Marse Chan: A Tale of Old Virginia

by Thomas Nelson Page

Excerpt from Marse Chan: A Tale of Old Virginia
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61 pages, Paperback

First published March 17, 2010

About the author

Born at Oakland, one of the Nelson family plantations, in the village of Beaverdam in Hanover County, Virginia to John Page and Elizabeth Burwell Nelson. He was a scion of the prominent Nelson and Page families, each First Families of Virginia. Although he was from once-wealthy lineage, after the American Civil War, which began when he was only 8 years old, his parents and their relatives were largely impoverished during Reconstruction and his teenage years. In 1869, He entered Washington College, known now as Washington and Lee University, in Lexington, Virginia when Robert E. Lee was president of the college. After three years, Page left Washington College before graduation for financial reasons. To earn money for the law degree he desired, Page taught the children of his cousins in Kentucky. From 1873 to 1874, he was enrolled in the law school of the University of Virginia in pursuit of a legal career. At Washington College and thereafter at UVA, Nelson was a member of the prestigious fraternity Delta Psi, AKA St. Anthony Hall.

Admitted to the Virginia Bar Association, he practiced as a lawyer in Richmond between 1876 and 1893, and began writing. He was married to Anne Seddon Bruce on July 28, 1886. She died on December 21, 1888 of a throat hemorrhage.

He remarried on June 6, 1893, to Florence Lathrop Field, a widowed sister-in-law of retailer Marshall Field. In the same year Page gave up his law practice entirely and moved with his wife to Washington, D.C..There, he kept up his writing, which amounted to eighteen volumes when they were compiled and published in 1912. Page popularized the plantation tradition genre of Southern writing, which told of an idealized version of life before the Civil War, with contented slaves working for beloved masters and their families. His 1887 collection of short stories, In Ole Virginia, is the quintessential work of that genre. Another short-story collection of his is entitled The Burial of the Guns (1894).

Under President Woodrow Wilson, Page served as U.S. ambassador to Italy for six years between 1913 and 1919. His book entitled Italy and the World War (1920) is a memoir of his service there.

He died in 1922 at Oakland in Hanover County, Virginia.

Reviews

[Caleb Giles · Rating 1 out of 5]

Immediate post Civil War literature is very weird and very racist. It is weird looking back on book's like this and questioning how racist stories like this captivated the nation, but I think that the people back then were experiencing so much change that they latched on to anything that feigned the sentimental value of the "Old South". The most curious thing about this book is that it is a story narrated by a former slave about white characters which communicates the notion that having the inclusion of a black narrator is necessary to promote authenticity of the South for the story. However, just a few years earlier before the Civil War, this would have never happened because white people pushed a false narrative of slaves being untrustful and frivolous. Also, this book is wrote completely in phonetically spelled out "slave dialect" which just adds more racism on top of the mountain of racism already present here. This subgenre of sentimentalist southern literature is just really weird to think about because it is so polarly opposite than what was actually happening in the South before the Civil War. I think the most telling sign of how absurd this genre was is that anytime the Civil War or the freeing of slaves is mentioned in this book, the author treats it as just "this thing happened, but it came and went" and this is because if the author acknowledged the reasons the Civil War was fought over, then it would ruin the genre's narrative of "the happy slave" and it would completely discredit the entire genre. Essentially, all of this forces any writer of this genre into strictly following a formulaic structure and basically makes every book of this genre the exact same.

[Davina Cunningham · Rating 3 out of 5]

After reading this book for my seminar class, I think the story of Marse Chan is an interesting one as is its author Page. If I were to take the story out of it historical context, it’s a lovely story about romance, family, honor, and loyalty. However, knowing the world which preceded Page as well as his early childhood, I cannot help but see the many wrongdoings, contradictions, and misconceptions within the tale. Sam, a former slave, talks about his life with Marse Chan as if the two were best friends and equals, yet as the story unfolds it becomes harder and harder not to notice the power imbalance, sexist undertones, and overall disregard for the horrors of that time. While this story definitely hits for its target audience, I can’t help but feel sad that the world created is no where close to the reality of the time. 2.5/10

[carson · Rating 1 out of 5]

*read for class
Reading this was straight up painful. I know it’s a stylistic choice, but I do not understand why we have to write characters with such heavy “accents” and have their dialogue written phonetically. It makes it much harder to understand as a reader. I understand that I’m a 21st century reader criticizing and reading something that was written almost immediately following the Civil War, but still. Just write their dialogue normally and then make a reference to an accent, if they absolutely *must* have one.

[Catherine · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found the vernacular so difficult to read, I gave up. I looked online to see how the story would end, and it sounds like it might have been an interesting read - if only I could read it. It took me several pages before I figured out that Cunl was "colonel." Almost 90% of it was written in this dialect.

[Alyssa · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story felt kind of long and of course, I had a little issue reading the dialect. Eventually, I got used to it and it wasn't so bad. It is a sad story, and I teared up a little towards the end.

[Jessica Fleming · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once I got used to the dialect the story read smoothly. I found the story interesting and quite sad.

[Ksania Katzman (Shzuplik) · Rating 5 out of 5]

read and wept it !