The Goophered Grapevine

Chesnutt’s work is an example of regionalism, a realist literary movement that arose during the nineteenth century in the United States and intensified as Americans turned consciously to a more national culture after the Civil War.Like other regionalists such as Mark Twain, Chesnutt attempts to realistically present specific settings, language, characters, and beliefs to entertain a national audience that was curious about the culture of the South.

The setting of “The Goophered Grapevine” is a ruined Southern plantation and vineyard. The narrator’s description of the destroyed big house, untamed grapevines, and exhausted soilgive a snapshot of a sleepy South that has yet to recover from the war. Audiences accustomed to reading the Gothic fiction of writers like Edgar Allen Poe might have recognized the setting as a moody, atmospheric one that promises some touch of the supernatural and an entertaining history of how the place came to be in ruins.

When that story does come, it is from the lips ofJulius McAdoo.Readers of dialect stories like Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus tales, for example, would have recognized the dialect as language that is specific to the South and