TY - JOUR
AU - Stevens,, Erica
AB - Abstract Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s The Goodness of St. Rocque, and Other Stories (1899) plays with the diminutive description of “charming” often given to local-color writers in order to imagine alternative social relations in an era determined by modes of difference and exclusion. Charm—an aesthetic category most generally understood to be manipulative, feminine, and a distracting accessory to beauty—becomes the method supporting this collection’s challenge to the contemporary discourse of “social equality.” In the late nineteenth century, social equality was a distorted idea meant to accuse those pushing for civil rights of also seeking to eliminate individual choice from the social world and the public sphere or, at the most extreme, of advocating intermarriage of the races. In her short story collection, Dunbar-Nelson responds to the issue of social equality not directly but through her unique understanding of how literary form and character could charm readers into attachments beyond intersubjective desire or assured knowledge. Throughout The Goodness of St. Rocque, and Other Stories, her narrators mystify the reader’s search for knowledge and turn characters into resistant objects. Building on critical conversations about Dunbar-Nelson’s challenges to racial categorization, this essay explores the connections between aesthetics and politics in the early work of this writer, a writer who otherwise expressed a desire to maintain a distinction between those two goals for her fiction. In “Uncle Wellington’s Wives” (1899), Charles Chesnutt reveals his suspicions regarding overly optimistic prognostications about racial uplift. The title character attends a public lecture and becomes inspired to leave the South and his wife behind to chase dreams of gentility through interracial marriage. As the well-dressed lecturer speaks, the narrator explains that the rapt Uncle Wellington had long “indulged in occasional day-dreams of an ideal state of social equality” (206). Only after hearing the mixed-race speaker does Uncle Wellington have a “name to the forms his imagination had bodied forth” (207).1 Before choosing the dictated path of intermarriage, what were Uncle Wellington’s imagined forms of equality? If they were forms, and not names or laws, how could they be brought into the world? With these questions in mind, I investigate how writer and activist Alice Dunbar-Nelson “bodied forth” forms of newly imagined social equality in her fiction. In her collection The Goodness of St. Rocque, and Other Stories, first published as a companion volume to her husband Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Poems of Cabin and Field in 1899, Dunbar-Nelson meets the expectation that a local colorist should charm her reader with details of a particular place; however, by signifyin(g) on “charm” as an aesthetic and as a religious-magical object—especially within her New Orleans settings—she challenged limited definitions of the “social” that merely extended the logic of individual, private choices and informed “social equality” debates. Like charm itself, generally understood by aestheticians as a manipulative category of art that offers mere sensory pleasure and no chance for contemplation, Dunbar-Nelson’s visions of the social sphere are disruptive of judgment and individual autonomy. Throughout The Goodness of St. Rocque, her narrators mystify the reader’s search for knowledge and turn characters into resistant objects, all the while acknowledging the stereotypically “charming” expectations of local-color fiction. In so doing, she maintains her commitment to a style of artistic expression that gracefully blends pleasure and critique. Using charm in multiple ways, she imagines a social world that functions more like this too-sensuous aesthetic category. While Uncle Wellington’s daydreams solidify according to appealing propaganda, Dunbar-Nelson’s stories remain in hazier dreamlike states enabled by the multiple meanings of “charm”—an aesthetic, an allure, a spell, a verb, an adjective, and a noun—and refuse the rhetorical dead-ends of social equality discourse. The use of the term social equality was an insult and a purposeful misunderstanding underpinning what has been called the “nadir” of African American art and politics: the postbellum, pre-Harlem era.2 It meant that those pushing for civil rights were secretly advocating advantages and policies that would violate private choice and erase class distinctions. In many cases, the term simply denoted “miscegenation.”3 “They who are political equals will soon be socially so, and promiscuous intermarriages will be the inevitable result,” claims an 1866 pamphlet by conservative Northerners titled “Negro Suffrage and Social Equality” (National Union Executive Committee 4). It would be difficult to overestimate how widespread and insidious the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century conversation about social equality was, yet few have examined its importance to the period’s literature or to developments in African American aesthetics. The major exception is Kenneth Warren’s Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism (1993), in which he provides the most extensive discussion of social equality’s effects on realist literature. While authors such as Henry James did not confront race issues explicitly, Warren argues that white realist writers envisioned a privatized social realm in which people are free to exclude on the basis of discomfort or aesthetics (39-40). The topic of social equality emerges when critics assess the postbellum politics of black writers, but few have explored how social equality’s rhetorical tricks may have influenced literary style or black writers’ participation in the period’s popular fictional genres. Rather than defending social equality as an ideal, the majority of civil-rights activists emphatically rejected it or “found themselves again and again having to deny the charge that they were promoting social equality” (Warren 23). “[W]e long since learned that equality before the law, equality in the best sense of that term under our institutions, is totally different from social equality,” wrote Fannie Barrier Williams in 1894 (243). Most disclaimed social equality because it had become a fear-mongering tactic; others, however, seemed more fundamentally opposed. As Nell Irvin Painter explains, upholding “race pride” was often dependent on denying immediate “social equality” (113).4 This “race pride” was also reliant on denying equality through intermarriage. Pauline Hopkins’s Will Smith, the activist character in Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900), fully understands the conflation of miscegenation and “social equality”: “Miscegenation, either lawful or unlawful, we do not want. The Negro dwells less on such a social cataclysm than any other race among us. Social equality does not exist; no man is forced to receive another within the environments of intimate social life. ‘Social position is not to be gained by pushing’” (264). Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, civil-rights activists insisted that “social equality” was a tactical distraction, but this awareness did not prevent constant debate in newspapers, on legislative floors, and throughout fiction into the twentieth century. Alonzo Ransier, a black congressman from South Carolina, defended civil-rights legislation in 1874: “The bugbear of ‘social equality’ is used by enemies of political and civic equality for the colored man in place of argument. There is not an intelligent white man or black man who does not know that it is the sheerest nonsense” (qtd. in Green 210). The recurring confusion about private choice and public rights forced writers and politicians to articulate a sphere of “intimate social life” (Hopkins 264) or “private social companionship” (Cable 222), representing an increasingly privatized sense of relations in public space. How could the law adjudicate the proximity of diverse bodies?5 A representative from Kentucky, an opponent of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, explains the problem, ending with a powerful but confusing double negative: You may say that these are not social relations provided for in this bill; but, sir, if I am compelled to sit side by side with him in the theater, the stage coach, and the railroad car, to eat with him at the same table at the hotels, and my child to be educated at the same schools with his child—if these are not social relations, I do not understand them. (United States 406) More than its actual argumentative content, “that nightmare known