When reading Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman, I became intrigued by the supernatural elements that that Chesnutt used, that are similar to gothic literature elements. I want to continue exploring and researching the gothic similarities that plantation fiction and slave narrative writers are utilizing, such as Chesnutt in his plantation fiction and or Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass . In Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman, the reader can note the supernatural elements that the character Julius uses in order to tell the conjure tales that attract both John and Annie, but mostly Annie. In  Douglass text, the reader can note that Douglass used his ability to write in order to write about the horror of being a slave in the South.

In addition to researching the Gothic similarities or elements that are being used in plantation fiction and in slave narratives, I want to focus on how the Gothic helps writers such as Frederick Douglass express his silence and the silence of other slaves that weren’t able to speak or write their experience, but have their experiences have been physically inscribed in their bodies. Furthermore, I noticed that certain characters, Including Douglass, are separated from their parents (potentially Gothic), such as Bayard and Ringo who both are like brothers. Bayard experience growing up and being raised by the slaves his father owns has altered his reality that can sometimes been seen in the text, which can also be said of  Ringo’s experience as a slave.

In a last note, since slaves are being physically inscribed by their slave masters or overseers, I would like to further explore Franz Kafka’s apparatus, which seems like a powerful machine that seems almost sublime (a Gothic element), since it causes pain, fear. The apparatus is in a way unnatural that causes unknownness to the condemn slaved.

Sources

Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony”

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of F. Douglass

Charles W. Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman

Potential Sources

Charles W. Chesnutt, “Superstitions and Folk-lore of the South” http://chesnuttarchive.org/Works/Essays/superstitions.html

Martin, Robert K., and Eric Savoy, editors. American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative. University of Iowa Press, 1998. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt20q1zmk.

Mulvey-Roberts, Marie. Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal. Manchester University Press, 2016. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt18pkdzg.

Initially, In the Conjure Tales by Charles W. Chesnutt, I was interested in the tales that Uncle Julius told, and how those tales reflected slavery in the South. My focus and interest drifted when I had to play the character John, who is also the narrator. I noticed that even though John is the narrator, he has little dialogue that actually belongs to him, since he is basically quoting Uncle Julius throughout the novel; and the same applies to Annie, who has less dialogue than John. I also notices that John, as the narrator, is narrating Uncle’s Julius speech in the AAVE language. By playing John, I learned more about the Northerner’s fantasies to start businesses in the South, since the Northerners were taking advantage of the South’s post-bellum conditions by purchasing inexpensive land.

One major obstacle when playing John was that John is the antagonist in the novel, and the least likeable character. For me, it was difficult playing a character who embodies a form of superiority over other characters. At first, I wasn’t sympathetic of John, but by playing John, I was able to pleasurably create a background story for John. One of the pleasures of playing the novel was that I was able to depict, or portray John the way I wanted, or at least tried to make John to be more sympathetic and possibly likeable. The frustrating part of playing the novel was researching characteristics of Northerners in the late 1800s that might be likeable; In my search, most characteristics of Northerners were of the stereotypical “Yankee”, who is rational and liberal who move to the South to fulfill their fantasies.

I decided to find information about John in the text, and when I was re-reading the “Goophered Grapevine” tale, I noted the reasons why John decided to go move to the South and then tried to connect his reason to why someone would move or travelled to a different location; One reason was to start his business in a vineyard in an inexpensive location, and the other reason was because the South was the perfect environment for his wife’s medical condition. I then started to focus on John’s business, and based some of my moves by talking about his business, and also in the relationship he had with his wife. There was pleasure in trying to provide and create possible background information of John’s business experience, since not much is said in the novel. Also, it was interesting to explore John’s relationship with his wife and how it was possibly affected by John’s vineyard business. Overall it was fun creating John’s background information, although I tried to make John a bit more sympathetic, I had to maintain John’s antagonistic characteristics, and so I had to talk about John believing that Southerners are ignorant because they believe in superstitions.

