SOURCE: Duncan, Charles. “Telling Genealogy: Notions of the Family in The Wife of His Youth.” In Critical Essays on Charles W. Chesnutt, edited by Joseph R. McElrath Jr., pp. 281-96. New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1999.

In the following essay, Duncan discusses Chesnutt's probing of race consciousness in the United States and the manner in which the writer's short stories add a “stanza” to the genealogical poem formed by black American literature.

Any consideration of the literary output of Charles W. Chesnutt must, of course, acknowledge race as a defining feature. Certainly, Chesnutt exhaustively probed the matter, examining in great detail both the sources of race consciousness in the United States and the far-reaching consequences of what has become our prolonged national mediation on the issue. As a means of exploring the broad social and cultural implications of post-Reconstruction race relations, his fictions, especially the works collected in...