Probing the Unorthodox and Reappraising Nonconformity: Recent Historiographical Perspectives on Early America and the Antebellum Period

This chapter situates Chesnutt’s writing within a tradition of black classicism as political engagement and historical critique extending from the antebellum period to the twentieth century and beyond. Reading Chesnutt as a figure at the crossroads of multiple historical times and cultural forms, the chapter examines his manipulation of multiple mythic traditions into a cohesive and unsettling vision of history as unfinished business. In the novel The Marrow of Tradition and the late short story “The Marked Tree,” Chesnutt echoes a nineteenth-century tradition that included David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, and writers and editors for antebellum black newspapers, while at the same time anticipating a later anti-imperial discourse generated by writers such as Richard Wright and Toni Morrison. Chesnutt provides a fulcrum for a collective African American literary history that has emerged as a prophetic counterpoint to the prevailing historical consciousness in America.

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In the Light and on the Road

10.1093/oso/9780198814221.003.0008 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Sarah Crabtree

Keyword(s):

Rhode Island ◽

Early America ◽

Women's Bodies ◽

Women's Ministry ◽

The Road ◽

Cultural Expectations ◽

Female Autonomy ◽

On The Road ◽

One Year ◽

Gendered Expectations

Patience Brayton (1734–94), a Quaker itinerant minister from Rhode Island, completed two extended journeys: one year-long trip covering the American seaboard and a four-year trek through Ireland and Britain. These journeys required her to leave her husband and young children, navigate hazardous travel conditions, endure incapacitating illnesses (often alone), and contend with those hostile to women’s ministry. This chapter contrasts these feats with post-Revolutionary ideas about the weakness of women’s bodies and minds, arguing Brayton’s narrative resolved this conflict by reiterating her own discomfort with these anomalous experiences and by attributing her strength and success to God. Thus, although her journal documented myriad examples of female autonomy and authority, descriptions of her travels, absences, illnesses, and silences conformed to gendered expectations. While ‘in the light’ Quaker women may have stretched gender norms in early America, they could not escape the gendered boundaries of cultural expectations while ‘on the road’.

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