The Wife of His Youth Study Guide

Charles Chesnutt was born to a free, mixed-race couple who had left their native city of Fayetteville, North Carolina to live in Cleveland, Ohio just before the start of the American Civil War. Chesnutt was considered Black, even though he had majority European ancestry and could “pass” as white—although he never chose to, instead identifying strongly with the Black community. Although born in Ohio, Chesnutt spent most of his early life in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where his parents moved back to following the end of the Civil War. He worked as a teacher, then became principal of the State Colored Normal School. However, racism in the South at the time led him to move back to his birth city of Cleveland, Ohio, along with his wife and children, where he worked as a clerk while studying to become a lawyer. His great ambition was to become a full-time writer, and he wrote stories and novels in his spare time. Chesnutt published two short story collections: The Conjure Woman (1899), which depicted life under slavery, and The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color-Line (1899), which depicted issues of racial identity. Chesnutt also published three novels: The House Behind the Cedars (1900), The Marrow of Tradition (1901), and The Colonel’s Dream (1905). Chesnutt sometimes found it difficult to find a wide readership in his lifetime due to his own racial identity as well as the anti-racist themes of his work. His final two novels, Paul Marchand, F.M.C (1921) and The Quarry (1928), were only published posthumously due to their subversive treatment of racial identity. 

As with many of Charles Chesnutt’s works, “The Wife of His Youth” deals with themes of racial oppression and the legacies of slavery in post-Civil War America. The end of the Civil War in 1865 resulted in the emancipation of millions of formerly enslaved people, but initial hopes for a more free and racially equal society were shattered in the following decades as new forms of racial segregation and coerced labor were put into place. Because of racist beliefs that originated during the time of slavery, anyone who had any African ancestry, even if they appeared “white,” was subject to racial oppression. However, many middle-class Black Americans in the years following the Civil War nonetheless sought to work against racism to gain increased social status, leading to class divisions within the community.

Many of Chesnutt’s works, including the other stories of The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color-Line, The House Behind the Cedars, Paul Marchand, F.M.C, The Quarry, and Many Oxendine, deal with themes of racial identity among mixed-race people in 19th- and early 20th-century U.S. society. Another story in the same collection as “The Wife of His Youth,” called “A Matter of Principle,” is also set in the context of the fictional “Blue Veins” society. It tells the story of a mixed-race man who ruins his daughter’s chances of marrying a Congressman because of his prejudice against people with darker skin than his own. Many of Chesnutt’s other works deal with the question of whether mixed-race people should seek acceptance in white society, or rather embrace solidarity with the Black community—a question that preoccupied Chesnutt in his own life. Many later American authors, such as William Faulkner—perhaps most notably in Absalom, Absalom—dealt similarly with themes of racial identity through characters’ internal and interpersonal conflicts. Other notable works about racial identity in the U.S. include George S. Schuyler’s Black No More, Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, and Richard Wright’s Black Boy.