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The Law of Torts and the Logic of Lynching in Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Trinyan Mariano
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Abstract

Tort law, which governs civil wrongs, coalesced during the late nineteenth century as courts became increasingly willing to compensate injured people. Its history, however, has been told without reference to issues of race or compensation for slavery and its aftermath. In the novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901), Charles Chesnutt stretches tort discourse by using its principle of corrective justice to theorize liability for racial injustice and so discovers what law suppresses—the problem of collateral consequences when responsibility is made a function of race. Not only does corrective justice reach an operational limit when the enormity of the wrong exceeds the ability to pay, but using race to assess liability aligns corrective justice with the logic behind the southern practice of lynching. Recovering Chesnutt's use of tort challenges the dominance of contract law as the framework for reading Marrow and revises our historical understanding of the significance of reparations.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 128 , Issue 3 , May 2013 , pp. 559 - 574
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by The Modern Language Association of America

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