as social equality” (Williams, “Intellectual” 116) was fueled by its own haze of foolishness, impossibility, and confusion. In response to such folly, “When foes of Reconstruction held up miscegenation as the bête noire of social equality, reformers laughed off the threat as extreme and implausible” (Moran 77). In 1873, The Weekly Louisianan, one of New Orleans’s African American newspapers, did, for example, laugh off the social equality question and claimed that “every thinking man” knew the concept was “eminently absurd” (“Election” 1). Civil-rights activists found themselves asserting common ground with their opponents when they championed individual liberties, which also helped to uphold standards of economic success and respectability for the emerging black middle class. Dunbar-Nelson herself used class difference when she critiqued the “spectacle” of interracial sociality in a 1927 essay: “[T]he women of our race must realize that there is no progress in sobbing with joy over the spectacle of two or three ordinary Southern white women sitting down to talk with several very high class black women over the race problem” (“Facing” 299). Critiquing self-congratulatory interracial conferences, Dunbar-Nelson argues that “ordinary Southern white women” should not be applauded for offering their company to “very high class black women.” These statements were similar to the views of one Reconstruction congressman, a former slave from Louisiana, who lamented that segregation would force him, a respectable family man, to share a railroad car with “drunkards, gamblers, and criminals” (Lynch 156). In turn, he believed that the passage of a civil-rights bill “[would] place the colored people in a position where their identification with any party will be a matter of choice and not of necessity” (150). Such arguments defended class in order to impede caste.6 Even the case for Homer Plessy made by Albion Tourgée, and brought to the Supreme Court by the New Orleans Comité des Citoyens, relied on the logic of individual rights and ownership, or seeing identity as “property” (Robinson 243-44). Reading Dunbar-Nelson’s stories in The Goodness of St. Rocque as engaging the discourse of social equality may seem to run counter to her still underappreciated modern aesthetic. Moreover, in her important early work on the author, Gloria T. Hull observes that Dunbar-Nelson “maintained a sharp demarcation between black concerns and her literary work” (19). Indeed, Dunbar-Nelson once expressed exhaustion both with a certain style of didactic literature and with its bandied-about terms. In an 1895 letter to her future husband, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Dunbar-Nelson (then Alice Ruth Moore) named her distaste for a certain kind of politically motivated fiction: “I haven’t much liking for those writers that wedge the Negro problem and social equality and long dissertations on the Negro into their stories, Its [sic] too much like a quinine pill in jelly” (“Letter”).7 Her expressed aversion to the conversation about social equality shows a commitment to art’s ability to conceal political engagement, a commitment similar to that of Kate Chopin, who, adhering to her magazine publishers’ expectations, was a faithful recorder of Louisiana folk life but not an interpreter.8 However, unlike many black writers or activists who ceded common ground in saying that they, too, did not desire social equality, Dunbar-Nelson, in her very excision of the term’s explicit politics from her fiction, reimagines what counts as “social” interaction. Indeed, she does so by turning charm into an aesthetic and social project. I will turn to queer theory and the object-oriented philosophy of Graham Harman, who helps to explain that social connections between proximate objects (or object-behaving persons) do not function the same way as social connections based on personal choice or judgment. Again, privileging the latter kinds of social relations was essential to developing a limited “social equality” discourse. Dunbar-Nelson’s uses of charm as a powerfully subject-shattering force counter an era determined socially and culturally by modes of difference and exclusion. Charm, denigrated in much aesthetic theory, starting with Immanuel Kant, supposedly denies the viewer the autonomy to reason and appreciate true beauty; unlike beauty, charm’s delights are merely “empirical.” “A judgment of taste is therefore pure,” Kant writes, “only so far as no merely empirical satisfaction is mingled with its determining ground. This always happens, however, if charm or emotion has any share in the judgment by which something is to be declared to be beautiful” (108). Here, charm is not only a less intellectual form of beauty, it is powerful enough (like a physical charm, even) to disrupt the experience of beauty. Charm also belongs to the long-neglected and troubled realm of details, features that are ornamental (as a charm itself might be), excessive, minor, and, in the modern view, feminine. Kant thus understands what is charming to be inessential: “The colors that illuminate the outline belong to charm. Though they can indeed make the object itself vivid to sense, they cannot make it beautiful and worthy of being beheld” (110). Throughout the nineteenth century, aestheticians such as Kant mostly “[despised charm] because through its sensuousness it mixes a practical demand into the aesthetic” (Rosenkranz 175). Charm was expected of regional magazine fiction. “Short stories were for the entertainment and enjoyment of a national reading audience,” Thomas L. Morgan writes in his study of critical receptions of Kate Chopin’s Bayou Folk (1894) (replete with praise of its many “charms”), “one that wanted the pleasantness of daily life reinforced, not challenged” (148). Despite its soporific, distracting, or sensual functions, charm allowed Dunbar-Nelson to engage differently with, rather than “wedge” in, the elusive politics of social equality; thus, readings of The Goodness of St. Rocque that mark the author’s formal techniques might reveal a social sphere not dependent on the individualistic and racist contours of “social equality.” Still, because of New Orleans’s association with feminine sensual exoticism, Dunbar-Nelson must reformulate charm. How, Dunbar-Nelson seems to ask, could one write about New Orleans and its ambiguously raced characters without engaging in the erotics of simultaneous interest and disinterest? In her stories, Dunbar-Nelson charms readers into knowledge of her characters rather than encouraging them to seek certainty through reading styles of aggressive decoding, styles that often appear as disinterestedness, which is the enemy of charm. While congressmen and journalists fighting for civil rights needed to distance themselves from “social rights,” as W. E. B. Du Bois called them (170), and even build their own political projects of uplift around that disavowal, fiction of the period, perhaps especially regional writing, responded differently to the concept of “social,” if not also the problem of equality. The insufficient classifications of private choice and public rights urged writers to recover the social’s other possible meanings and unnamed charms. If oppressors made social equality into a bugaboo (Joel Chandler Harris’s term for the phrase) or an illusory chimera, for fiction writers of the late century, social equality’s reputation as nonsense or folly conjured visions of a mysterious social sphere. Charm, then, in Louisiana local color especially, was not only an aesthetic, feminized quality of regional writing but also a force capable of revealing relations from repressed pasts or from social worlds escaping the rule of law and the individual. Dunbar-Nelson’s The Goodness of St. Rocque is only one example of how regionalism and its generic qualities revise social equality’s terms. The mixed-race author was also not the only one to find social equality redefined in the spectacular or the spectral. George Washington Cable, New Orleans’s most nationally renowned local colorist, infamously defended himself against charges of supporting social equality, but in his fiction the absurdity of the discourse emerged as suppressed history, haunting the efforts of segregation and clear bloodlines. Their shared method shows a similar investment in using the mysteries of a city such as New Orleans to speak to the absurdity of social equality politics. Haunting Reconstruction: George Washington Cable’s Companions If Dunbar-Nelson expressed a desire to avoid addressing social equality in fiction as some of her contemporaries did, she made use of the concept’s ambiguities to capture the complexity