Miss Cynthie Literary Elements

Short story/literary fiction/African American literature/Harlem Renaissance

New York City—particularly Harlem—sometime during the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920’s.

The story is written in the third-person point of view, telling the story from the perspective of Miss Cynthie.

The tone is of the story remains light throughout even as Miss Cynthie’s mood—which is the controlling barometer of the story—veers from being overwhelmed by the big city to familial pride to dismay to judgmental to acceptance.

Protagonist: Miss Cynthie; Antagonist: the culture clash created between religious morality and the generation gap

The conflict of the story is created by the tension between Miss Cynthie’s old-fashioned judgments constructed by steadfast religious devotion and the mainstreaming of modern entertainment.

The story reaches a climax in the form of an epiphany undergone by Miss Cynthie stimulated by her nephew performing a song she taught him when he was a boy.

The climax is foreshadowed about halfway through the story when Miss Cynthie is heard singing the song he performs at the encore of his show and relates to his girlfriend the story of how she had taught him the song when he “wasn’t knee-high to a cricket.”

Miss Cynthie’s pondering of what the mystery of what her nephew does for a living turns out to be quite an understatement: “…he’s done succeeded at sump’m. Mus’ be at least an undertake.”

The entire backstory of Dave Tappen’s move from his Aunt’s home in a rural region of the South to New York to find success and celebrity is an allusion to the Great Migration of African-Americans to northern population centers in the first two decades of the 20th century.

The speed of a horse is conveyed entirely through imagery: “I’d high Betty up to yo’ grandpa’s buggy and pass anything on the road. Betty never knowed what another horse’s dust smelt like.”

The climax turns on the paradox that it is the very song which Aunt Cynthie had taught David as a young boy that is the mechanism brings about the epiphany that changes her mind. Further adding to the paradox is the irony that the this features lyrics about holes in the stockings of a female dancer and a woman asking a man “up” to share a bottle of gin—hardly the stuff of Cynthie’s beloved church choir.

The theme of the story is structured upon creating a series parallel cultural contrasts: old versus young, south versus north, rural versus urban, church versus theatre, and traditional versus modern.

“To her, the theatre had always been the antithesis of the church.” Throughout the story, both “theatre” and “church” are used as metonymic metaphors the values they represent or lack to Aunt Cynthie.

Miss Cynthie perceptually personifies the effect that her nephew’s entertainment production is wielding over the audience, even including herself: “Having thus baited her interest, the show now proceeded to play it like the trout through swift-flowing waters of wickedness.”