If I were to play the game again, I would pick the same character, John. I would like to expanded on my moves, specially on my “Philosophy and Tales” move since I still find it interesting that Annie and John don’t have the same interest; Maybe I can add a move about the differences of a female Northerner and a male Northerner where John talks about those differences. Maybe I would have Annie talk about those differences and have John narrate it to us, and explore the way he decides to narrate Annie’s dialogue to us. Also, It would be interesting to make a move where John critiques Uncle Julius’ AAVE, and maybe have John talk about whether AAVE is a dialect or a language or and base it on racialinguistics research. Also, maybe instead of basing my moves on the text, I would like add moves that are base from external research.

My first query was to “ask” the corpus the trend of the words “letter*”,  “*hand”/”hand*), and “work*”. I wanted see the connection between the word “hand*” and the words “letters*” or “work” by doing a search for the trends of the words in the “Entire corpus”.

Trend in work*, hand*, letter*

With the graph, we can see that the words for “work*” and “hand*” were more used more. The dots for “work*” and “hand*” were closely, or more connected in the earlier texts than the ones from later texts. The word “Letter* is not used as much, but we can see in the graph that the points of the word “letter*” closely match points of the words “work*” and “hand*”. In certain points the word “work*” seems to be the trendiest and the word “letter*” seems to be within the lowest usage. Overall, the graph tells us that words like “letter*” are not used as much as the words “hand*” or “work*” in slave narratives.

My Second query was to search the “Entire Corpus” for the links that surround the word, or letter “I”. I wanted to know what the first person narrative links himself with, or what links are associated with the word “I”.

Links of “I”

Searching for “I” in Links was interesting. “I” is connected or linked with the words “told”, “know”, “went”, “said”, and “time”. The most interesting link is the “I” and “Know” link, because it causes curiosity of what the “I” knows.

For my third query, I decided to add other words in the Link search. I added the words “read” and  “book*”. I wanted to see how the “I”, “read” , and the word “book*” are linked.

Links of “I”,”read*”, and “book*”

This search was interesting since we can see how “I”, “read*”, and “book*”, are linked. “I” is linked to “time”, which is linked to “read”. I is linked to “said” which is linked to “book*” which is linked to “read”. The links may be simple, but from the links we can see that their is an important word, which is “time” . The word “time” links “I” and “read” together in the “Entire Corpus”. With the information provided in this visual image of the words linking, we can conclude that time had to be an important factor for slaves who wanted to read.

I ended up adding the words “write*”, and “writ*” in the the search as well, just to see how they are link. From the image we can see that the word “learn” links the “write*” and “read*” together. In this search, and image, the links seemed to be a little different, and a little more complex, which might be due searching for multiple keywords at once.

Links of “I”, “read”, “book”, “writ*”, and “write*”

Doing a distant reading using Voyant Tools was interesting. We can gather visuals of how words are being used in the text, either by graphs or by web like visuals of words linking.

In Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Douglass narrates memorable experiences he endured as a slave, from his childhood to the day he successfully reached the northern free states. In the “Preface” of the the narrative, WM. Lloyd Garrison authenticates Douglass narrative since it was believed that Douglass was never a slave: “He was such an impressive orator that numerous persons doubted if he had ever been a slave, so he wrote Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass” (Frederick Douglass, Douglass). For Douglass, to have a written narrative would indicate that his experiences as a slave were real, that would become part of the American slavery history.

Furthermore, Lloyd Garrison states: “The experience of Frederick Douglass, as a slave, was not a peculiar one; his lot was not especially a hard one; his case may be regarded as a very fair specimen of the treatment of slaves in Maryland, in which State it is conceded that they are better fed and less cruelly treated than in Georgia, Alabama, or Louisiana” (Preface, Douglass). Lloyd Garrison is indicating that there is nothing peculiar in Douglass’ experience and treatment as a slave in Maryland, since slaves in Maryland were treated “kindlier”. I think that Douglass being differently treated than other slaves, is what makes his experience peculiar, or strange, because he is not treated like the slaves that he wrote about, such as his aunt Hester, his little brother, or Demby. Douglass mostly observed those cruelties, and wrote about them in his narrative. He wrote about the savage acts that were physically inscribed in the bodies of his fellow-slaves and that were mentally inscribed in his mind and memories.

