Gothic Storytelling and Resistance in Charles W. Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman

Abstract

This essay explores how Chesnutt uses gothic strategies to expose the historical contradictions of race and conjure up black‐abject, revisiting the American gothic via Kristeva's concept of “the abject.” The Conjure Woman (1899) deploys gothic strategies to speak of the unspeakable experiences associated with slavery and contest the rationalist discourses that enforce and legitimate racism. Chesnutt's conjure stories reverse the “national process of forgetting” in the Reconstruction era to reintegrate the nation through the racially charged abjection process. His use of the gothic decisively reverses racist abjection through the juxtaposition of narratives between the former slave Julius and the Yankee investor John. Chesnutt's stories create a space of struggle between the oppressed and oppressor by summoning the abject that has been thrown off in the institution of Western hegemony. Julius's conjure stories wield the subversive power to challenge John and Annie, disrupt their binary thought, and instigate a form of multiple discourse. The Conjure Woman became a groundwork articulating the African‐American presence through inarticulate gothic sounds and imagery, and has paved the road for later generations of African‐American literature to continue to summon up the black‐abject that has long been silenced and marginalized.