and unreasonable aspects of social life on the color line. One of those contemporaries, Cable, who had already moved from New Orleans by the time the young Dunbar-Nelson began publishing, was (in)famously explicit about social equality in both essays and fiction. Pressing continually for the importance of distinguishing social equality from civil rights—most famously in his “The Freedman’s Case in Equity” (1885)—Cable was still accused with much hostility of supporting social equality, although he outwardly denied holding that position.9 However, like Chesnutt and Dunbar-Nelson, Cable investigated alternatives to the rhetoric of social equality in his Strange True Stories of Louisiana (1889), even when he asserted—perhaps ironically in some cases—that history could never validate such a thing. Despite the role that a much-feared version of forced “social equality” played in quashing radical Reconstruction, its definitional bastardizations and impossibilities also offered some writers the opportunity to imagine justice from a new starting point, one that reimagines social action as dependent on proximity, not necessarily choice alone. In other words, the idea of social life as either based on supposedly natural (racialized) affinity or on supposedly reasonable chosen associations undergirded the discourse against “social equality.”10 In Cable’s and Dunbar-Nelson’s stories, New Orleans history and culture challenged these limited ways of being social, as proximate bodies, places, and histories jostled each other indiscriminately. Even without the background of Voodoo and Catholic practice present in Dunbar-Nelson’s stories, Cable’s notorious descriptions of New Orleans’s landmarks, usually interpreted as merely encouraging a touristic gaze, often recognize and record the material past’s influence on the present: “Cable asks us to dig around in buildings in order to recognize the palimpsest” (Hirsch 80). The buildings in Cable’s stories have multiple lives, often birthed out of racial violence and ethnic change. One might reference the rotting mansions in “Jean-ah Poquelin” (1875) or “Belles Demoiselles Plantation” (1874) and their respective ties to the slave trade and Choctaw displacement. In “The Haunted House in Royal Street” from his Strange True Stories of Louisiana, Cable connects the multiple lives of a single French Quarter building in a story of terror and attempted integration. In this story, Cable describes Dr. and Madame Lalaurie’s mansion’s pre- and post-Civil War uses. The first section describes the lurid details of excessively cruel slave torture at the hands of wealthy Creole Madame Lalaurie. The family’s secret operations of cruelty are exposed when a young enslaved girl falls from a balcony into a courtyard and when a fire engulfs the house during a lavish dinner party and the police discover the torture chamber of an attic. The second half of Cable’s tale takes place in the same building, which, during Reconstruction, had become an integrated school. Despite this integration, Cable’s narrator assures readers that in the school there was no “enforcement of private social companionship.” “Daily discipline did not require any two pupils to be social,” Cable writes, “but only every one to be civil, and civil to all” (222). Such insistence exemplifies the careful civil-rights positioning across Cable’s writing. However, in “The Haunted House in Royal Street,” there is a force that extends an extralegal ruling on proper interaction among the pupils. Within the walls of the school, the “bugaboo” of social equality is complicated by actual ghosts, the spirits of former slaves and of Madame Lalaurie. Ghosts of the building’s past appear and adjudicate whenever one student is cruel to another, usually across the color line: “[A]t times it chanced to be just in the midst of one of these ebullitions of scorn, grief and resentful tears that noiselessly and majestically the great doors of the reception rooms, untouched by visible hands, would slowly swing open, and the hushed girls would call to mind Madame Lalaurie” (223). Cable’s narrator might deny any mandate of the girls’ “private social companionship,” but he will not deny the power of material, architectural space. Integration means literally sharing a roof, and if the law will not dictate “private social companionship,” a roof’s past lives, somehow, might. While Cable does not seem to believe that laws will directly change private sentiments, this story shows how occupying spaces together is itself a powerful first step. Cable tells readers that the school was segregated by a White League mob after raids in 1874 and 1877, linking the school to real street battles in the city.11 In Cable’s story, the cityscape presents a terrifying map of Reconstruction: “In sight of the belvedere of the ‘haunted house,’ eight squares away up Royal street, in the State House, the de facto government was shut up under close military siege by the de jure government” (231).12 Here, Cable refers to another palimpsest: the state “carpetbagger” government was housed in the former St. Louis Hotel, the site of the city’s most spectacular slave sales, where Uncle Tom was sold under its “splendid dome.”13 From the hotel, the mob in Cable’s story travels to the school to forcefully desegregate it. In the end, the school’s young pupils are haphazardly sorted by the mob according to their race; racial and social ambiguity permits some of the girls to call themselves Spanish or to claim their high-class familial ties. The pupils pushed out into the street cry out at the thought of attending a school with their servants, a familiar class-based assertion against social equality. The teachers manage to protect one light-skinned girl, passing and betrothed to a white man, from the “inquisitors.” During the sorting of students, “Accusations of the fatal taint were met with denials and withdrawn with apologies” (227). As such, these practitioners of segregation are less confident than the ghosts of the Lalaurie mansion at “restor[ing] order” (222). Throughout, Cable claims to tell a “strange true story, and not to please one cause or another,” thus sustaining late-century regionalists’ devotion to charm, not instruction (222). In discussing the Radical party and its supposed corruption, Cable halts his own narration: “Come! this history of a house must not run into the history of a government” (224). Yet, of course, the story continually does run into this history. The “strange” part of these “true” stories comes as much from their ghostliness as from their reality. The school is eventually turned into a music hall wherein guests continue to whisper about the building’s pasts, and near the end of the story, Cable tells us how a teacher from the former school sits at the orchestra’s show and reflects: “The scene was ‘much changed,’ . . . but the ghosts were all there, walking on the waves of harmony” (232). Cable shows how the ambiguities of equality, “harmony” here, might make room for different forms of social engagement. Social Charm and Alice Dunbar-Nelson Similarly, Dunbar-Nelson reshaped the possibilities of the social in order to accommodate her goals for fiction. Early in her career, Dunbar-Nelson wanted freedom from the pressure to address racial politics in her fiction, a desire she shared with Dunbar, whose dialect poetry was disproportionately encouraged by editors and audiences. She also complained of publishers’ and audiences’ literary expectations with similar language: she decried the “necessity of cramming and forcing oneself” into writing dialect simply because “one is a Negro or a Southerner” (qtd. in Ammons 66). This “cramming,” or “wedging,” is typical of texts from the period, as Andreá N. Williams has demonstrated. Scenes of “bad writing,” in which “the seams show” in intrusions, digressions, and long-winded didacticism, are signals of “the unsettling presence of class” and its representative problems in a text (Williams 16). If we follow Williams’s argument, then what should we make of Dunbar-Nelson’s desire not to “wedge” or “cram”?14 As an African American woman writing in the regional mode, Dunbar-Nelson negotiated a complex set of often-conflicting expectations for her fiction: to write, as one critic failed to see in her stories, with “characteristics peculiar to her race” (qtd. in Hull 19) and, as William Dean Howells encouraged American realist writers, to focus on the “smiling aspects of life” (641-42). Even so, she was praised for having matched Cable’s “charm of description” (qtd. in Hull 50), and Dunbar encouraged her to continue writing in that vein: “[Y]our ‘Little Miss Sophie’ is as graceful, poignant, and charming