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 threshold of Mr. Ryder's...