African Diasporic Short Fiction | Lorne Fienberg (essay date September 1990)
Lorne Fienberg (essay date September 1990)
SOURCE: Fienberg, Lorne. “Charles W. Chestnutt's The Wife of His Youth: The Unveiling of the Black Storyteller.” American Transcendental Quarterly 4, no. 3 (September 1990): 219-37.
[In the following essay, Fienberg views Charles Chestnutt's short story “The Wife of His Youth” as a reflection of the author's own efforts to define himself as a black author.]
At the pivotal moment in Charles W. Chesnutt's “The Wife of His Youth” a mysterious old black woman walks through a doorway and tells her story. For twenty-five years she has been carrying this simple tale of the brutality of slavery and of her faithful love; each retelling of the story is a critical act of self-identification. Now she has found the ideal audience for whom the act of listening and re-telling will also constitute an acknowledgement of the past and a re-creation of the self. ‘Liza Jane's passage over the...
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