The Vanishing South: Race and the Ecogothic in Ambrose Bierce and Charles Chesnutt
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Ambrose Bierce (1842–c.1914), known in his lifetime as an acerbic journalist and author of short stories, can easily be seen as a singular figure. His work is sometimes read for its vivid and brutal portrayal of the Civil War (in which he fought for the Union army) and sometimes through its deserved place in the canon of American “weird” fiction. It bridges the gap between Poe and Lovecraft in its blend of the gothic, the supernatural, and science fiction. Bierce’s disappearance, seemingly after traveling into Mexico at the age of 71, is prefigured in his fiction by strange tales of mysterious vanishings. Similarly, the story of Charles W. Chesnutt (1858–1932) is overshadowed by his crucial place in African American literary history as a writer who offered both fantastical and realist portrayals of Black life in the Reconstruction era. Here, I argue that both authors, specifically in Bierce’s “The Difficulty of Crossing a Field” (1888) and Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman (1899), engage in their fiction with an ecological perspective that simultaneously decenters and reasserts the specificity of racial experience in their time.
I contend that the racial truths within gothic fiction have been neglected due to their narrative displacement onto the environment, highlighting the crucial need for further attention to race within ecocriticism. Social constructions of race are irrelevant in the context of the natural world, but manage to produce separate spheres of experience that might seem fantastical were their consequences not so real. Despite their overlapping careers, the authors are not usually considered in terms of their shared concerns. In doing so, I argue that they provide an important insight into the relationship between “nature” and racial categorization at the crucial juncture in American social and political life at which they wrote. It is appropriate, given the fantastical nature of how we have divided humans into races and how we have constructed the notion of a definable nature, that [End Page 55] supernatural fiction is the means by which this insight is achieved. Here, I examine the intersection of ‘nature’ and race through a comparative analysis of Bierce’s short story and several of Chesnutt’s, focusing on “Mars Jeems’s Nightmare,” “Po’ Sandy,” and “The Goophered Grapevine.”
Race, the Supernatural, and the Gothic
Bierce’s “The Difficulty of Crossing a Field,” published in the San Francisco Examiner in 1888, consists of fewer than eight hundred words and recounts one bizarre incident, without explanation and with barely any context. A plantation owner called Williamson gets up to walk across to a nearby field in order to relay a message to his overseer, Andrew. In crossing the unoccupied field between his own house and garden and the field where Andrew and a team of enslaved people are working, he vanishes. The closest witnesses are a neighbor called Armour Wren and his son James, together with the coach driver and an enslaved man called Sam. They are all momentarily distracted when the horses pulling their carriage stumble, causing them to lose sight of Williamson, who never reappears. The first part of the story is told in the third person, while the second shifts to a first-person legal testimony from Wren’s perspective. It then concludes by stating that “the courts decided that Williamson was dead, and his estate was distributed according to law.”1 The structure is not unlike that of many of Bierce’s other short stories, including “The Damned Thing” (1893), which likewise takes the form of a legal inquiry, although in this case the corpse of a dead man is present, and it is the creature that killed him that has disappeared, seemingly invisible from the start. Bierce shows a fascination with the past: there is a sense of a lost era that has passed almost into myth, lending itself (as European gothic did with its settings in the medieval past) to supernatural fiction. In “The Difficulty of Crossing a Field,” the antebellum South performs a similar function as a simultaneously exotic and familiar period setting, with clear parallels to Chesnutt’s local color style...