as anything Grace King ever wrote. Everything you have written shows remarkable thought behind that—talent” (qtd. in Nagel 96). A charm aesthetic fit a genre that cultivated appreciation but did not always encourage deeper understanding. Consider the connection between charm and simplicity in a Springfield Republican review of Mary Elizabeth Wilkins’s fiction: “The charm of Miss Wilkins’s stories is in her intimate acquaintance and comprehension of humble life, and the sweet human interest she feels and makes her readers partake of, in the simple, common, homely people she draws” (qtd. in King 306). Another definition comes from a reviewer of Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), who marks charm as something more elusive: “It would be no easy task to point out just the charm, just the secret of interest in writing like this” (“Reviews” 23). In local color, these interpretations of charm are especially useful in producing landscapes and people that are simultaneously simple yet elusive, unthreatening yet still interesting.15 Dunbar-Nelson’s sketches are certainly “charming” in the sense that the local-color genre demanded, but they also acknowledge that New Orleans had its own particular history of charm, both in terms of its eroticized touristic pull and in its Catholic-Voodoo religious practices. These modes of charm are invoked in plot but also in the stories’ use of detail, where detail’s dual function as both charming description and assured knowledge is effectively destabilized. Along the same line of denying such adjudication, the stories show carefully managed vision as a form of violence. Scenes of social festivity, a typical background or mood for local color, also provide a social scene that is more than the sum of its individually sovereign subjects. Finally, in further cementing the collection’s challenges to individual choice and the primary basis for social equality’s repudiation, descriptions of object-like characters, often in scenes of death, open possibilities for what Fred Moten calls “resistant material objecthood” (18). From the start of The Goodness of St. Rocque, Dunbar-Nelson tries to circumvent a too-curious reader’s desire for difference by short-circuiting the function of detail as a way of knowing, a “guarantor of meaning” (Schor 7) and also a crucial feature of local color’s charm. We encounter dysfunctional detail in the title story of the collection, in which the protagonist, Manuela, receives a physical charm from a wizened Creole woman to win back the affections of her love, Theophile. In the first sentences of the story, the reader finds the particularizing quality of detail emphasized but undermined: “Manuela was tall and slender and graceful, and once you knew her the lithe form could never be mistaken. She walked with the easy spring that comes from a perfectly arched foot” (3). Manuela is “tall and slender and graceful,” unsurprising adjectives for a young beauty of ambiguous race, and these well-worn words, with their double “ands” emphasizing the accumulation of detail, take center stage as the first words of the whole collection.16 Two kinds of recognition collide in this sentence: the description of supposedly particularizing details and the “once you knew her” that hints at the racial connotations of grace and litheness. By invoking the characterization of the New Orleans Creole woman of color, Dunbar-Nelson shows how easily details lose their ability to truly particularize Manuela for the reader. As a type, the mixed-race woman is highly recognizable despite, or because of, her ambiguity.17 In her sentence construction, Dunbar-Nelson exposes how this paradox works. It is not that her actual “lithe form” cannot be mistaken; it is a person’s familiarity with her form (“once you knew her”) that makes Manuela’s “lithe form” readable, particular, and unforgettable. Only when you know her can she be recognized; the scrutinizing attention of the detective-like reader cannot lead to the kind of knowledge Dunbar-Nelson makes possible through witnessing the breakdown of detail’s particularizing function. Here, detail, the supposedly superfluous indicator of charm in late-nineteenth-century aesthetic theory, becomes instead essential and nonparticular. Ultimately, this small disturbance in the function of detail in Dunbar-Nelson’s opening sentence challenges knowledge of Manuela’s racialized body, the kind of knowledge that would uphold a social world dictated by the rules of antisocial equality. Manuela and her inscrutability also introduce us to themes most associated with The Goodness of St. Rocque. Dunbar-Nelson is celebrated by critics both for her insider view of New Orleans, such as using obscure street names as clues to a character’s life or identity, and for her ability to keep readers on shaky ground. Elizabeth Ammons contends that, in Dunbar-Nelson’s stories, questions of “who—the obsessive American question—is ‘black’ and who is ‘white,’ we often cannot say, and are usually not invited to ask” (66). Truly, like many stories of the color line from the late nineteenth century, the characters’ racial ambiguity destabilizes the visual demarcations required for segregation. Still, many of the stories rely on familiar New Orleans clichés, especially the tragic mixed-race protagonist. My interest here, then, is in how indirection works through the paradox of offering clear markers for ambiguous characters. “Although Dunbar’s references to the race of some of her characters were subtle[,] . . . they would have been unmistakable,” writes Jessica Adams, highlighting this tension of clarity and ambiguity (33). Even if Dunbar-Nelson purposefully obfuscates the racial and ethnic identities of her characters, her stories still provide telling hints for readers, almost inviting them to presume racial difference. If a reader cannot fully grasp any single detail’s exact import, she is not kept from enjoying the ambiguity that characterizes New Orleans’s most exotic(ized) offerings. Any obvious ambiguity is how racialization in New Orleans literature works. Ambiguity, not detail alone, actually becomes the “guarantor of meaning” (Schor 7). If Dunbar-Nelson was cunningly redirecting readers’ expectations of race and place, as many such as Ammons and Adams have suggested, she did so by first tempting readers to search for clues in the form of details and then, by denying the search’s assured end, leading readers through a complex landscape wherein they must surrender themselves to the text’s various charms. To understand this process of tantalizing ambiguity, I turn to queer theorist Leo Bersani and art historian Ulysse Dutoit, who describe art that beckons its viewers (or readers) with “a relation of paranoid fascination,” a desire built around an “enigmatic signifier,” or a “provocative unreadability” that is ultimately antagonistic in its very nature (Bersani and Dutoit 13). In psychoanalytic terms, the enigmatic signifier is a seductive secret that structures all intersubjective relations: “[W]e are originally seduced into a relation by messages we can’t read, enigmatic messages that are perhaps inevitably interpreted as secrets” (Bersani 107). Such basic relations with humans, with the world, and with art, rely on profound otherness. However, in Caravaggio’s Secrets (1998), Bersani and Dutoit describe an alternative to relation-as-difference through their close reading of Baroque Italian paintings. Attending to “correspondences” across a visual plane, they suggest a “radically other order of being,” an order referring to a “vast family of materiality in which community is no longer a function of reciprocal readings of desire” (6). To find these kinds of relations, one must look with “only a receptive passivity,” not with seduced (or suspicious) reading, nor with a restrained glance of learned disinterest (57). Two possible but opposed readings are offered, then, in the first sentence of The Goodness of St. Rocque: the “provocative unreadability” of Manuela herself, a racialized body, or a general familiarity with her form, or the sentence’s form, which itself could charm those reading with “receptive passivity” into knowledge not offered merely by scrutinizing Manuela. By working with charm to avoid intersubjective desire and by depicting stories of seduction rather than using details of race to seduce readers, Dunbar-Nelson rerouted investigations of the seductively withholding bodies in her stories, those of characters such as Manuela. To be charmed instead of seduced means that the boundary between object (charm) and subject (charmed) is partially dissolved by the object’s own agency and by the individual’s corresponding