Jan 2, 2010

The Passing of Grandison | Character Analysis

Charity is smart enough to want a man who has accomplished something and smart enough, too, to marry a man over whom she might exercise some power. In agreeing to marry Dick, she gets both, yet only by acting within the confines of Southern womanly behavior. In addition, Chesnutt uses her to expose the hollowness of the ideology of the “purity of southern womanhood.” On the one hand, Charity tells Dick that her “Quaker blood that came from [her] grandmother assert[s] itself when she hears about cruelty in slavery,” and she wishes that “all Sam Briggs’s...