Both Joel Chandler Harris and Charles Chesnutt wrote decades after the abolition of slavery, during the period of Jim Crow segregation. Do their stories seem to look back at slavery and the plantation in the same or different ways? Where do you see a particular point of affinity or distinction?
2 thoughts on “Plantation Tales”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Both authors’ narratives contain an element of the nostalgia for pre-war order and plantation life as discussed in class, however the roles and social understandings of the slaves themselves are different. Uncle Reamus, for example, proves to be a sort of comforting, grandfather sort of a figure, telling stories and perpetuating a way of enslaved life in a nostalgic way. Julius, by contrast, is more of a progressive figure in that he defies the figure of Uncle Reamus and provides more accurate and realistic social commentary. For me, the major point of distinction seemed to be that in Chesnutt’s narrative, the reader gets a taste of the displaced Northerner’s views and experiences with blacks. This is missing in Handler’s piece, which takes place in a very narrow setting and fails to acknowledge any socioeconomic changes in an effort to reminisce of stability.
Both Handler and Chesnutt appeal to a sense of nostalgia for the pre-Civil War south, but their views on slavery and plantation life differ dramatically. Harris’ Uncle Remus seems downright complacent with his role as a kindly storyteller, while Chesnutt’s Julius stands as a component of a larger underlying social commentary about man’s conquest over nature and his fellow man. In a way, Chesnutt uses the same shallow tropes present in the Uncle Remus stories, such as idealized plantation life and an interpretation of slave vernacular, to make his social commentary. In short, the stories’ apparent similarities actually reveal their striking differences.