surrender of mastery. It is crucial, then, to note that Dunbar-Nelson’s plots do not hoodwink readers about the race of their characters, unlike the plots of stories such as Cable’s “’Tite Poulette” (1883) or Grace King’s “The Little Convent Girl” (1893), which both climax with dramatic revelations of racial identity. Following Bersani in his search for new models of relation, we can consider Dunbar-Nelson’s details as signifyin(g) on the notion of the enigmatic signifiers common to New Orleans. After all, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. argues, signifyin(g) functions through a logic of repetition, like Bersani and Dutoit’s “correspondences” (6), and through shadow traces countering “black difference” (Gates 51). In “Sister Josepha,” we meet another of The Goodness of St. Rocque’s many characters with indeterminate yet obvious race. This story, however, shows us more clearly how an exchange of glances is portrayed in the plot but foreclosed by the story’s forms and correspondences. Camille, an orphaned “child without an identity,” grows up in a convent “with the rest of the waifs,” all “scraps of French and American civilization thrown together to develop a seemingly inconsistent miniature world” (157). Despite the fact that Camille is of unknown origins, or more likely because of that fact, she is especially favored at the convent. The other girls envy her: “Camille, they decided crossly, received too much notice. It was Camille this, Camille that; she was pretty, it was to be expected. Even Father Ray lingered longer in his blessing when his hands pressed her silky black hair” (160). She is an enigmatic signifier to the other characters of the story: her eroticism “advertises an availability that is somewhat opaque” (Bersani and Dutoit 8). While her desirability is conveyed in the plot, the reader is blocked from regarding Camille similarly. Camille’s desirability eventually produces the story’s central drama. One day, Camille is introduced to a couple wanting to adopt her from the convent, but she refuses to go with them: “The woman suited her; but the man! It was a doubtless intuition of the quick, vivacious sort which belonged to her blood that served her.” Camille cannot fully understand this reaction to her would-be father, but in being marked as ambiguous, the man’s intentions become easy for the reader to “divine”: “Untutored in worldly knowledge, she could not divine the meaning of the pronounced leers and admiration of her physical charms which gleamed in the man’s face, but she knew it made her feel creepy” (Dunbar-Nelson, “Sister” 159). After this encounter, Camille’s world becomes one of correspondences. The disturbing “gleam” of the man’s face is echoed when Camille newly reads her world and the convent’s parlor: “The room was not an unaccustomed one, for she had swept it many times, but to-day the stiff black chairs, the dismal crucifixes, the gleaming whiteness of the walls, even the cheap lithograph of the Madonna which Camille had always regarded as a perfect specimen of art, seemed cold and mean” (160; emphasis added). It is not unremarkable that the walls’ “gleaming whiteness” corresponds with the man’s gleaming face. Against this man’s leering, the rest of the sketch guides the reader through different relations in and through space, such as this moment with Camille in the parlor. The end of the story offers another way of looking that refigures the very basics of social interaction, the assumption of intersubjectivity and its required delineation of difference. Sometime after Camille refuses to leave with the couple, a fête day at the cathedral serves as the setting for Camille’s first feeling of love. Camille, now Sister Josepha, sees a pair of eyes looking at her “pityingly” (166). After the service, the eyes continue “haunting her persistently” (167). She tries to complete chores around the church, but the eyes remain present: “And always the tender, boyish brown eyes, that looked so sorrowfully at the fragile, beautiful little sister, haunting, following, pleading.” The difference between the leering man and the haunting eyes is a significant clue as to how Dunbar-Nelson signals the difference between reading and looking at enigmatic characters. The “haunting” eyes follow her but do not leer at her with ownership or judgment. After this crucial encounter with the eyes, Sister Josepha longs to escape her convent and “to merge in the great city where recognition was impossible, and working her way like the rest of humanity, perchance encounter the eyes again.” She plans to “glide up Chartres Street to Canal, and once there, mingle in the throng that filled the wide thoroughfare” (169). This desire for her own haunting, for mingling “unseen” with the “throng,” is not possible for Camille in her cloistered world of leering and gleaming, where her ambiguous past and identity is subject to suspicious reading. Dunbar-Nelson’s stories, with their many social scenes, return again and again to the “throng”—a social sphere more than, or capable of signifying more than, the sum of its parts. “Sister Josepha” has its “reverent throng” (165) and “M’sieu Fortier’s Violin” its “bright-hued chattering throng” (79). In “Odalie,” a second story about a cloistered young girl, the word is used multiple times “within” the space of a few paragraphs: “What a hurry to be out in the motley merry throng,” “throng after throng of maskers” (188), “[d]own Toulouse Street there came the merriest throng of all” (189), and “the laughing throng pelted her with flowers and candy” (190). Dunbar-Nelson had multiple reasons to include scenes of festivity. Characteristic of New Orleans and of regional writing in general, such social scenes might well be one of the most maligned aspects of the local-color genre. They often provide extended descriptions wherein ethnic others are rendered as distant background actors in a picturesque landscape. However, across regional writing, the inclusion of “dancin’ parties” or reunion picnics occasionally did more than merely fulfill the genre’s demand for quaint social customs.18 In these boundary-dissolving mobs and carnivals, Dunbar-Nelson emphasizes social relations that are public yet not measured by belonging. Belonging, Lauren Berlant cautions, is only one kind of relation, one “that cannot be presumed” (395). Like Cable’s haunted houses, dictating relations beyond choice, the thronged spaces in Dunbar-Nelson’s stories force us to reckon with proximity: “The crowded but disjointed propinquity of the social calls for a proxemics, the study of sociality as proximity quite distinct from the possessive attachment languages of belonging” (Berlant 395). This is not to say that all crowds are benevolent in The Goodness of St. Rocque but rather that any return to the motley scenes of New Orleans, violent or jovial, counters the choice-based and overly logical definitions of the “social” in social equality of the late nineteenth century. In her scenes of fish fries and afternoon parties at the lakeshore, Dunbar-Nelson’s work fits into what detractors saw, and still see, in the local-color genre: a “lighter, more comforting version of realism, one in which descriptive detail and the humorous depiction of quaint customs painted over its lack of serious themes” (Campbell 93). However, even as Dunbar-Nelson’s narratorial guides offer glimpses at authentic “native” life, they always do so through specific mention of the reader’s non-belonging. Throughout The Goodness of St. Rocque, narrators interrupt scenes of fun with second-person address, as in “The Fisherman of Pass Christian”: “You’ve never been for a hay-ride and fish-fry on the shores of the Mississippi Sound, have you?” (42-43). The first line of “La Juanita” is similar in kind, inviting but explicit in marking the tourist’s non-belonging: “If you never lived in Mandeville, you cannot appreciate the thrill of wholesome, satisfied joy which sweeps over its inhabitants every evening at five o’clock” (195). Dunbar-Nelson exposes the paradox in this address, making it obvious that the “never” can also be worked into an invitation. In “The Goodness of St. Rocque,” the narrator similarly beckons with a familiar tone: “Now, a picnic at Milneburg is a thing to be remembered for ever. . . . For what can equal the music of a violin, a guitar, a cornet, and a bass viol to trip the quadrille to at a picnic?” (5). In these moments, the reader is simultaneously included and distanced, again staging the kind of seductive withdrawal Bersani dramatizes in some of Caravaggio’s paintings. In this seductive distancing, Dunbar-Nelson highlights one of the common features of regionalism: its