Minor Characters and Their Culture: A Way of Reading Frances Harper's Iola Leroy and Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition

Abstract

Minor Characters and Their Culture: A Way of Reading Frances Harper's Iola Leroy and Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition The purpose of this essay is to look into minor characters whose cultural significance had gone unrecognized in late nineteenth-century black writing. In the period following the Emancipation Proclamation, black intellectuals and leaders participated vehemently in the mission of racial uplift. African-American fiction writers were not out of sync with them in a campaign for the racial enlightenment. In their novels, Frances Harper and Charles Chesnutt created a group of heroes and heroines who play the representative role in leading the newly-freed black masses. It is, however, worth remarking that the uneducated lower-class black people were not Minor Characters and Their Cultureunable to invent their own vernacular culture. Paying due attention to the relationship between character-creating and culture-building, my essay examines the various ways in which Harper's and Chesnutt's minor characters embody all the survival strategies in Iola Leroy and The Marrow of Tradition. Regardless of whether the authors were intent or not, the folkloric vitality of their "full-blooded" minor characters is to offset the sophisticated anxiety of their "mulatto" main characters. To see the matter in this light is to suggest that the question of the continuity of a particular black culture is no less urgent than such grand issues as emancipation and enlightenment. My approach thus explores the underlying structures of black vernacular culture that face not only the growing virulence of white racism in the post-Reconstruction era, but also the ambivalence of the new class of black bourgeoisie.