The Wife of His Youth

"The Wife of His Youth" features an upwardly mobile, light-skinned mulatto man who is a respected member of the Blue Veins Society in a Midwestern city.

The main character dreams of becoming white but ultimately seems to accept being black and the full history of African Americans in the United States.

Ryder is sought after by the town's women but begins courting a very light mixed-race woman from Washington, DC, named Molly Dixon.

"The Wife of His Youth" was first published in the July 1898 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, without reference to the author's own racial background (he was African American, with majority-white ancestry).

[1] After Chesnutt read several compliments from friends and in various newspaper reviews, he wrote to editor Walter Hines Page, "taking it all in all, I have had a slight glimpse of what it means, I imagine, to be a successful author.

In "The Wife of His Youth", Howells was impressed that the main character offered up a Christ-like sacrifice, unimpeded by his being African American.

[5] In 1891, Chesnutt contacted Aldrich's successor Horace Scudder about publishing a book of his tales and revealed his African-American heritage.

[6] With the support of both Scudder and Page, Houghton Mifflin published The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line in 1899,[7] which included "The Passing of Grandison", which turned slave narratives around.

[7] Chesnutt advised his editor Harry D. Robins of his intentions with The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line: "The book was written with the distinct hope that it might have its influence in directing attention to certain aspects of the race question which are quite familiar to those on the unfortunate side of it; and I should be glad to have that view of it emphasized if in your opinion the book is strong enough to stand it; for a sermon that is labeled a sermon must be a good one to get a hearing".

[9]Many years later, Carl Van Vechten, who corresponded with Chesnutt, included a character in his novel, Nigger Heaven (1926), who reads "The Wife of His Youth" and its accompanying stories.

How much he admired the cool deliberation of its style, the sense of form, but more than all the civilized mind of this man who had surveyed the problems of his race from an Olympian height and had turned them into living and artistic drama.

That difference is further emphasized by Ryder's writing 'Liza's address in the flyleaf of his Tennyson book and, when recounting her story, switching into his own "soft dialect".

Ryder is pretentious and uppity, concerned about the delineations in class based on skin color, and promotes advancement of lighter-skinned people, some of whom were already educated before the war.

[20] Though the story has been traditionally read as having a happy ending, Wachtell emphasizes that 'Liza has no final lines which show her response to the husband who had forgotten her.