Beyond "Standards of Feeling": Bitterness in Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition

On November 10th, 1898, Wilmington, North Carolina’s white Democratic leaders orchestrated the massacre of its black citizens and overthrew the city’s government. Celebrated throughout the nation as a redemption for... [ view full abstract ]

On November 10th, 1898, Wilmington, North Carolina’s white Democratic leaders orchestrated the massacre of its black citizens and overthrew the city’s government. Celebrated throughout the nation as a redemption for civilization, law and order, decency and respectability, the riot turned the white world right-side up. Charles Chesnutt’s public response came in his 1901 novel, The Marrow of Tradition, which meant to subtlety undermine the feelings on which such racial violence was founded. Despite efforts to please readers, William Dean Howells condemned Marrow as “bitter.” While critics acknowledge that Howells’ accusation ended Chesnutt’s career, none have considered what bitterness itself means in the context of citizenship and national belonging, and in Chesnutt’s own racial uplift philosophy. Taking bitterness as a sign of black incivility, Chesnutt publicly disavowed that he or the novel was bitter. This disavowal embodied the “standard of feelings” he believed must be shared by citizens in order to develop the sense of affective kinship he hoped would form the basis of shared national belonging. While this “standard of feeling” demands a civil response to racial violence, the novel suggests that bitterness arises from the affect management Chesnutt’s uplift philosophy demands of its adherents. Thus a “civil” response is ultimately impossible. Marrow justifies rejecting affect management and black civility as an uplift practice, as these are counterproductive and too costly, both personally and politically. In the process of proving his own philosophy false, bitterness becomes a position from which to directly confront violent oppression and claim affective equality.