Jeanne L. Bohannon

African American literary giant Charles Waddell Chesnutt once wrote: “Speaking of dialect, it is almost a despairing task to write it.” His frustration with the treatment of dialect, specifically the black plantation dialect of the 19^th century, presents a view of Chesnutt’s own treatment of written dialect in regards to lexical choices he makes in his fiction. Within the constructs of 19^th century America, Chesnutt’s ability to employ black dialect as a metaphor for social change contrasts with his ambivalence in using diction as a weapon to affect this change. Many critics have postulated that the historical context of Chesnutt’s time relegated him to the realm of Plantation Fiction, that is, a genre of framed narratives that glorified the Antebellum South and its fractured cultural values. Other critics herald Chesnutt as the founder of African-American fiction, arguing that he was forced by societal context to accomplish this goal through non-offensive lexical choices that nonetheless proved effective in creating an African-American opposition to inferior caste status. This study analyzes how Chesnutt not only operated within a sphere of literary racism, but that he further used his alleged “caste place” within this system to create a body of dialectal diction that subverted 19^th century white societal mores, even while he maintained his literary marketability to his predominately white readers. His juxtaposition of white and black dialects and lexical choices provides a framework for the common 19^th century cultural metaphor of white man as master and black man as servant. Through critical examination of lexical choices in one of Chesnutt’s stories, “The Deep Sleeper,” this study will employ the works of fellow literary critics and linguists as well as my own observations to examine Chesnutt’s dialectal features in the characters of Uncle Julius and the Narrator as they relate to diction, purpose, and audience within the social castes and linguistic codes of 19^th century America. Through an understanding of coded subversion used in literature to advance social opportunity, ethno-linguists can better evaluate cultural tropes that occurred in the 19^th century and apply them to current rhetorical trends in the 21^st century.