auditor's sentimentalism or the white capitalist's racial prejudice, it does not lead to any fundamental change in the white audience members' awareness: John still regards Julius's tacitly reformoriented tales merely as nonsensical ghost stories invented by the absurd imagination of a subservient, entertaining, and exploitable black coachman. Admitting his defeat, Julius relinquishes his original goal of deterring John's capitalist exploitation of both racial Others and the natural environment of the South and finally decides to serve the economic power of white capitalism. This self-defeating conclusion, however, should not be identified with Chesnutt's failure as an author. Rather, it should be understood as an interim result of the black author's earnest experiment with literary media best suited to his reform project. In fact, this narrative failure reveals Chesnutt's accurate diagnosis of the postbellum literary world: a black voice is still feebly heard and even easily buried by the whites' capitalist ambition and consequently intensifying racism. Conclusively, Julius's narrative failure should be positively evaluated as Chesnutt's one step further in his gradual and lifelong progress to a narrative goopher effectively to engage whites' imagination and sympathy for a vision of equal interracial coexistence.