insider look at those deemed outsiders. Stephanie Foote argues that “one of the most important functions of regional writing was to rectify exclusion” (13), regional and personal exclusion, from the idea of a universal American ideal. According to this reading, regionalism was a “literary strategy” meant to mitigate the contradictions of homogenizing nationalism and national heterogeneity (14). Following Foote’s emphasis on what regionalism can do for understanding nation, the purpose of the address in The Goodness of St. Rocque is to stage such mitigation. The narrators’ highlighting issues of inclusion and exclusion in these moments of invitation shows two conflicting operations of the social world: one is the exclusive world of social position, one that Dunbar-Nelson, as a middle-class, light-skinned daughter of an ex-slave (not, as might be expected from New Orleans myth, from a long-prominent family of former free people of color), was especially shaped by; the other is the sense of the “social” as a distinct object of inquiry, a sense only recently available through more formal (in both senses, referring to its institutionalization and to a study of forms) sociological study. To acknowledge both these views operating in tandem in The Goodness of St. Rocque is to recognize Dunbar-Nelson as a theorist of the social, not merely as a recorder of its festive events. As such, she joins the ranks of Du Bois, especially as Ross Posnock interprets Du Bois’s careful adumbration of pragmatism and aesthetics or even his desire to “reconcile democracy and elitism” (504). Dunbar-Nelson’s unique contribution to this kind of radical calculation, however, is her shift in focus from the more familiar opposition of aesthetics and politics to aesthetics and a refiguring of the private/public divide that was shaken by “social equality” discourse. She also offers challenges to concepts of objectification identified by Christopher Freeburg in incidents of lynching, wherein the white mob’s struggle to objectify another actually reveals personhood’s intractability. One final important pattern in The Goodness of St. Rocque will fully illustrate a social world not based on private choice or belonging but instead open to a “vast family of materiality” (Bersani and Dutoit 6). The character deaths concluding many of the stories not only make for tragic melodrama; their bodies also challenge reading-as-objectification. Because local-color stories circulated in magazines like museum pieces, objects detached from their contexts (Brown 81), it is striking that each of Dunbar-Nelson’s dead characters is described as a “bit” or a “Something.” “When the Bayou Overflows” ends when the restless Sylvie, who leaves his rural Louisiana home for Chicago, returns home as a corpse. When his family goes to the station expecting to meet him, instead they see “some men bearing Something” (106) from the train. Sister Josepha is brought to the convent as a “dimpled bit of three-year-old humanity” (157). Both “Mr. Baptiste” and “Carnival Jangle” have similar endings of spontaneous, misdirected violence, and both protagonists turn object-like in their deaths. “Mr. Baptiste” is perhaps the most explicitly political of all the book’s sketches, referencing an 1892 strike by the city’s dockworkers. The strike erupted over the cotton industry’s use of the cheapest labor, African Americans, who were not welcome in the union.19 Mr. Baptiste himself is Dunbar-Nelson’s invention; he is a poor Creole man who walks the levee market taking from “baskets of forgotten fruit” (113). Baptiste subsists this way, delivering the nearly rotten fruit to his “clients,” who, in turn, provide him with nourishing meals. However, the strike leads to problems for Mr. Baptiste, and he laments the resulting loss of the fruit trade. Because the white men refuse to work with the black men, “de fruit ship, dey can’ mak’ lan’, de mans, dey t’reaten an’ say t’ings” (115-16). When a fight breaks out one morning between the union strikers and the African Americans loading boxes onto ships, Mr. Baptiste hides behind a bread cart. After “weakly cheering the Negroes on,” he is singled out by an angry Irish man who “let[s] fly a brickbat in the direction of the bread-stall” (122). The brick hits Mr. Baptiste, killing him instantly, and a “sympathetic mass” gathers around him: “The individual, the concrete bit of helpless humanity, had more interest for them than that vast, vague fighting mob beyond” (123). For Kristina Brooks, this sentence demonstrates two modes of identification pitted against one another: the “vague” mob based on ethnic “divisions that Dunbar-Nelson indicates are only seemingly stable” (14) and the more specific accessory to the historical event, the “fruit-eatin’ Frinchman” (Dunbar-Nelson, Goodness 122). While, as Brooks argues, “Mr. Baptiste” corrects the historical record by telling the story of the individual, it is the language of “the concrete bit of helpless humanity” that interests me here. Regarding Mr. Baptiste as a physical but fictional remainder, the “sympathetic mass” stands in for Dunbar-Nelson’s readers. Mass and “concrete bit” meet in the end, rather than reader and character. In “Carnival Jangle,” a young girl named Flo is whisked away by a sinister crowd during Mardi Gras and meets an end similar to Mr. Baptiste’s. The crowd’s leader, dressed as a Prince of Darkness, promises to show Flo “what life is” and brings her to a shop run by a French-accented woman with eyes that are “sharp as talons in their grasping glance” (130). Traversing the town costumed as a young male troubadour, Flo is soon mistaken for someone else. Calling to mind the opening of “Goodness of St. Rocque,” a voice in the crowd says to his accomplice, “I’d know that other form anywhere. It’s Leon, see? I know those white hands like a woman’s and that restless head” (133). The violent avenger then stabs Flo. “There is murder, but by whom?” the narrator asks. Like the gathered mass above the bloodied body of Mr. Baptiste, Flo’s mother attends her slain daughter, and we are left with another object in the sketch’s final image: “a broken-hearted mother sat gazing wide-eyed and mute at a horrible something that lay across the bed” (134). The transformation of characters into “somethings” suggests the author’s knowledge of how her own sketches and characters circulated as easily consumable “material.”20 The musician in her “Fortier’s Violin” is referred to as a “unique specimen” by an opera-goer who tries to buy the man’s instrument. Unlike Chopin, who in “A Gentleman of Bayou Têche” (1894) ironized her own role as recorder, Dunbar-Nelson converts each character into a material charm meant to draw interest, like the “interested mass” around Mr. Baptiste. Materiality is central to The Goodness St. Rocque, and especially to its title story. When Manuela senses that Theophile is straying and keeping company with a blonde acquaintance, she seeks advice from a “wizened yellow woman,” who tells her to pray to St. Rocque and gives Manuela a “lil’ charm fo’ to ween him back” (9). Diasporic and Creole religions, such as the versions of Voodoo, Hoodoo, and Catholicism practiced together in Dunbar-Nelson’s New Orleans, often incorporate objects such as the “lil’ charm” in ways that challenge but sometimes complement Christian epistemological systems of thought about agency and objects.21 In this moment, Dunbar-Nelson skillfully conflates the sense of diminutive local-color charm with the literal “lil’ charm” in this story. In The Goodness of St. Rocque, charm is not soporific nor does it necessarily lead to condescension; its vitality challenges the social world of choice and reasonable relationships. In this particular story, the charm literally challenges the hierarchy of white supremacy that inheres in romantic relationships, restoring Theophile to the darker Manuela and leaving “dat light gal” (8), Claralie, alone. As Diana Paton has discussed regarding Obeah and as Kodi Roberts argues of Voodoo, African American religious traditions involving gris-gris or physical charms were frequently deployed to challenge various and related boundaries, those of nation and race, and those between the physical and the supernatural world. As Voodoo knowledge animates many of the stories in The Goodness of St. Rocque, it also signifies on charm’s place in aesthetic and literary theory and engages charm’s persuasive sensuality opposing beauty’s ideal. Typical of local-color texts, a paradoxical disinterested attention keeps the reader from fully incorporating the people they imagine preserved in a region into hegemonic ideas of national belonging. In The Goodness of St. Rocque, the