The Marrow of Tradition

"Marrow of Tradition is a 1901 novel about the 1898 Wilmington Coup, in North Carolina, in which white supremacists led a murderous assault on the city’s Black newspaper and Black neighborhoods, and violently overthrew a Republican-led government that included many Black Americans in positions of power. The precise number of casualties isn’t known, but at least dozens—perhaps hundreds—were killed. Walter Scott’s Waverley Novels and U.S. historical romances like Hope Leslie explored the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from the vantage of the early nineteenth century. But Marrow ’s dramatic compression of the temporal gap—just three years—between the events narrated and the time of the novel’s publication underscores its unique urgency. The massacre was immediately justified in the white press as a response to a “race riot” triggered by supposedly violent Black residents. Chesnutt counters this view by dramatizing the white resentment and insecurity that fueled the coup, and clearly exposes its immediate cause—a supposedly “incendiary” article attesting to the reality of voluntary mixed-race couples—as a flimsy pretext. Chesnutt refracts the complex dynamics of this moment—a rising Black professional and political class, a waning plantation aristocracy—through a cast of white and Black characters whose lives are marked by entanglements of intimacy, disavowal, and jealousy. And this is shortly before Jim Crow laws would entrench a rigidly policed segregation, effectively endorsing white terrorism of Black Americans. Chesnutt’s works have always been crucial reading, and I highly recommend his collection of short stories The Conjure Woman, as well. But in the wake of the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, and as the present-day Republican Party openly associates itself with white-supremacist resentment, Marrow looks even more like one of the long nineteenth century’s greatest and most prescient novels. People are always asking me: What is a major late-nineteenth-century naturalist novel that explores themes of greed and lust through the figure of an unlicensed dentist at a moment of new, emerging professional norms and regulations? For them, I recommend Frank Norris’s McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (1899). I wish I could have included other naturalist texts, too. Loosely, naturalism is a genre often related to realism—though Norris importantly associated it with the “romance”—that dramatizes a deterministic universe of social, bodily, and environmental pressures. Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth (1905) is another classic in this mode, but for the reasons above, I chose Chesnutt as my “cheat” twentieth-century pick. But I’ve been thinking a lot about Wharton’s approach to her upper-crust characters—how she described drawing out the “dramatic significance” of “a frivolous society”—while watching HBO’s Succession . (I’m obsessed . ) Likewise, I excluded delightfully odd late-eighteenth-century texts such as Charles Brockden Brown’s gothic novel Wieland and classic seduction tales like Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette , which are so important for thinking about the longer trajectory of the U.S. novel. Cathy Davidson’s The Revolution and the Word remains a great account of the early novels I mentioned above. David Reynolds’s Beneath the American Renaissance is very helpful for situating familiar American Renaissance texts in a wider context of sensation literature and reform movements. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I’ve given short shrift to the sentimental novel in our conversation, but the first chapter of Lauren Berlant’s The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture offers a major reading of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the power and pitfalls of sentimentalism: the idea that “feeling right” is a reliable measure of injustice or a guide to political action. Throughout our conversation, I’ve had in mind Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America . Her brilliant account of how white Americans defined and define their own freedom against Black unfreedom is indispensable in understanding the genre of the slave narrative and a novel like Stowe’s. Berlant and Hartman tragically remain essential reading, too, in understanding the continued circulation of images of victims of police violence, which presumes an uncomplicated link between spectacles of Black suffering and the transformative politics that will supposedly follow. To pick something more recent: I love Jennifer Fleissner’s new Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem and the story she tells about the American novel as a form for thinking through the complexities of human will, desire, motivation, and action. (This is different from some “rise of the novel” arguments, focused largely on British fiction, that see the novel producing a conception of self we could shorthand as the modern, rational, self-interested individual.) She has an interesting take on sentimentalism, too, which she associates with fantasies of fellow feeling that, in effect, want to escape the potentially disturbing sense of our ourselves as divided and opaque to self-reflection. Instead of being weird, complicated, conflicted creatures, wouldn’t it be nice to be fused into an organic, loving collective!"