초록 열기/닫기 버튼
This paper aims to demonstrate how Charles Chesnutt’s two central characters in The Marrow of Tradition, William Miller and Josh Green, represent the two prominent but polarized approaches to racial issues, integrationism and radicalism. It specifically examines how the ideals and rhetorics of Miller and Green before and during the Wellington riot serve to evoke and anticipate those of black leaders and thinkers during Chesnutt’s lifetime and in later decades, including Booker T. Washington and Martin Luther King Jr. with integrationism and W. E. B. Du Bois, Stokely Carmichael and Franz Fanon with radicalism. Regarding how the two approaches collided and interacted with each other in reality, both Miller and Green have their own advantages and disadvantages in their approaches to racial issues in the fictional town of Wellington. The Marrow of Tradition does not seem to fall a good/bad binary because Chesnutt skillfully demonstrates both strengths and weaknesses of the ideologies through Miller and Green. However, the novelist ultimately casts a doubt on Miller’s integrationist position that turns out to be rather unconvincing during the Wellington riot.
