Conjure woman meaning8/8/2023 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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