Satire and Reality Meet in 'Baxter's Procrustes'

I read all of the Chesnutt stories at once, and a particular story that stood out to me was "Baxter's Procrustes." I have loved reading the satirical pieces for this class, but there was something I loved about this story in particular, and that was the 'Emporer's New Clothes' aspect of it. There's always satire in misunderstanding and misleading, but what I really loved about this story was the fact that Baxter functioned as Procrustes to this club of men. In the Greek myth Procrustes is a man who forces people into an iron bed and physically stretches them. In the story the narrator says, "Society was the Procrustes which, like the Greek bandit, of old, caught every man born into the world, and endeavored to fit him to some preconceived standard, generally to one for which he was least adapted." This sentence describes just what Baxter does in the end of the story by trying to publish the poem with nothing inside its pages--just a beautiful looking book on the outside. This mockery of the club of gentlemen, as is described as incredibly bourgeois on the first page of the story, proves to satirize the concept of this high society-type of club.

I did some research on Chesnutt and learned that for years growing up he had wanted to be a part of the Rowfant Club, and his admission was denied. It is assumed this had to do with his race, and as is said by William L. Andrews in The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt, "for a man who had left the south twenty years earlier to escape such discrimination, this rebuff must have seemed a humiliating irony" (Andrews, 210). Thus he wrote "Baxter's Procrustes" as a satirical jab at these types of clubs (which he was later admitting into as the first African American man in the club). Nonetheless, to paint the gentlemen of the club as fools following fools is really clever and entertaining. Even in the way the men talk about the book they don't use any original sentences, they only discuss Baxter's work in terms of other authors. At one point in the story the narrator (who is also a strange mystery in the story) is talking to other people reviewing the book and one of them says, "It is not exactly Spencerian, although it squints at the Spencerian view, with a slight deflection toward Hegelianism. I should consider it an harmonious fusion of the best views of all modern philosophers, with a strong Baxterian flavor." I thought this quote was really hilarious for two reasons specifically. First of all, he uses these other two categories of writing, based off of writers names, we can only presume, in such general terms--he doesn't actually say anything about them. The second reason is following these general terms he then creates the term "Baxterian." This seemed hilarious to me, because he actually says nothing about the book in this sentence. He describes what he thinks of Baxter by basically saying "classic Baxter."

It is in these moments of the story that I think Chesnutt does an incredible job of satirizing high society and the atrocities of a this uptight culture of this club. Ironically this story seemed to have turned out to be incredibly popular, much like Baxter's, and so they both seem to have managed to make a mockery out of these men and both come out on top.