reader, expecting to be in charge of her relationship to the text and its ability to offer details that might add up to knowledge, is challenged. However, in converting her characters into objects, social relations are still possible, albeit ones that crucially challenge intersubjectivity.22 Charm is a “witchcraft,” says Harman (135), supporting Kant’s unfavorable characterization of charm as manipulation. For Kant, “Charm is more of a direct result of our being affected by the object and involves to a lesser degree, if at all, any acts of reflection on our side” (Wenzel 61). However, Harman’s careful discussion of charm twists Kantian valuations of agency and judgment. In Harman’s articulation of charm, the idea of losing personal reflection or choice corresponds closely to Dunbar-Nelson’s aesthetic correctives to the social in the bugaboo discourse of social equality. Charm, Harman argues, arises from witnessing an object’s “sincerity,” which means only describing an object’s intentionality, its automatic practice of simply being what it is. One can, of course, see how easily this idea of “sincerity” works in local-color writing to elevate the superior reader’s complexity above the fully absorbed object-like character. Such an attitude is foundational to critiques of the genre. Imposing both the authentic and the automatic on regional others can make them “seem less free than we are” (Harman 136). This condescension, however, is exactly what Harman means to counter when he defines charm alongside comedy, which, according to Henri Bergson, whom Harman cites, is based on a similar recognition of the hopelessly automatic. “Instead of laying bare someone’s hopeless style of dancing so that we might laugh at it,” Harman writes, “[charm] brings this style before us contagiously, as a kind of magnetic force that realigns our nervous systems” (137). Instead of deriving comedy or derision from something charming, we are instead reminded that any object, any thing, is just as it is, wholly absorbed in itself. Overall, Harman seeks to point out the arrogance in overestimating and exalting a subject’s freedom.23 Such a theory is useful for understanding the new and contested social scene that emerged in the late nineteenth century—one filled with crowds fighting about the hierarchy of the social as its rules crossed with those of race in spaces such as the train or the sidewalk. My reading of The Goodness of St. Rocque shows that Dunbar-Nelson’s fiction offers a robust and signifyin(g) theory of charm—a theory of losing individual choice—one that engages with the politicization of social interaction and with the demands of literary tastes. Conclusion Dunbar-Nelson, writing at the turn of the century, was caught between the local-color tradition and the coming decades of “New Negro” thought. As such, she has not enjoyed a steady place in African American literature, as the authors included in a recent special issue of Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers on Dunbar-Nelson all suggest. Anna Storm argues that Dunbar-Nelson’s work has also not been sufficiently considered as part of an African American “tradition,” no matter how troubled that concept might be, because of her refusal to sacrifice art for (a certain kind of) political engagement. At the same time, Dunbar-Nelson is not widely celebrated for departing from canonical consensus. Brad Evans observes that Dunbar-Nelson “has been unduly trapped in a very boring mode of criticism” while her experimental aesthetics have not been fully appreciated. For Evans, Dunbar-Nelson’s minor positioning results from critics misrecognizing the innovative and cosmopolitan, not provincial, techniques of local colorists. However, in any less “boring” discussion, we should still appreciate the timeliness of The Goodness of St. Rocque, published just three years after the Plessy v. Ferguson decision (Evans 141). Following Evans in his brief but potent assessment of Dunbar-Nelson’s aesthetic and political projects, my understanding of The Goodness of St. Rocque as a collection responding to an era wherein race relations were limited by the absurd definitions of “social equality” sees Dunbar-Nelson as not only creating a “sharp demarcation between black concerns and her literary work” (Hull 19) but as theorizing that demarcation in a way that also reveals alternative ways of understanding social interaction or intersubjectivity. Dunbar-Nelson shows us that an African American tradition emerging from post-emancipation politics is not without experimental aesthetics. In literary criticism more broadly, this means that connecting texts to their sociological context is consistent with applications of aesthetic theory. What I have been suggesting is that Dunbar-Nelson employed various methods to imagine how to act socially and how to recognize the social in an increasingly private world of choice. Aesthetic revolutions within the Harlem Renaissance have been credited with finally stamping out the “social equality” conversation, at least in the terms of the long postbellum debates that conflated the idea so strongly with interracial marriage (Schneider 85). Additionally, military service in the two world wars contributed to a renewed push for civil rights and social regard. Before then, the “social equality” debates were legally halted. Acts and codes such as The Civil Rights Act of 1875—which made a convincing case based on the impossibility of distinguishing proximity, intimacy, and privacy—were officially overturned by the Plessy v. Ferguson decision: the Fourteenth Amendment could not have intended to “abolish distinctions based upon color” or meant to enforce “commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either” (“Plessy” 614). Rebecca J. Scott argues that to “conflate the phrase ‘social equality’ with an imagined taxonomy of civil, political, and social rights is to mistake an insult for an analytic exercise” (781). In Louisiana’s Reconstruction politics, this is certainly true, as Scott demonstrates in her study of the 1868 Louisiana Constitution’s careful language of “public rights” and the many vernacular and global solutions sought by writers, reporters, and politicians. However, in imaginative fiction such as The Goodness of St. Rocque, the rhetoric of social equality collides with the developing concerns of African American aesthetic practice, as Dunbar-Nelson encapsulates in her lament about the “quinine pill in jelly” (“Letter”). Revisiting this post-Reconstruction literary period with an attention to the rhetoric of social equality shows just how varied the responses in fiction could be to the irrational folly of the real world. Footnotes 1. Charles W. Chesnutt is the writer of the period perhaps most associated with social equality debates. William L. Andrews points out that rarely “in American fiction was the chimera of ‘social equality’ so matter-of-factly confronted” (89). Nick Bromell also discusses Chesnutt’s negotiation with social equality, arguing that The House behind the Cedars (1900) exposes the false yet carefully maintained distinction between a private life of choices and a public life of law in white-dominated society against the “inevitability of connection” (53). 2. As Nell Irvin Painter argues, social equality reveals the equation of race with class, the inability of whites to conceive of blacks as anything other than lower class. While Painter is right that, from a white perspective, social equality really meant race equality, for African American thinkers, social equality did actually lead to discussions of class within their race. 3. At its worst, the rhetoric of enforced companionship buttressed mass hysteria over invented black sexual aggression. 4. For an example of this denial in fiction, see Viola’s dying plea for separation of the races in Sutton E. Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio (1899). 5. For example, the defense in Baylies v. Curry (1888) was that “while the Civil Rights Act of 1885 prohibited exclusion of African Americans from certain places, it did not explicitly outlaw segregation within those places” (Dale 325). 6. For a contemporary voice, see Charles Sumner; for a critical discussion of this issue, see Elizabeth Dale. 7. For more on Dunbar-Nelson’s complaints about her contemporaries’ literary style, and for another dilation on this quote, see Anna Storm. Contradictory publishing demands are perhaps worth considering. When a novel-length version of her “Stones of the Village” was rejected from Atlantic Monthly, the editor cautioned her that the public had developed a “distaste” for stories of the color line (Hull 57). 