![]() White identifies that "Fayetteville, North Carolina" is the setting of these narratives in order to shred away the falseness of the typical presentation of the majestic South that consists of women and men leisurely drinking and relaxing all day every day (White 85). If disobedience occurs, this overseer is given the ability to evoke pain and punishment on the slave or slaves.Ĭritic Jeannette S. Surrounding this overseer are many African-American slaves who are expected to obey this single figure of power. The metaphorical tower is within the fields and the overseer serves as the watchmen or eye within this structure. In correlation to the physical structure itself, the antebellum plantation society is developed with a similar style. Foucault explains that a Panopticon is a 18th and 19th century architectural prison style created by English theorist Jeremy Bentham in which a tower is placed within a circular structure where cells or holding places for prisoners all face inward towards this tower (Foucault). However, in the postbellum society of Chesnutt's tales, the center becomes focalized on the piazza section of the plantation home as a place for storytelling to occur. In this period, the plantation house itself serves as the center of activity for the society. Michel Foucault's metaphorical concept of the Panopticon plays a crucial role in the organization of Chesnutt's antebellum plantation society within the embedded narratives. Through these historical contexts, Chesnutt develops his plantation and piazza societies as a functioning Panopticon in the antebellum internal narratives and an inverted Panopticon in the postbellum external narratives. Critic Wesley Allen Riddle explains that as African Americans were freed from slavery, they gained control over former masters and other members of white society through sharecropping, which let white society know that intense regulation and strictness "were no longer legitimate, nor were they to be tolerated by freedmen or federal agents (Riddle 53).Therefore, former slaves gain control over their personal and occupational lives for the first time no longer where they going to be controlled by the wealthy white plantation owners and overseers nor be seen as weak, inferior individuals in the white-dominated society. In contrast, the postbellum South represents the period after the Civil War and during Reconstruction when former slaves are able to control themselves both mentally and physically. The antebellum South represents the period of the South before the Civil War when control is displayed extensively through plantation owners. The antebellum South and postbellum South function in differing panoptic systems. Thus, Julius is the authority figure despite not being the narrator of these narratives through the use of specific storytelling techniques such as dialect and the trickster technique as well as irony and evoked emotion. In this essay, I will argue that this inversion of panoptic-like power places Julius in complete control of the narrative situations despite the ironic exertion of physical and mental control that appears to be emitted from the internal narratives' slave owners and the main narrator John. However, Chesnutt inverts this model of the South in his portrayal of the external postbellum narratives. Foucault's panoptic theory of the mental gaze supports the idea of paralysis of the slave mentality when physical punishment is applied by masters and overseers. Thus, Foucault's theory of the Panopticon parallels Chesnutt's portrayal of the antebellum South. Through this telling of interior antebellum slavery, Chesnutt describes the South as a systematic structure of labor. Julius must relive the horrors of slavery through his narration of tales in the embedded narratives. The embedded narratives display physical and mental control of slaves by masters.Ĭontrastingly, the external narratives demonstrate physical and mental control obtained by Julius through his method of educating his audience of the past. These tales function under a system of two distinct narrative styles. It was not until 1991 that American literary scholar Richard Brodhead stumbled upon a larger collection of Chesnutt's short stories and published the second edition of Chesnutt's work entitled The Conjure Woman and other Conjure Tales. These stories were limited in number with only seven stories making the first edition. Charles Chesnutt's collection of stories entitled The Conjure Woman, which involve the telling of past plantation stories by an elderly former slave named Julius McAdoo to a curious white couple named John and Annie, were originally published in 1899. ![]()
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