The Passing of Grandison

Satire is an artistic form in which human folly or vice is ridiculed through exaggeration, often with the intent of bringing about social reform. In “The Passing of Grandison,” the narration, allusions, and instability of assumed identity all contribute to the story’s satirical commentary.

The story’s point of view (a third-person limited narrator) is a key factor in the structure of its satire. Readers immediately understand Dick’s unreliability because they can see the gaps between the (presumably reliable) narrator’s descriptions of events and Dick’s accounts of the same events. Second, because of this unreliability, the twist at the end of the story is concealed from the reader until it happens. Thanks to Charity’s description of his character, it is clear to the reader that Dick is “utterly lazy and good for nothing” (60), and cares primarily about his comfort. As such, he is largely blind to Grandison’s plan. Throughout the story, Dick demonstrates his laziness by attempting to orchestrate passive circumstances in which Grandison flees of his own volition.

He believes himself to be “a keen observer of human nature, in his own indolent way” (64), but Dick conflates the way he believes someone ought to act with how they act in reality. Because Dick is so devoted to one singular, selfish thing—winning over Charity—he believes that Grandison too should be selfishly devoted to his freedom. When Grandison continually fails to run away, it never occurs to Dick that Grandison has a larger plan. Instead, he concludes “with great disgust” (67) that Grandison is too stupid to realize his proximity to freedom, and instead “sensibly recognized his true place in the economy of civilization, and kept it with touching fidelity” (66). Dick believes in the inherent subservience and inferiority of Black people. Because the reader gets only Dick’s limited perspective, Grandison’s plans appear as a surprise at the end of the story. Dick’s prejudiced point of view allows Chesnutt to execute this satirical twist ending.

Dick and Colonel Owens both have deeply held racist beliefs that were typical of 19th-century enslavers. Due to his investment in the institution of slavery, Colonel Owens believes that abolitionists present a danger to society. When he hears of Dick’s plans to go North, he even tells his son, “I hope you’ll keep your eyes and ears open to find out what the rascally abolitionists are saying and doing” (61). Despite his intention to free Grandison, Dick fundamentally agrees with his father, saying that the abolitionists are “a pestiferous lot […] and dangerous to our institutions” (62). The wealth of the South and the infrastructure of the United States were built with enslaved people; Dick and Colonel Owens are invested in preserving the institution that gives them enough wealth that Dick can live his life being “lazy as the Devil” (59).

Despite Dick and Colonel Owens’ blindness to Grandison’s plan and the fully entrenched nature of their racial prejudices, there are ironic moments throughout the text that foreshadow Grandison’s escape and the reality behind his performance as the “happy slave.” Upon Grandison’s return, the colonel announces that Grandison’s story of kidnapping and return is “as good as one of Scott’s novels! Mr. Simms or some other one of our Southern authors ought to write it up” (69). The colonel romanticizes Grandison’s story as if it were a novel by the famous 19th-century Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott, whose most enduring legacy is as an innovator of the historical novel. Scott’s novels were not mere entertainment but “sought to balance the need for realism with the opportunity for fiction to portray social and personal change in response to the powerful forces of societal disorder” (Gouck, Michael. “How Sir Walter Scott Changed the Face of World Literature,” The Collector, Sept 9, 2022). Colonel Owens wants to take the social power of novels such as those of Scott and have them penned instead by a novelist such as William Gilmore Simms, an author and politician who wrote pro-slavery propaganda. For instance, in 1852 (just before the setting of this story), Simms published “The Morals of Slavery” in an edited volume entitled The Pro-Slavery Argument. In this essay, Simms argues that the institution of slavery is a moral, political, and social good that benefits both white and Black Southerners.

This is a model that Colonel Owens subscribes to and that Grandison takes advantage of. He assumes the identity of a loyal and grateful slave to gain and keep Owens’s trust. When Colonel Owens tests Grandison’s fidelity, he prompts Grandison to confirm that he is “a great deal better off” than freed African Americans “with no kind master to look after them and no mistress to give them medicine when they’re sick” (62-63). Grandison has only to confirm and reiterate the lines that Colonel Owens feeds him to fool the man. Colonel Owens has a “feudal heart” (62)—a reference to a system of medieval rule that many slaveholders idealized, in which nobles supposedly cared for the peasants on their land, who in turn gratefully provided their lord with labor. Colonel Owens calls this “the blissful relationship of kindly protection on the one hand, of wise subordination and loyal dependence on the other” (63). He subscribes to the belief that he and the people he enslaves live in a mutually beneficial system. To fool the colonel, Grandison must put on a continuous performance of the archetype of the happy slave, “bow[ing] and scrap[ing]” for Owens in the way the colonel expects (64). Though he is forced to assume this identity, Grandison ultimately exploits Colonel Owens’s racist beliefs to orchestrate the escape of his entire family from slavery.