A Cultivated Conscience

"The workings of the human heart are the
profoundest mystery of the universe" (117).
Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901)

Points for Reflection

C. Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901), chps. 25-31

1. Does Mr. Delamere’s explanation of the factors shaping both law-abiding and criminally behaving black folk give white communities too much, too little, or just enough responsibility?
2. Does Major Carteret’s point about the limited reliability of environmental factors--in shaping character—hold water?
3. While Chesnutt makes it easy to make a simple, up or down judgment concerning characters like “Captain” McBane and Dr. William Miller, other figures occupy a gray middle.  Where does Chesnutt wish us to place characters like Dr. Price (see chps. 7 & 22) and, more recently, Mr. Ellis?
4. What palpable outcomes arise from Mr. Delamere’s discoveries about Tom’s behavior? 
5. Why does Mr. Delamere agree to publicly voice a lie?
6. With what tone does Chesnutt’s narrator observe that “the workings of the human heart are the profoundest mystery of the universe” (139)?  
7. What does the narrator’s report about the aftermath of the near-lynching reveal about the way press releases work?
8. Why are Mr. Delamere’s wishes, concerning his estate, suppressed?  
9. Why might Chesnutt decline to explore Tom’s psychology in depth?
10. Who hires Sandy after the near-fatal debacle?
11. What impact does church involvement have on Sandy’s behavior?
12. What array of changes/shifts follow in the wake of the near-lynching?
13. Does Ellis gradually become a more praiseworthy sort of fellow, or would we do better to characterize him as decidedly unheroic?
14. What does the narrator reveal about the psychological factors underpinning U.S. aggression, both in the Spanish-American War of 1898, and in increased hostility towards black U.S. citizens?
15. How do some in the South go about stealing the vote from the black population?
16. Does Chesnutt’s narrator share the despair of the black population he describes?
17. What exactly do the conspirators, convening at the Morning Chronicle, hope to achieve?
18. Is the rhetoric and language of Belmont, Carteret, and McBane distinct enough that you can distinguish among them without being directly told which one is currently speaking?
19. What important factor do the conspirators leave out of their calculations, according to the narrator?
20. The narrator explains that Olivia Carteret “was a good woman, according to her lights, with a cultivated conscience, to which she had always looked as her mentor and infallible guide” (160).  Do chapter thirty’s contents support or question this self-evaluation?
21. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), Sigmund Freud highlights the role played by “objective sensory excitations” occurring outside the body in creating dream content (62).  What such external variable shapes Mrs. Olivia Carteret’s troubled dream in chapter thirty-one?
22. Does the internal conflict which wracks Mrs. Olivia Carteret in chapter thirty-one make her more sympathetic, or less so?
23. In a letter written to Chesnutt by W. E. B. Du Bois (March 8 1902), Du Bois declares the novel “one of the best sociological studies of the Wilmington Riot which I have seen” (Norton Critical 210).  In your own estimation, what sociological truths does the novel effectively illustrate?
    

Portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Atherton Curtis with Still Life
Henry Osawa Tanner

Dr. Paul Marchbanks
pmarchba@calpoly.edu