48 pages • 1 hour read
Charles W. ChesnuttThe Wife Of His Youth
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1898A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
Post-Reconstruction in the American North
Like many African Americans of the post-Reconstruction period, Mr. Ryder is forced to confront a not-so-distant and painful past. Chesnutt uses the story of Sam/Mr. Ryder and Liza Jane to explore the ethical dilemmas and psychological reality of moving forward with life after two great historical ruptures: the end of slavery and then the end of Reconstruction.
Reconstruction, the historical period spanning from the end of the Civil War to 1877, was the federal government’s only significant nineteenth century effort to secure the benefits of democracy for recently freed slaves. These efforts took various forms, including access to political office and the ballot box, and the establishment of freedman’s bureaus to reunite families and provide aid to newly freed slaves. This period ended when federal troops retreated and left the South to assert its own oppressive racial regime.
The needs of freed slaves like Liza Jane were staggering. Having labored in the harshest form of slavery in the Deep South, Liza Jane’s body bears all the marks of slavery and the difficult financial straits in which she found herself once freed. Because she was traded away from her husband and community, Liza Jane would have found it hard to support herself in her old age. While she could have made a living using her cooking skills, her infirmities made her situation precarious. Liza Jane represents the large portion of African Americans who faced freedom with few resources.
Sam/Mr. Ryder, having escaped before he could be sold, is more fortunate. Although his speech still bears the marks of his past, Mr. Ryder was born free, gained skills as an apprentice, and managed to escape to the North where he found greater economic opportunity. He represents the small portion of African Americans whose resources and experiences before the war equipped them to be relatively successful afterward—and who were able to take advantage of the brief window Reconstruction allowed to gain some upward mobility.
The specific ethical question upon which the story hinges is whether Mr. Ryder has any responsibility to Liza Jane. But the larger question that confronted African Americans at that time, especially after the end of Reconstruction, was whether people of one social class had any responsibility toward people of another. Early in the story, the Blue Veins’ efforts to separate themselves from darker-skinned African Americans implies an answer: There would be haves and have-nots despite a common-but-varied history of oppression during slavery. However, Mr. Ryder’s ultimate choice, and the approval it earns from the party guests, is a didactic moment in the story that offers an opposite answer, encouraging people to choose to unite despite differences in skin color and fortunes.
Slavery
“The Wife His Youth” is firmly set in the post-Reconstruction period, but Chesnutt also uses the story of Mr. Ryder and Liza Jane to realistically document the enduring impact of pre-emancipation history.
The story emphasizes one significant consequence of slavery: class stratification among African Americans based on skin color. Internalized racism certainly operates in the Blue Vein Society’s membership selection, though the members rationalize “that if most of their members were light-colored, it was because such persons, as a rule, had had better opportunities to qualify themselves for membership” (Part 1, Lines 13-15). Indeed, lighter-skinned African Americans are over-represented among many of the early, successful African American politicians, business people, and educators. Mr. Ryder’s refined appearance, for example, likely ensured that he was given the chance to take on a clerical job that brought him in closer proximity to whites and greater economic opportunities.
Slavery also had substantial lingering effects on families, typified by the disrupted relationship between Mr. Ryder and Liza Jane. Their master had no qualms about separating the married couple for his own profit. Historically, family groups were broken up, or created, at the whim of owners, all in the name of profit and efficiency. Fractured families are one of the real legacies of slavery, and there are sociologists who argue that this impact continues to reverberate in black families to this day.
By ending his story as he does, Chesnutt advances the idea that African Americans can only become whole if they confront the powerful, enduring effects and losses of their slave past.
Colorism
Colorism is a form of internalized racism where members of an ethnic or racial group embrace aesthetic standards that prize fairer skin or skin that more closely approximates the skin of the dominant group. The only half-jokingly named Blue Vein Society is a prime example of this phenomenon: The club is so called because members’ skin is so light as to reveal blue veins beneath.
Mr. Ryder, described by friends and Liza Jane as “mulatto” (racially mixed), has lighter skin than Liza Jane and has embraced colorism. The denouement of the story offers yet another didactic moment that encourages readers to consider character over appearance.
The Blue Vein Society “consisted of individuals who were, generally speaking, more white than black” (Part 1, Line 7), and Mr. Ryder is among the most conservative members. He is inspired to hold the ball to counter “a growing liberality, almost a laxity, in social matters, even among members of his own set” (Part 1, Lines 69-70); he notes that he “had several times been forced to meet in a social way persons whose complexions and callings in life were hardly up to the standard which he considered proper for the society to maintain” (Part 1, Lines 70-72). While he claims that he harbors no racism, such ideas certainly show the mark of a person who embraces colorism with gusto: Mr. Ryder draws conclusions about character based on skin color.
The logical inconsistency of claiming to be free of racial prejudice while embracing colorism is on full display as Mr. Ryder ties himself in knots trying to find a poem to describe his romantic interest, Mrs. Dixon. While his aesthetics are such that he values the women in Tennyson’s poems—“pale Margaret” and a lady “divinely fair”—no description fits Mrs. Dixon, whom Chesnutt describes with irony as “the palest lady [Mr. Ryder] expected at the ball, and she was of a rather ruddy complexion” (Part 2, Lines 98-99).
The colorism of Mr. Ryder and the Blue Veins is turned on its head when the society members are confronted with the character of Liza Jane. Chesnutt presents Liza Jane as physically resembling the stereotype of black women from slavery times: “[S]he was very black—so black that her toothless gums, revealed when she opened her mouth to speak, were not red, but blue. She looked like a bit of the old plantation life, summoned up from the past” (Part 2, Lines 122-24). Despite the members’ prejudices, however, Liza Jane’s persistent faith and love for her husband drives home to the audience who hears Mr. Ryder recount her tale that her character trumps her appearance.
The emotional reaction of Mrs. Dixon and the other guests invites the reader to share in that reaction. During a moment (and one could argue that we are still in such a moment) when blackness as beauty would have been a laughable proposition to some, Ryder’s proclamation of Liza Jane as his wife is a declaration that sustaining black love against all odds is the most beautiful thing about black women.
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