Abstract: This essay examines how Paul Laurence Dunbar uses Christmas to test the limits of sentiment and social critique. Reading across dialect and non-dialect poems (and, briefly, short fiction), I argue that Dunbar ironizes the holiday’s familiar rhetoric of generosity, exposing it as both linguistic failure—words like “Christmas” ringing hollow—and economic hypocrisy, where charity conceals exploitation. The “Christmas mask” extends his broader poetics of performance: festive cheer conceals deprivation while still preserving fragile longings for the renewal of community. By situating his Christmas writings within the sentimental overdetermination of the holiday, I show how Dunbar turns the season into an overlooked site for examining authenticity and performance and how artifice might sustain hope in postbellum Black life and literature.
Lloyd Alimboyao Sy (Sun,) studied this question.