Bad Feelings,White Feelings: Miscegenation Law,Sentiment,and the Violence of Custom in Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition

Abstract

This article considers how the unequal mobilization of white feelings limited political progress toward racial equity following Plessy v. Ferguson. Discussing The Marrow of Tradition, this essay examines how Charles Chesnutt’s realist novel exposes the reactionary nature of legal feeling by depicting interracial legal marriage as the limit case for the boundaries of white sympathy.Illustrating how Chesnutt showcases the limits of white empathy to remedy the harm caused to Black citizens, the essay demonstrates the powerful ways in which literature can reveal an unspoken status quo in U.S. racial logics that the customs of white sentiment helped to reconsolidate at the expense of Black political belonging.