In Chapter VIII, Douglass states:

I suffered more anxiety than most of my fellow-slaves. I had known what it was to be kindly treated; they had known nothing of the kind. They had seen little or nothing of the world. They were in very deed men and women of sorrow, and acquainted with grief. Their backs had been made familiar with the bloody lash, so that they had become callous; mine was yet tender; for while at Baltimore I got few whippings. (Chapter VIII, Douglas)

Douglass was constantly observing the savage acts of the overseers, and the slave masters, which can only indicate that Douglass would suffer anxiety not just because he knows kindly treatments, but because he knows of the horrors of slavery in the South that marked his childhood and are written in his first few chapters of his narrative. Furthermore, Douglass notes that his fellow-slaves haven’t seen much of the world, and perhaps nothing. His fellow-slaves are kept ignorant, and in a way is indicating that his fellow-slaves are not observant. What is interesting is that the slaves with there callous back don’t need to write a narrative to tell their sorrows and pain. One has to observer their callous back, like how Douglass did to see the inscriptions of sorrow and pain that have been marked in a slave’s back by their overseers and slave master; something that Douglass didn’t experience until later in his life when Mr. Covey whipped him, leaving his back with cuts.

Also, something to note: while Douglass’ back was not marked or calloused like the backs of his fellow-slaves, his narrative is. And it is not marked in the back, but it is marked at the very beginning, in the “Preface”. Lloyd Garrison, perhaps without noticing, marked Douglass’ narrative in order to legitimize the narrative. Also, Lloyd Garrison undermined Douglass to a mere “specimen”, like something to be observed on and studied.

In W.E.B. Du Bois’ first paragraph of his book The Souls of Black Folk, he mentions the problem of the 20th century, which is the problem of the color line. Du Bois wants for his reader, specifically the white reader, to know the strife of the Black Folk in his writing. The strive that whites can’t see because of a “veil”, a “veil” that separates the blacks and the whites. Unlike the whites, the blacks are able to see through the “veil”, and they can see how the whites perceive them. Unfortunately, the whites perceive the black folk as a problem. The problem is that the whites don’t accept the blacks as part of their “species”. The problem is that white Americans don’t see the black American as being part of the Nation. A nation that has been created by the free labor of blacks during slavery, and are continually building through a “second slavery”.  Black Americans have been subordinated by a “veil” which has been created by the white people.

Du Bois states: “The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land” (Du Bois). Du Bois is indicating that the black folk have not yet gained true freedom, even after emancipation. To Du Bois, the Nation has not found peace from its sins, probably because the black folk are in a “second slavery” that renders black people without a voice via institutions in law and education. In Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference it Makes”, he states: “Learning to read and to write, then, was not only difficult, it was a violation of a law” (Gates 9). Gates, let us know that Blacks weren’t allowed to learn and write since it was against the law. How are blacks going to express themselves when speaking is not enough, since “most Europeans privileged writing” (Gates 9)? Whites have created laws in order to keep the black people silenced in any way possible. The same white people who created slavery, and laws of segregation.

The problem is that the black folk have not been given the opportunity to represent themselves, they have been represented by others. Du Bois states: “The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world” (Du Bois). Unfortunately the “other world”, the white world, sees the black body as a “problem”, and inferior. Gates lets us know that Africans were perceived as inferior because the ability to read and write was viewed as a human quality that Africans lacked, and the lack of writing meant that Africans lacked “reason”. Gates indicates: “Blacks were most commonly represented on the chain either as the lowest of the human races or as first cousin to the ape. Because writing, according to Hume, was the ultimate sign of difference between animal and human” (Gates 12). The “other world”, or the world of the whites, would represent blacks as a human race that is closely related to animals. Gates and Du Bois would agree that white philosophers such as Hegel, Hume, and Kant are the ones that are part of the problem, since they provided the world with pseudoscience of why Africans are inferior. These philosopher have marked the black body as a “problem”.

When Du Bois is being asked “How does it feel to be a problem?” (Du Bois), he is being viewed as a marked body. The white people who ask him that question are assuming that he is problem, but don’t realize that the problem is their prejudice. They, the white people, don’t realize that the problem has been rooted by them through pseudoscience, slavery, segregation, and racism.