Studies in American Naturalism

A major strand of African American fiction published at the turn of the twentieth century is structured by a revelation of an intimate secret. In most cases, the hidden information concerns the characters' racial identities and interracial family histories. This figuration is so prevalent that, according to M. Giulia Fabi, an analysis of "the tropes of miscegenation and passing" can best elucidate the central significance, literary artistry, and ideological complexity of these frequently underestimated and understudied narratives (2).¹ To different extents, these works are shaped by the melodramatic mode, which "draws into a public arena desires, fears, values and identities which lie beneath the surface of the publicly acknowledged world" (Gledhill 33). This drive towards disclosure is most conspicuously visible in coincidental race-revelation scenes that propel many Black works of the age of realism. Typically for literary recognitions, these moments reveal a "perverse" and "improper" knowledge, a "monstrous transgression of a taboo" (Cave 3, 7, 209). In African American realist narratives, the revelation of the secret does not, however, result in a restoration of order or an unambiguous closure, which characterize conventional melodrama. On the contrary, the texts' endings are frequently open and depart from the "final reward of virtue" and punishment of villainy (Brooks 12). The works question both the melodramatic opposition between good and evil and the polarized division into whiteness and Blackness, which was central for Jim Crow racial classifications. The hidden identities and race revelations in African American fiction challenge the "rigid color line" and expose its invisibility and volatility (Chesnutt, "A Stream" 851).

The melodramatic element that permeates a significant segment of turn-of-the-twentieth-century African American narratives is not exceptional when juxtaposed with the corpus of canonical U.S. fiction [End Page 56] of the period. Although traditionally perceived as a reaction against romantic, sentimentalist, and melodramatic aesthetics, American realist and naturalist narratives continued to employ romance, coincidence, and sensationalism rather than complete plausibility, exceptionalism rather than representativeness, and dramatic contrasts rather than a balanced perspective on social life (Chase 1–11; Pizer 264–69; Trachtenberg 190–91). As Keith Newlin points out, the melodramatic aesthetic is key for the works of the naturalist canon, which evoke an immediate reaction in the reader and express a Spencerian, determinist vision of the world (5–15). Similarly, elements of melodrama can also be found in realism. One of the most influential studies of this aesthetic, Peter Brooks's The Melodramatic Imagination, devotes an entire section to Henry James, a canonical realist author. His works, according to Brooks, express an "intensification of consciousness," and the characters' ethical conflicts and choices are imaged "in the polarized and heightened mode of melodrama" (197; see also 153–97). In Charles W. Chesnutt's "Her Virginia Mammy" and "Cicely's Dream," melodrama is key to his narrative aesthetic and it enables him to bend the "rigid color line" to reveal its absurdities.

Just as in the case of James's writing, Chesnutt's use of melodrama stems from his specific approach to realism. As Ryan Simmons states, for Chesnutt "realism's purpose is not to document histories but to disassemble and re-create readers' methods for understanding these histories, all with the intent of changing not only what readers know, but also how they know it and how they are capable of responding to it" (3). His fiction is "designed to instill an understanding of racism" because "reality properly portrayed and rightly understood must compel action" (3, 5). Such an understanding of realism is superficially similar to the naturalist novel, which "moralizes or sets out to demonstrate a particular thesis" (Newlin 10). Yet, although Chesnutt diverts from the traditional program of objective, documentary realism (Becker 184–97), his fiction does not represent "a melodramatic vision of human beings at the mercy of forces over which they have little control but whose purpose is ultimately intelligible" (Newlin 15). Instead, he portrays self-aware, conflicted characters who interact with social forces that are too complex to be explained with Spencerian determinism. In Chesnutt's works, the melodramatic vision does not...