Crane & Chesnutt

928 Words4 Pages
In Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and in Charles Chesnutt’s The Goophered Grapevine, the main characters in the story are oppressed by their situation in life. In Maggie, the characters are oppressed by their situation in the social hierarchy and in Goophered Grapevine, the main characters are oppressed by racism because they are black and they are slaves. The main dilemma in Maggie is that Maggie, the main character who is innocent and naïve, in spite of the world around her, wants so badly to better her life that it causes her to allow herself to be taken advantage of by another man and then is shunned by her family and dies living on the streets. The main dilemma in Goophered stems from the story within the story. The main character, Julius, tells a story about how the vineyard John and Annie are planning to buy is goophered, or bewitched. The main dilemma is that Julius doesn’t want John and Annie to buy the vinyard because he has been able to make a living off of it for years. So he tells the story about the goophered grapevines to try to deter them from buying the vineyard. In the story, Mars Dugal was the original owner of the vineyard and it grows scuppernong grapes. The black people around the community come and steal and eat the grapes. In order to make them stop stealing the grapes, he hires a conjure woman named Aunt Peggie to bewitch the grapes so that if anyone tries to eat them, they will die within a year. The following year, one of Mars’ slaves dies and he buys Henry, one of Mars slaves, who is old and weak. Henry does not know that the grapes are goophered. He eats some of the grapes and then finds out about the curse put on them. In fear, he goes to Aunt Peggie who tells him that when Mars begins to prune the grapevines, Henry should scrape off the sap and put it on his bald head. When he begins to do this every year, it causes
Open Document