More Than Mere Metamorphoses: Animals in Charles W. Chesnutt’s Conjure Stories
Keywords:
African American literature, Charles Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman, Animal Studies, Voodoo, metamorphoses, slavery, animal meat, animal crueltyAbstract
This contribution will apply the theory of Animal Studies, an inter-disciplinary field which encompasses, among many other areas, literary studies. In the African American conjure fiction written by Charles Chesnutt, the animal behavior, human-nonhuman animal interactions, anthropomorphic representations of animals and the expanding ethical considerations (beyond human dimensions) will be examined. Applying Animal Studies to literary texts means in effect synthesizing writing on animals and charting their connections to human consciousness and human action toward the nonhuman world. Charles Chesnutt’s fourteen conjure tales were written largely in dialect in the 1880s and 1890s and are set in a Southern plantation community. They include enslaved humans who undergo metamorphoses into various animals, some animals under the supernatural control of conjurers and finally the various animals to be consumed under ethically questionable circumstances within the slave community. The attempts at resolution to conflicts is said to reverberate in black culture well after slavery had ended, according to the black narrator.
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