Blooms Literary Themes - THE TRICKSTER.pdf - ymerleksi - home

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Joel Chandler Harris
a simpleton and racial stereotype and Harris was a simple-minded
racist (or at least a naïve defender of plantation-style paternalism).
More recently, however, both Remus and his creator have sometimes
been depicted as more complicated fi gures. Th e issue is still a matter of
controversy, and for that reason alone it merits further investigation.
One of the fi rst critics to suggest a more complicated view of both
Harris and Remus was Raymond Hedin, who argued in a 1982 article
that Remus “uses the tales and his own power as a storyteller to serve
his own ends rather than anyone else” and that “Remus’s innocence
is more strategic than pastoral; he is never as guileless as he seems.”
According to Hedin, “Remus is at his most powerful through his
ability to conjure the tales or withhold them, to explain them or not.”
Meanwhile, in a far more lengthy and substantial article published in
1990, Wayne Mixon made a very strong case for seeing both Harris
and Remus as extremely complex fi gures. Mixon suggested that the
experiences of Harris’s youth probably “did much to engender” a
“sympathetic understanding of the plight of blacks” (458) and that his
“ambivalence toward the white South caused him to engage only rarely
in glorifying the Lost Cause of the Confederacy” (459). “Perhaps the
most withering attack” of Harris’s journalistic career (according to
Mixon) “was directed at Jeff erson Davis because he thought Davis was
trying somehow to resurrect the Old South of slavery” (460).
Mixon’s main argument is that “suffi cient evidence exists both
within the Remus tales and in Harris’s other writings to justify the
conclusion that a major part of his purpose as a writer was to undermine
racism” (461). Mixon provides abundant evidence to support
this view, contending that Harris “fought the almost hopeless battle
against racism in the only way he could—subversively, through fi ction”
(465). Mixon believes that Uncle Remus himself “is an exceedingly
complex fi gure who recognizes a stereotype when he sees one and
whose personality includes none of the traits, such as immaturity,
exuberance, and laziness, that are commonly ascribed to the happy
inferior” (467). “Although Remus regards a few whites highly, he is” (in
Mixon’s view) “nobody’s lackey. His attitude toward the whites who
seemingly control his life serves his own interests” (469). “Like Brer
Rabbit” (Mixon contends) Remus “is intelligent, sly, and proud” (473).
All in all, Mixon provides plenty of evidence to suggest that Harris
deliberately created Remus—and wrote the Remus tales—with the
intention of undermining white racist prejudices.