The Wife Of His Youth Analysis

The Wife of His Youth is a love story with a happy ending. Desiree’s Baby is a love story with a tragic ending. The protagonist in The Wife of His Youth is named Mr. Ryder. He is a bi-racial black man who joined a group unofficially called The Blue Vein Society. Mr. Ryder described the original purpose of the society as such, “The original Blue Veins were a little society of colored persons organized in a certain Northern city shortly after the war. Its purpose was to establish and maintain correct social standards among a people whose social condition presented almost unlimited room for improvement. By accident, combined perhaps with some natural affinity, the society consisted of individuals who were more white than black” (Chesnutt 488).

It’s also important to note that while The Blue Vein society was a fictionalized group created by Chesnutt, it doesn’t mean that those kinds of groups didn’t exist. The famous black society Alpha Kappa Alpha was rumored for years to practice the brown paper bag test on their potential members (Paper Bag Test: Letter From 1928 Addresses Black Fraternity And Sorority Colorism At Howard University). You could only become a member if your skin was lighter than the paper bag. In South Africa, a pencil was used to determine if a person was black or white. If a person could hold a pencil in their hair without it slipping out, they were black. If it slipped out, they were white. The AKA wasn’t founded until 1908, while The Wife of His Youth was published in 1898. The pencil test was used in South Africa during the apartheid (Chigumadzi). This means that the same racial colorism and prejudiced tests were still relevant only 70 years ago. We are still experiencing the very real effects of systematic colorism to this very day, almost 120 years after the publication of these two short