Charles W. Chesnutt: A Study of the Short Fiction.

Henry B. Wonham. Charles W. Chesnutt: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1998. 168 pp. $25.95.

As a good many readers of Charles Chesnutt's work now recognize, to study his brief literary career is to study and read for the quietly dramatic struggle between his large literary aspirations and the narrow place reserved for them in the literary marketplace of his time. A "bed of Procrustes," Chesnutt's own trope for the crippling dangers in African American aspiration or accommodation in post-Reconstruction America, may not fully describe his own drama of authorship. That authorship has left for us work that is both small enough to fit into its original commercial receptacles and alive enough to complain about the fitting, to make us now students of that confinement.

Henry Wonham's commendable study of Chesnutt's short fiction reminds us of this drama in two ways. While it celebrates "the lyrical intensity, pathos and humor" of Chesnutt's short works, its own fine, lucidly written readings of Chesnutt's dialect and non-dialect stories deftly situate them in the context of public expectations about "race" literature of the time--the political amnesia of plantation fiction, for example, or the pathologizing of miscegenation in the "tragic mulatto" figure--so that we can see what veins Chesnutt is writing in and against. Less obviously, Wonham's book must deal with the confinements of genre itself by fitting into the formula of the Twayne's Studies in Short Fiction Series. It does this well, too.

As "in-depth critical introductions" or "companion" texts that respond to both "popular" and "scholarly interest" in modern and contemporary short stories (Twayne's brochure language), the series means to satisfy a middle zone of critical need above the work of plot summary but below the rigor and originality of critical studies. Wonham's volume occupies this position gracefully, consisting of a brief but sturdy biographical introduction, short readings of nineteen of Chesnutt's stories, a small selection of Chesnutt' s journal and nonfiction writings, six essays or book excerpts from critics (starting with William Dean Howells's revealing appreciation of 1900), a chronology of Chesnutt's life, and a thorough bibliography. Wonham manages to make all of this hold together quite naturally.

For instance, in the skein of Wonham's nineteen readings, while even veteran readers of Chesnutt's stories may lose track of the distinctions of each, Wonham has not; his habit of recalling the details of earlier stories as he enters another reading both clarifies and particularizes our sense of Chesnutt's preoccupations. It also helps illustrate one of Wonham's larger contentions: that in Chesnutt's early short fiction, particularly in the dialect stories of The Conjure Woman, he navigates the artistic and political limits of the form by tinkering restlessly with nuance and implication. Only in accumulation, one suspects, could Wonham's readings describe so clearly the ever-shifting dance of power relations among Uncle Julius, John, and Annie. In "Po' Sandy," Wonham insightfully discerns the aggressiveness in Uncle Julius's implying a connection between the melancholic Annie and Tenie, the conjure woman in Julius's tale, widowed and driven mad by "her isolation within the patriarchal regime of the old plant ation"; in "Hot-Foot Hannibal," on the other hand, Wonham recognizes Julius's simple gratification of John's moral complacency. That story's difference from "Po' Sandy" reminds us that "Julius's narrative blend of conjure and persuasion is thoroughly and ambivalently entangled in the cultural circumstances of the postwar plantation. His capacity for resistance is always limited by his participation in a system of hierarchies that he can nudge, perhaps modify, but never escape." Wonham's book confirms his assertion that a careful reading of the Conjure Woman stories, front to back, helps avoid the kind of romantic exaggeration of Julius's "powers of vernacular resistance" that may attend a late-twentieth-century reading of just those dialect stories most often anthologized, "The Goophered Grapevine" and "Po' Sandy."

Some consequences of the Twayne formula may be less genial to the work of the study. While Wonham reminds us that Chesnutt chaffed against the liabilities of dialect fiction and sought to escape the subgenre, dialect stories receive most of Wonham's critical and celebratory energies, potentially distending further what he calls the "awkward shape" of Chesnutt's career, especially for the less initiated reader who might not know about the dozens of non-dialect stories not considered in the volume. Wonham's selection of stories no doubt follows Twayne dicta: It is The Conjure Woman, in part or in whole, that most often makes it into classrooms where Chesnutt' s stories are studied, not The Wife of His Youth. A major force behind this slender sort of canonicity, the now robust body of criticism on the Julius stories, is also well preserved in Wonham's book, particularly the readings of Andrews, Sundquist, Werner, and Selinger. Because such criticism takes full advantage of the "subversive" inferences Julius mak es available, the volume's embrace of such criticism may inadvertently flatten interpretive possibilities for the whole of Chesnutt's short story corpus, especially in light of Chesnutt's own complex race and class politics.

Despite itself, Wonham's study implies the need for all readers of Chesnutt's short fiction to break into new perspectives. His use of Brodhead's edition of Chesnutt's conjure tales is a case in point. Among the dialect stories Wonham considers are all the Conjure Woman tales, treated in the order they appear in the original volume, which Brodhead's edition in part duplicates. Yet, as Brodhead's introduction makes clear, Walter Hines Page's unilateral editorial control over the constitution of The Conjure Woman opens to us other possible configurations of the volume that might more accurately describe the intentions of the author. Because Wonham never raises these interpretive possibilities, his practical, series-appropriate recapitulation and linking of the "original" sequence of stories makes the study more the "companion" of Walter Hines Page's work than most readers may know. The critical modesty of these kinds of "in-depth introductions" may have, in the case of Chesnutt, a politics that matters. This g eneric modesty may also explain why the book seems under-theorized. Literary-critical frameworks that might have given Wonham's train of readings different and larger kinds of unities are missing because the terms that invoke such frameworks--conjure, parable, and allegory, most obviously-- emerge only in the expediency of particular readings. Their referential work is never fully explained or justified.

But these criticisms are largely a matter of the book's excellence making us impractically ambitious for it. Within its confines it brings us plenty. Its own criticism, including masterful readings of "Mars Jeems's Nightmare" and the late and brilliant "Baxter's Procrustes," its agile marshaling of the work of others, and its wise selection of supporting material should make Chesnutt many new companions, and cannot fail to gratify the old.