'To Suggest the Sound': Impressibility and the Language of Whiteness in Charles W. Chesnutt's Long Fiction

Charles W. Chesnutt constructs the sound of whiteness in The House Behind the Cedars and The Marrow of Tradition by situating character language within emerging frameworks of racial 'impressibility. ' House explores the lives of two siblings, John and Rena, whose racial passing Chesnutt registers, in part, through the siblings' language practices. Marrow, on the other hand, introduces a different type of 'passing' character, the cruel Colonel McBane, whose speech patterns Chesnutt associates with, and uses to critique, anti-black violence perpetrated by the 'po' white' class. Both novels critique the color line by participating in the popular nineteenth-century racial discourse of sentimental biopower and impressibility, as identified by Kyla Schuller. In the biopower regime Schuller describes, racial hierarchies rest on differing capacities of bodies to absorb sensations and stimuli and adapt. In Marrow and House, these capacities are underscored through language metaphor and linguistic characterization, part of Chesnutt's complex, longstanding inquiry into the relationship between language and race. Keywords: fiction / linguistics / Charles Chesnutt / whiteness / African American fiction
In an 1898 letter to his publisher, the celebrated 'dialect' writer Charles W. Chesnutt bitterly asserts that 'there is no such thing as a Negro dialect [...] what we call [...]