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The Conjure Woman, Brodhead Edition: General Questions

Compiled by Michele McIver-Bell

Research Topics and Extended Learning Opportunities
  • To what extent does the use of dialect add to or detract from the collection?
  • To what extent does the use of the n-word add to or detract from the collection?
  • Who was the publisher who wielded such control over the content of the collection? Is it usual for a publisher to exercise that degree of control over an author?
  • Compare the use of dialect in the 19th century with the use of hip-hop and urban vernacular of the 20th and 21st centuries.
  • Compare Frederick Douglass’s treatment of the conjure experience with Chesnutt’s treatment.
  • Conjure as a means of equalizing, or at least, negotiating power between a powerful, yet morally bankrupt dominant force to s subjugated, yet resistant force. The subjugation is never complete: tension persists between power and limitation
  • Language as a form of power-role of vernacular and dialect
  • Purpose of literature
    • Teach a lesson
    • Entertain
    • Pass on values
    • Promote a position
  • Compare the Uncle Remus stories and Uncle Julius stories
  • Capitalist developers compared to slaveholders
Other Questions

Writers of the local color tradition, according to Sylvia Lyons Render in The Short Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt, expressed a, “fidelity to a localized setting, to the appearance and peculiarities of the people of the area—including their folkways, dialects and superstitions.”

  • Genre How does each of the stories in this collection represent “local color”?
  • Style Students may be asked to read segments of dialogue aloud as an attempt to grasp the variety and richness of speech.
  • Character Most characters in the plantation tradition, whether black or white, fall into stereotypes or stock characters that never change. Students should have a clear definition of “stereotype” in mind before they study this section. The black stereotypes which most frequently were portrayed were the contented slave, the wretched freeman, the brute Negro, the tragic mulatto, the comic Negro, and the exotic primitive. Others included the worshipful servant and the superstitious Negro.
    White characters also fall into molds of the benevolent father of the mulatto, the kind aristocrat, the northern liberal, the mean planter, the brutal overseer, and the poor white villain. Locate examples of each aforementioned stereotype in the selections of Page, Harris, Cable, Chesnutt, and Dunbar. Cite instances, especially in the works of black writers, of attempts to veer away from stereotyping.