Charles Chesnutt portrays an array of African American attitudes in his novel The Marrow Of Tradition.  One of the African American servant characters from this book, Mammy Jane, portrays a contented black woman with loyal servitude to the Carteret family.  This image seems to serve the interests of the whites, but Chesnutt argues his novels are directed to developing the morals of the white population in regards to race.  Chesnutt states in an essay explaining his novel, "The primary object of this story, as it should be of every work of fiction, is to entertain; and yet it belongs in the category of purpose novels, inasmuch as it seeks to throw light upon the vexed moral and sociological problems which grow out of the presence, in our Southern states, of two diverse races, in nearly equal numbers" (Chesnutt, 169).  Chesnutt wanted his audience to view the similarites between certain black and white characters in his novel while finding other traditional black characters unrealistic of the true African Americans at the turn of the century.  My goal in this hyper-essay is to examine the Mammy caricature as compared to Mammy Jane to see if she portrayed an attitude similar to African Americans during the time or if she's a societal myth used to degrade the black race.