Thus, Julius is the authority figure despite not being the narrator of these narratives through the use of specific storytelling techniques such as dialect and the trickster technique as well as irony and evoked emotion. In this essay, I will argue that this inversion of panoptic-like power places Julius in complete control of the narrative situations despite the ironic exertion of physical and mental control that appears to be emitted from the internal narratives' slave owners and the main narrator John. However, Chesnutt inverts this model of the South in his portrayal of the external postbellum narratives. Foucault's panoptic theory of the mental gaze supports the idea of paralysis of the slave mentality when physical punishment is applied by masters and overseers. Thus, Foucault's theory of the Panopticon parallels Chesnutt's portrayal of the antebellum South. Through this telling of interior antebellum slavery, Chesnutt describes the South as a systematic structure of labor. Julius must relive the horrors of slavery through his narration of tales in the embedded narratives. The embedded narratives display physical and mental control of slaves by masters.Ĭontrastingly, the external narratives demonstrate physical and mental control obtained by Julius through his method of educating his audience of the past. These tales function under a system of two distinct narrative styles. It was not until 1991 that American literary scholar Richard Brodhead stumbled upon a larger collection of Chesnutt's short stories and published the second edition of Chesnutt's work entitled The Conjure Woman and other Conjure Tales. These stories were limited in number with only seven stories making the first edition. Chesnutt has continued to captivate audiences for a century.Charles Chesnutt's collection of stories entitled The Conjure Woman, which involve the telling of past plantation stories by an elderly former slave named Julius McAdoo to a curious white couple named John and Annie, were originally published in 1899. Humorous, heart-breaking, lyrical, and wise, these stories make clear why the fiction of Charles W. Written in the late nineteenth century, a time of enormous growth and change for a country only recently reunited in peace, these stories act as the uneasy meeting ground for the culture of northern capitalism, professionalism, and Christianity and the underdeveloped southern economy, a kind of colonial Third World whose power is manifest in life charms, magic spells, and ha'nts, all embodied by the ruling figure of the conjure woman. No longer a reactionary flight of nostalgia for the antebellum South, the stories in this book celebrate and at the same time question the folk culture they so pungently portray, and ultimately convey the pleasures and anxieties of a world in transition. But in Chesnutt's hands the tradition is transformed. In the tradition of Uncle Remus, the conjure tale listens in on a poor black southerner, speaking strong dialect, as he recounts a local incident to a transplanted northerner for the northerner's enlightenment and edification. It allows the reader to see how the original volume was created, how an African American author negotiated with the tastes of the dominant literary culture of the late nineteenth century, and how that culture both promoted and delimited his work. This edition reassembles for the first time all of Chesnutt's work in the conjure tale genre, the entire imaginative feat of which the published Conjure Woman forms a part. Lesser known, though, is that the The Conjure Woman, as first published by Houghton Mifflin, was not wholly Chesnutt's creation but a work shaped and selected by his editors. Chesnutt's first great literary success, and since their initial publication in 1899 they have come to be seen as some of the most remarkable works of African American literature from the Emancipation through the Harlem Renaissance. The stories in The Conjure Woman were Charles W.
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