8. See Thomas L. Morgan, who explains how the expectations of the local-color genre also became the means for social critique. 9. Although he left New Orleans in 1885, George Washington Cable did not stop writing about the South. An 1889 incident in Nashville, Tennessee, is often cited as the most infamous attack against Cable; he had, however, left the South for Northampton, Massachusetts, almost five years prior. Cable was criticized in newspapers in and beyond Nashville for dining with a black Republican politician, James Carroll Napier. A Nashville American article argued that it was always “folly and wickedness” to “[inspire] ignorant negroes with vain dreams of social equality” (qtd. in McElrath and Leitz 55n6). While Cable was certainly outspoken on rights issues, critics sometimes view his preservationist studies of African American culture or folklore, such as his publication of “Creole Slave Songs,” as insidiously compatible with his expressed nervousness about social equality and an implicit belief in white supremacy. Kenneth Warren, for example, argues that Cable relied on The Century Magazine’s reputation to “arrest the social implications of his civil rights argument and to assure Southerners that blacks could enter society without turning it topsy-turvy” (47). For robust criticism of Cable’s clinging to theories of “civilization,” see Jonathan Daigle. 10. Before he details various definitions of “social” to help make his argument for true equality, Harvey Johnson, a Baltimore pastor, writes in 1903, “What is ‘social equality’ and what does the white man mean when he cries out, ‘No social equality!’ Is he sincere or is he only gambling with words and terms?” (198). 11. New Orleans was the only city during Reconstruction that systematically attempted desegregation. For a historical account of public schools during this period, see Louis R. Harlan. For a history of the major Reconstruction massacres and skirmishes, see James K. Hogue. 12. Susan Gillman argues that Cable is unwilling in The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life (1880) to make connections between slavery and his present: “[T]he potential link between the Bras Coupé story and that of Honore, f.m.c. is never made, just as the gap between past and present remains unbridged” (38). Following this diagnosis of Cable’s hesitant vision of equality, one could read the (merely) haunting presence of slavery as a way not to engage the very real continuities between the Madame Lalaurie tortures and the White League’s racism. 13. After being used by troops in the Civil War, the hotel was sold to the state government in 1874. In 1884, the building was sold again, after sitting in ruin. It changed names from the St. Louis to the Hotel Royal, as it appears in Dunbar-Nelson’s own “Anarchy Alley,” from her first collection Violets and Other Tales (1895). For more on the building’s history, see Richard Campanella. 14. Dunbar-Nelson certainly does not completely avoid issues of class in The Goodness of St. Rocque (1899), but those stories of class struggle or destitute existence are also crucially intertwined with ambiguous ethnic markers. As Kristina Brooks points out, Dunbar-Nelson’s work moves toward realizing the “inter-connected relationship between race and ethnicity in Creole identity,” as they overlap (8). In “M’sieu Fortier’s Violin,” the elderly protagonist loses his employment at the opera house and ascends to the cheap seats as he descends the social scale. In “Tony’s Wife,” an Italian man and his German wife persist with their tiny shop on the suddenly fashionable side of town. Moreover, one of the stories alludes to a real, politically fraught local event: her “Mr. Baptiste” and its depiction of a workers’ strike on the New Orleans docks. Importantly, Dunbar-Nelson’s stories place the relationship between class and race on shifting ground. Whereas Kate Chopin wrote sketches wherein “the class position of Cajuns seems inextricably connected to their brownness,” Dunbar-Nelson challenges such conflation that might further assist the caste-making goals and clear racial hierarchies of “social equality” (Fetterly and Pryse 286). Building on Painter’s argument—that at the heart of “social equality” discourse’s perceived absurdity was the belief that, for many whites, “the merging of class and race seemed completely natural” (124)—I am suggesting that these more explicit engagements with class politics in The Goodness of St. Rocque are part of Dunbar-Nelson’s effort to reshape the social. 15. Yet another definition of “charm” comes from Hamlin Garland, who defines local color as it “corresponds to the endless and vital charm of individual peculiarity” (57). 16. See the following example from early French colonial writing: “Along with intelligence, the Creole negro combines a graceful form, supple movements, agreeable features, and a use of language that is gentler and stripped of all the accents which African negroes blend in” (qtd. in Berman 39). 17. According to Christine Palumbo-DeSimone, “The mulatta is, by definition, a racially ambiguous figure. In a society which asserted inherent and irreconcilable racial disparity as a basis for white domination, the mulatta called into question absolute racial categories” (126). Despite this possible challenge to racial categories, the mixed-race woman was turned into an attractive and dangerous ambiguity in the stock figure of the “tragic mulatta.” 18. See, for example, Mary Noailles Murfree’s “The Dancin’ Party at Harrison’s Cove” (1878) (published under the pseudonym Charles Egbert Craddock) and the Bowden reunion in Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896). 19. See Daniel Rosenberg for a history of racial tensions in the industry. 20. As Michael A. Elliot argues, all local-color realism had in common the idea that “people could be ‘material’—that they possessed a certain identity that could be recorded in such a way as to be instructive, even entertaining, to a consuming audience.” The problem is always that, as Elliot notes, “putting cultural material into circulation risks the possibility of condescension instead of appreciation” (45). 21. Gris-gris charms were popular, Lawrence N. Powell points out, “in the town’s swampy environs as early as the 1720s” (266). Elizabeth Maddock Dillon’s work on the object life of colonial religions is crucial to my understanding of charm, as she describes an obi fetish, a collection of objects—often hair, bones, cloth—not as a thing but as a “practice of assemblage” (173). Such assembling, she argues, revealed or created the “plasticity and boundary dissolution between objects and bodies, animate and inanimate entities” (175). For discussion of allusions to particular Voodoo and folk practices in The Goodness of St. Rocque, see Elizabeth Ammons (64-65). 22. Graham Harman observes that “It needs to be shown how relations and events are possible despite the existence of vacuum-sealed objects or tool-beings” (2). Using queer theory and critical race theory together is a fruitful move for many critics because of overlapping concerns with identity, performance, pathology, the body, and relation. Michael P. Bibler provides an in-depth look at social equality differently imagined in modernist Southern literature. Bibler also enlists Leo Bersani to trace how southern literature betrays the rhetorical and ideological strictures of social equality (15). 23. Harman claims that while no one wishes to be “a slave, scapegoat, tool, or object of ridicule,” we should reckon with the fact that, “Contrary to the usual view, what we really want is to be objects—not as means to an end like paper or oil, but in the sense that we want to be like the Grand Canyon or a guitar hero or a piece of silver: distinct forces to be reckoned with” (139-40). Dunbar-Nelson’s stories might anticipate the theorizing of black radical traditions that provide insight into “resistant material objecthood” (Moten 18) or, as Christopher Freeburg describes, an understanding of the person at the very moment of objectification or “epistemic estrangement” from that person (4). Works Cited Adams Jessica. Wounds of Returning: Race, Memory, and Property on the Postslavery Plantation . U of North Carolina P , 2007 . 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TI - Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s Charm Aesthetics and the Bugbear of Social Equality
JF - MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
DO - 10.1093/melus/mlz034
DA - 2019-09-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/alice-dunbar-nelson-s-charm-aesthetics-and-the-bugbear-of-social-lShZavdvTf
SP - 129
VL - 44
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -