Mixed Race Studies

Rena’s Two Bodies: Gender and Whiteness in Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars

Studies in the Novel
Volume 43, Numbers 1 (Spring 2011)
pages 38-54
E-ISSN: 1934-1512 Print ISSN: 0039-3827

Melissa Ryan, Associate Professor of English
Alfred University, Alfred, New York

In a letter thirty years after The House Behind the Cedars was published, Charles Chesnutt referred to the novel as his “favorite child,” because its protagonist, Rena Walden, “was of ‘mine own people’. Like myself, she was a white person with an attenuated streak of dark blood, from the disadvantages of which she tried in vain to escape, while I never did” (An Exemplary Citizen 257). That he should refer to his character in such personal terms, so many years later, suggests that Rena functioned as his imagined second self, offering a way for him to try out in fiction what he chose not to do in life. Able but not willing to pass, he sent Rena across the color line in his stead. But while there is nothing unusual about such a relationship between author and protagonist, it is interesting that he cast himself as a tragic mulatta. In other words, in this tale of passing he is in some sense himself crossdressed.

Despite this provocative possibility, there has been little critical exploration of gender issues in the novel. At its most basic level, it is a love story whose fundamental conflict, as many critics have observed, is that between natural affection and unnatural law. Given this framework, perhaps Chesnutt’s treatment of gender roles seems to be so conventional as to merit scant attention; his tragic heroine may strike readers as insufficiently complex, a flat character whose femininity is shaped by the demands of sentimental fiction and the limitations of the masculine imagination. A closer look, however, suggests that there is more to be said. Gender difference is central not only to the plot but also to the larger questions of identity Chesnutt pursues, both in this novel and in tales of the color line like “Her Virginia Mammy” and “The Wife of His Youth.” Taken…

Read or purchase the article here.

Visually white, legally black: Miscegenation, the mulatto, and passing in American literature and culture, 1865–1933

Illinois State University
2004
193 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3128271

Karen A. Chachere

Many historians and literary scholars characterize the period between 1865-1933 as America’s preoccupation with the “Negro Question.” Admittedly, America was intrigued by the idea of the former slave as “citizen.” Seemingly, the more resounding question obscured behind the “Negro Question” was how whites would maintain their privilege. The answer to this question plagued America’s consciousness and manifested itself most obviously in American literature written from 1865-1933. Indeed, the novels, which emerged during this turbulent period, with their focus on miscegenation, the mulatto, and passing, accurately reflect the fear that whites felt at the thought of losing their legal, social, and economic advantages. White and black writers of the era capitalized on the nation’s fear of miscegenation and racial passing and voraciously used these themes to protest the venomous social, legal, and political conflicts that ensued over America’s desire to maintain its whiteness.

Diverse writers such as Mark Twain, Charles Waddell Chesnutt, and Jessie Redmon Fauset debated the color line in their works. “Visually White, Legally Black: Miscegenation and the Mulatto in American Literature and Culture, 1865-1933” examines the dialectical relationship that emerged between these diverse writers through American literature’s theme of miscegenation and passing narratives and exposes the underlying issue that was not blackness, but whiteness. And yet, the mulatto’s attempt at racial passing has often been misconstrued as an indictment against the black community rather than for what it really is–an indictment against claims of racial purity and white superiority. The first four chapters of this dissertation are grounded in biographical, historical, and legal evidence in order to expose the ways in which writers negotiated the nexus of race, class, and gender. Finally, chapter five illustrates how the passing genre may be used in the literature classroom to challenge and encourage dialogue concerning race, class, and gender superiority/inferiority.

Table of Contents

• DEDICATION
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CONTENTS
• I. HISTORICAL, LEGAL, AND LITERARY OVERIVIEW OF RACE MIXING
  • Brief Historical Overview of Miscegenation
  • A Divided Sisterhood: The Beginning
  • Building a Case Against Race Mixing
  • Constructing Whiteness Through the Legal System
• II. PROTECTING THE UNMARKED CATEGORY: WHITENESS RECOVERED IN MARK TWAIN’S PUDD’NHEAD WILSON
• III. WHITE ACCOUNTABILITY IN CHARLES W. CHESNUTT’S “THE SHERIFF’S CHILDREN”
• IV. REPRESENTATIONS OF WHITENESS IN JESSIE REDMON FAUSET’S COMEDY: AMERICAN STYLE
• V. MISCEGENATION, THE MULATTO, AND PASSING: A TEACHING NARRATIVE
• WORKS CITED

Purchase the dissertation here.

The Writer’s Almanac Podcast with Garrison Keillor [Charles Wadell Chesnutt]

The Writer’s Almanac
2011-06-20

Garrison Keillor, Host

Today in history and a poem or two.

It’s the birthday of Charles Waddell Chesnutt (books by this author), born on this day in Cleveland (1858). His parents were free mixed-race Southerners who left Fayetteville, North Carolina, for Ohio. One of his grandfathers had been a slaveholder, and Chesnutt looked white, but he always identified as black. His family moved back to Fayetteville when Charles was eight, and the boy went to a Freedmen’s Bureau school for the children of freed slaves. He became a teacher, and then principal of the State Colored Normal School in Fayetteville, which trained black teachers.

In 1880, when he was 22 years old, he wrote in his journal: “I think I must write a book. I am almost afraid to undertake a book so early and with so little experience in composition. But it has been a cherished dream, and I feel an influence that I cannot resist calling me to the task.”
 
It took Chesnutt a few years to get there. He was an established and respected citizen in Fayetteville, but in 1883 he decided that he didn’t have much of a future as a black writer in the hostile post-Civil War South. So he moved back to Cleveland with his wife and children. He passed the state bar exams and set up a stenography business, and in his spare time he wrote stories. In 1887, he published his first short story, “The Goophered Grapevine,” in The Atlantic Monthly. He was the first black fiction writer to be published in The Atlantic—although the magazine assumed that he was white until he informed them several years, and many stories, later…

Read the text here. Listen to the podcast here.  Download the podcast here.

The Mule as Metaphor in the Fiction of Charles Waddell Chesnutt

Theory and Practice in English Studies
Volume 4 (2005):
Proceedings from the Eighth Conference of British, American and Canadian Studies. Brno: Masarykova univerzita

Christopher E. Koy, Faculty of Arts
University of West Bohemia, Plzen

The term “mulatto,” meaning the offspring of one black parent and one white parent, is a racist term etymologically derived from the Spanish word “mulatto” meaning a young mule. The mule, a sterile offspring of a mare and a male donkey, is an important metaphor in early African American literature and folklore. Anthropologists collected African American tales with mules, and Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858-1932), inspired in part by this folklore, employed the mule as a metaphor in his literary works to represent the subjugation of blacks.

1 Introduction

The mule, the sterile offspring of a mare and a male donkey, is an important symbol in early African American literature and folklore. The term mulatto, meaning the offspring of one black parent and one white parent, is a racist term etymologically derived from the Spanish “mulatto” meaning a young mule. It is racist because it associates offspring of animals of different species with a person of mixed ancestry. The term “mulatto” is a cognate—even the Czech language uses “mulat/mulatka” to indicate a person of mixed African and Caucasian ancestry. The old-fashioned Czech idiom “drít jako mezek” (to slave like a mule) likewise links slave and mule.

Sander L. Gilman has argued that “the abyss between the perceiver and the object in concepts of race is total. It is a complete form of distancing. Placing the Other beyond the pale by stressing an unchanging sense of self provides an image of the Other that is the antithesis of self” (Gilman 1986: 255). One might assume that the case of people of racially mixed ancestry might fill in this “abyss” described by Gilman. If the person were between black and white, the distance would be shortened, so to speak. Yet, then again it may be an examination of the myth-making which forms the basis of any communal identity that needs to be addressed.

the United States today as in Charles Chesnutt’s time, legally as well as otherwise, a person is classified either as black or white. Birth certificates and visa applications require classification of a person’s race, i.e., “Caucasian” or “African American,”—one or the other, since these forms leave no alternative. The “mulatto” term served as a linguistic means to maintain distance between the “white” and “black” race by defining the mixture of the two as Other (than white). After the Civil War “miscegenation” came to express the unacceptable notion of race mixing which in American English came to replace the term “amalgamation” as the word of choice.

2 The degeneracy of mulattos

Chesnutt implicitly and explicitly refutes the myth of race mixing as degenerate in part through the trope of the mule. On the plantation, the mule was known as the superior beast of burden to either the horse or donkey. The hybrid animal ate less, worked longer hours and lived longer. It became ill less frequently and required less attention from its owners. These characteristics are echoed in literature about lighter-skinned slaves, who were sold at higher prices at slave auctions. House slaves are further described as more refined, wearing finer clothes, surrounded by wealth as well as mastering to a greater extent than their darker skinned brethren the “more cultivated” language of their white master. Indeed, the lighter the pigmentation of Chesnutt’s African American characters, the closer their English language resembles that of their master, whereas darker blacks always speak African American vernacular…

Early African American fiction and folklore frequently focus on hybrid mulattos and mules. Chesnutt challenges the Anglo-Saxon myth that the mixing of races constitutes degeneracy (implying most often the degeneracy of the white race), an allegation directed against fair skinned heroes and heroines in his fiction. In Chesnutt’s first published novel, The House behind the Cedars, a medical journal reported that “…the smallest trace of negro blood would inevitably drag down the superior race to the level of the inferior” (Chesnutt 1993a[1900]: 71), replicating notorious medical racist notions of the time. In Chesnutt’s most renowned novel, The Marrow of Tradition (1901), a white journalist rebukes a black man who works for him for purchasing hair straightening solutions and chemicals to lighten skin pigmentation:

“Jerry, when I hired you to work for the Chronicle, you were black. The word ‘negro’ means ‘black.’ The best negro is a black negro, of the pure type, as it came from the hand of God. If you wish to get along well with the white people, the blacker you are the better,—white people do not like negroes who want to be white” (Chesnutt 1969[1901]: 245-246).

The advertisement claims, “mulattoes turned perfectly white” (Chesnutt 1969[1901]: 244). A change of appearance is regarded as degenerate as well as a threat to white Southerners. The white journalist knows that Jerry wants to join the privileged group in order to gain power. When his “black face is splotched with brown and yellow patches,” he is publicly exposed as a shoddy counterfeit, his face a metaphor of the “pathetic effort to escape from the universal doom of his race” (Chesnutt 1969[1901]: 245). At the same time that they decried race mixing as degenerate, in Chesnutt’s novels white characters persistently prefer lighter-skinned blacks. In The Quarry, which is set in the first quarter of the 20th century, the hero, Donald Glover, is fair-skinned. He

often had to explain that he was a Negro—he soon found out that most white people preferred the word to any designation that suggested or assumed blood kinship with themselves, though it was quite obvious that he got along better with them than a darker man would have, and in this way they acknowledged in practice what they rigorously ignored in theory (Chesnutt 1999b:189).

This experience was universal in the ante-bellum period, when lighter-skinned slaves served as domestic servants (or “house slaves”). The preference for fair-skinned blacks and the credence that they were somehow “better” or deserved preferential treatment is also not a uniquely American trait but can be observed among liberal-minded European intellectuals of the 19th century as well, even in countries with little experience in slavery or African colonialism…

Read the entire article here.

Mandy Oxendine

University of Illinois Press
September 1997
136 pages
ISBN-10: 0252063473
ISBN-13: 9780252063473

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932)

Foreword by

William L. Andrews, E. Maynard Adams Professor of English
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

In a novel rejected by a major publisher in the 19th century as too shocking for its time, writer Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932) challenges the notion that race, class, education, and gender must define one’s “rightful” place in society. Both a romance and a mystery, Mandy Oxendine tells the compelling story of two fair-skinned, racially mixed lovers who chose to live on opposite sides of the color line.

Foreword

Mandy Oxedine is Charles W. Chesnutt’s first novel, though it has had to wait one hundred years to find a publisher. The leading African American fiction writer at the turn of the century, Chesnutt apparently began Mandy Oxendine a few years after he made his initial literary success as a short story writer for the prestigious Atlantic Monthly. Failing to interest his publisher in Mandy Oxendine, Chesnutt decided to focus his energies on making a book of short fiction, an effort that was doubly rewarded in 1899 with the publication of The Conjure Woman and The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line. Mandy Oxendine returned to its creator’s file of unpublished manuscripts; evidently Chesnutt never placed it in circulation again.

The effect of Mandy Oxendine on the long evolution of The House behind the Cedars (1900), Chesnutt s first published novel, was significant, for in both stories the central issue is the dilemmas a fair-skinned African American woman must confront in passing for white. When compared with Mandy Oxendine, The House behind the Cedars has reater narrative density and is more sure-handed in its development of secondary characters and plots. On the other hand, with regard to the depiction of the mixed-race woman, the central figure in both stories, the earlier unpublished novel is more resistant to popular notions of femininity and less willing to accommodate itself to the protocols of “tragic mulatta” fiction than is The House behind the Cedars. Perhaps the fate of Mandy Oxendine helped convince Chesnutt that to get his version of the novel of passing into print, he would have to tone down and conventionalize some of the qualities that make Mandy Oxendine remarkable. Certainly next to Rena Walden, the pathetic ingenue who plays the victimized heroine in The House behind the Cedars, Mandy Oxendine seems almost italicized by her bold self-assertiveness and her canny sense of how a woman of color must operate if she is to protect and advance her interests in the post-Reconstruction South. Through her plainspoken southern vernacular, Mandy Oxendine articulates a tough-minded assessment of her racial, gendered, and class-bound condition, which sheds a good deal of light on her creator’s firsthand experience of life along the color line in a region of North Carolina very much like Mandy’s own milieu.

Whether Chesnutt agrees with Mandy s solution to her situation or whether he favors the strategy espoused by her eventual husband, Tom Lowrey, is left deliberately vague in Mandy Oxendine. In the later published novels, Chesnutt usually states or strongly implies his moral perspective on social issues, but in Mandy Oxendine he seems more reticent, as though testing the waters. He may have been trying to determine for himself just how far a writer in his position should go in representing forthrightly and objectively the complex web of personal desire, racial obligation, and socioeconomic ambition that held the mixed-blood in social suspension in the post-Civil War South. Is Mandy Oxendine to be condemned for having spun her own web of deceit, or has she always been caught in a cage designed by the new southern social order to restrain those who might challenge its official deceptions about color and class? However a reader responds to these questions, one suspects that the social and gender issues that probably caused Mandy Oxendine to seem beyond the pale one hundred years ago are likely to make the novel of more than passing interest today, for Mandy Oxendine is a prototype of a new brand of African American literary realism in the early twentieth century.

Chesnutt and Realism: A Study of the Novel

The University of Alabama Press
2006
208 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8173-1520-7
E-Book ISBN: 978-0-8173-8228-5

Ryan Simmons

An important examination of Charles Chesnutt as a practitioner of realism.
 
With the release of previously unpublished novels and a recent proliferation of critical studies on his life and work, Charles W. Chesnutt (1858–1932) has emerged as a major American writer of his time—the age of Howells, Twain, and Wharton. In Chesnutt and Realism, Ryan Simmons breaks new ground by theorizing how understandings of literary realism have shaped, and can continue to shape, the reception of Chesnutt’s work.
 
Although Chesnutt is typically acknowledged as the most prominent African American writer of the realist period, little attention has been paid to the central question of this study: what does it mean to call Chesnutt a realist? A writer whose career was circumscribed by the dismal racial politics of his era, Chesnutt refused to conform to literary conventions for depicting race. Nor did he use his imaginative skills to evade the realities he and other African Americans faced. Rather, he experimented with ways of portraying reality that could elicit an appropriate, proportionate response to it, as Simmons demonstrates in extended readings of each of Chestnutt’s novels, including important unpublished works that have been overlooked by previous critics.
 
Chesnutt and Realism also addresses a curiously neglected subject in American literary studies—the relationship between American literary realism and race. By taking Chesnutt seriously as a contributor to realism, this book articulates the strategies by which one African American intellectual helped to define the discourses that influenced his fate.

The House Behind the Cedars

Houghton, Mifflin and Company
1900
294 pages

Electronic Edition
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
1997
Text scanned (OCR) by Jamie Vacca
Text encoded by Natalia Smith and Don Sechler
Filesize: ca. 600KB

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932)

The electronic edition is a part of the UNC-CH database “A Digitized Library of Southern Literature, Beginnings to 1920.”

• Any hyphens occurring in line breaks have been removed, and the trailing part of a word has been joined to the preceding line.
• All quotation marks and ampersand have been transcribed as entity references.
• All double right and left quotation marks are encoded as ” and ” respectively.
• All single right and left quotation marks are encoded as ‘ and ‘ respectively.
• Indentation in lines has not been preserved.
• Running titles have not been preserved.
• Spell-check and verification made against printed text using Author/Editor (SoftQuad) and Microsoft Word spell checkers.

Summary by Mary Alice Kirkpatrick from 2004:

Perhaps the most influential African American writer of fiction at the turn of the twentieth century, Charles Waddell Chesnutt was born June 20, 1858 to Andrew Jackson Chesnutt and Anna Maria Sampson, free African Americans living in Cleveland, Ohio. He moved with his family to Fayetteville, North Carolina in 1866. He first worked as a schoolteacher in Charlotte and Fayetteville, but, having grown frustrated by the limited opportunities he encountered as a mixed-race individual living in the South, he moved permanenly to Cleveland in the early 1880s. Chesnutt later opened a successful stenography business in Cleveland, having passed the Ohio bar exam in 1887. Eager to focus on his writing full time, Chesnutt closed his stenography firm in late September 1899; however, lagging book sales forced him to reopen the business in 1901.

Chesnutt published the bulk of his writing between 1899 and 1905, including his five book-length works of fiction: two collections of short stories and three novels. Notably, he was the first African American writer whose texts were published predominantly by leading periodicals such as the Atlantic Monthly and The Outlook and major publishers, including Houghton Mifflin and Doubleday. The popular and critical success of his short stories in The Conjure Woman (March 1899) and The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line (fall 1899) set the stage for the 1900 publication of his first novel, The House Behind the Cedars. His second novel, The Marrow of Tradition, was published a year later in 1901. Neither The Marrow of Tradition nor Chesnutt’s final novel, The Colonel’s Dream (1905), sold well. Consequently, his later publications were reduced to only the occasional short story. In 1928, Charles Chesnutt was awarded the Springarn Medal by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in recognition of his literary achievements.

Following numerous revisions throughout the 1890s, The House Behind the Cedars, beginning in August 1900, was serialized in Self-Culture Magazine; Houghton Mifflin later published its book form in October 1900. The House Behind the Cedars, which Chesnutt originally titled “Rena Walden,” scrutinizes the problems afflicting those on both sides of the color line. Highlighting the fluidity of race, Chesnutt focuses on passing, a social practice in which light-skinned African Americans would present themselves as white. Opening in Patesville (Fayetteville), North Carolina, the novel focuses primarily on two siblings, John and Rena Walden, who are African Americans of mixed-race ancestry. Having changed his last name to Warwick and married a white southerner, John works as a prominent attorney in Clarence, South Carolina as a white man. Following his wife’s death, John returns to Patesville, hoping to convince his mother, Miss Molly, to allow his younger sister to return with him and care for his infant son. Allowed to accompany her brother, Rena—under the name Rowena Warwick—seamlessly enters the white social sphere and is soon engaged to the dashing young aristocrat, George Tryon. However, when the truth of her Rena’s racial identity is revealed accidentally, Tryon rejects his betrothed and she falls gravely ill. Rena recovers and goes on to work toward uplifting her race. Nevertheless, Rena’s life ends tragically. Clearly drawing from the “tragic mulatto” tradition, The House Behind the Cedars has been critiqued for its seeming sentimentality; however, Chesnutt’s novel complicates these conventions. His sympathetic portrayal of passing illuminates racism’s pernicious and oppressive effects for both blacks and whites.

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Charles W. Chesnutt and the Engendering of a Post-Reconstruction Multiracial Politics

The Conversation
Number 2 (2009-2010)

Kirin Wachter-Grene

Once a promising fiction writer and would-be spokesman for African-Americans, Charles W. Chesnutt promoted a form of multiracialism but is largely forgotten today. Kirin Wachter-Grene traces the development of Chesnutt’s ideas about the amalgamation of races and their afterlife in the 21st century.

Introduction: The Roots of Multiracialism

Multiracialism, as the movement, academic field, and media discourse has come to be known, is a politics that is both controversial and particularly apropos to our contemporary moment in which terms like “post-racial” are frequently used in public discourse in reference to the era of President Obama and to the cultural climate in general.  Multiracialism should not be confused with multiculturalism. Where multiculturalism generally promotes the acceptance of divergent people and cultures for the sake of diversity, multiracialism maintains a decidedly conservative agenda of colorblind ideology that strives to blur the color line at the expense of racialized (particularly black) politics, culture, and identity. (I say particularly black because, as critics have long argued, blackness is one of the most, if not the most explicitly, racialized identities in the United States).  The driving force behind multiracialism is not a celebration of racial and ethnic diversity, but rather a disappearing of this diversity and a supposed de-emphasis of race.  Despite its idealized intentions, what multiracialism tends to achieve is a re-emphasis of rigid racial classifications by subsequently “othering” those who cannot “transcend” race.  The politics of multiracialism can only apply to the people who are privileged enough to be seen as, or who see themselves as, “race neutral” or crossover figures, or as racially ambiguous.  It does little to affect the lived realities of those whom society still continues to stereotype and demonize on a daily basis as a result of their explicit racialization, or identifiable racial identity. Furthermore it disregards and de-legitimizes people who choose to identify with, and take pride in their race or ethnicity, whatever that means to them.

Conceptions of a multiracial politics, a “mestizo” (“mixed”) America (as it is called in such politics), or a post-racial, “colorblind” culture is not an idea endemic to the late 20th century, although cultural critics, like Jared Sexton, have recently suggested it to be so.  In his new book Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism, Sexton locates his argument concerning multiracialism within the last thirty years, referring to it as a “decidedly post-civil rights era phenomenon,” (p. 1, italics author’s own).  This is partly because Sexton bases his argument on the careful consideration of the rhetoric of contemporary multiracialists, such as Charles Byrd, the founding editor of Interracial Voice, and writers Randall Kennedy, Gregory Stephens, and Stephen Talty to name a few.  While it is true that multiracialism as a politics has benefited greatly from the civil rights movement of the 1960s, in that a space was created for this kind of cultural discourse, the anxieties inherent to it are much older, and can readily be traced to some of the literature produced during an inchoate period in the history of the United States­­—the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. This literature, in which themes of multiracialism, “miscegenation” (i.e. an antiquated and offensive term for interracial reproduction), and calls for a homogenous national identity are explicit, reveals nothing if not the socio-political debates and struggles for subjectivity that continue to obsess our culture today.

One of the most understudied and provocative American authors of the era, Charles W. Chesnutt, was publishing essays and fiction from 1881 to 1931.  This was a time in which the country was struggling to articulate its burgeoning identity in everything from politics and imperialism to concepts of sexuality, class, race, and ethnicity.  The Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction years in particular seemed to be consumed with an existential crisis as to what the nation was and who its citizens were, and a palpable fear that the unification of the country could once again disintegrate without rigid social and political classifications.  Chesnutt’s work in particular provides an excellent example with which to think about the developing ideas of race, subjectivity, community, and nationality, because his work, perhaps more so than any other author’s work at the time, is rather strange, controversial, and challenging.

Chesnutt was a man of mixed race and white enough to “pass,” but he chose to identify himself as black and affiliate himself with the problem of race prejudice. While Chesnutt was a “civil rights activist, literary artist, student of social history, educator, business man, and cultural savant,” (Charles W. Chesnutt: Essays and Speeches. p. xxxvi), he was also a multiracialist, and his politics were not always, if at all, articulated in the best interest of the advancement of the black community for the sake of itself. Most notably, several of his essays do not shy away from advocating total racial amalgamation as the solution to the “Negro Problem,”—he argues for “miscegenation” to be enacted to the point of racial obliteration, an idea echoed by contemporary multiracialists. While Chesnutt advocated these ideas blatantly in several of his speeches and essays, he had a difficult time constructing a cohesive rhetoric, demonstrated by his struggles to rationalize his politics within his fiction. In other words, while his explicit amalgamation essays boldly take one tone, his fiction is much more ambiguous as he experimented with different “solutions” to race antagonism. His curious literature combined with the historical moment at which he was publishing, make for rich material with which to think about both Chesnutt’s particular authorial anxieties and the tensions inherent in these issues as they relate to our current politics…

Read the entire essay here.

Untragic Mulatto: Charles Chesnutt and the Discourse of Whiteness

American Literary History
Volume 8, Number 3 (Fall 1996)
pages 426-448
DOI: 10.1093/alh/8.3.426

Stephen P. Knadler

Among Charles Chesnutt’s earliest political essays is a little studied piece that he wrote for the New York Independent entitled “What Is a White Man?” (1889). At a time when he was, it has been argued, at best accommodating—at worst, pandering to—the taste of his genteel Northern readers for the exotic local colors of plantation fiction (Brodhead 204), Chesnutt was reinterpreting race as less a stigma against blacks, or an advantage for whites, than a cultural practice by which all are marked. The little-known Cleveland lawyer’s entrance into racial polemics was prompted by Atlanta Constitution editor Henry Grady’s series of speeches on the material progress of the New South. Although many Southerners viewed the economic development’ of the South with hope and apprehension, Grady had appeased their misgivings and sanctioned industrial advancement through a recurrent rhetorical appeal to “white supremacy.” In his speech “The South and Her Problems,” delivered at the Texas State Fair (1887), for example, Grady had recruited the implacable rise and expansion of the Anglo-Saxon spirit as a guarantee for a New South of industrialism and urban growth. This “transcending achievement” of the New South, Grady argued, could not be impeded, for the “supremacy of the white race must be maintained forever… This is the declaration of no new truth. It has abided forever in the marrow of our bones, and shall run forever with the blood that feeds Anglo-Saxon hearts” (53; emphasis added)…

Read the entire article here.

The Marrow of Tradition: Electronic Edition

Boston; New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1901
329 pages

Electronic Edition
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
1997
Text scanned (OCR) by Kathy Graham
Text encoded by Teresa Church and Natalia Smith
Filesize: ca. 600KB

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932)

The electronic edition is a part of the UNC-CH database “A Digitized Library of Southern Literature, Beginnings to 1920.”

• Any hyphens occurring in line breaks have been removed, and the trailing part of a word has been joined to the preceding line.
• All quotation marks and ampersand have been transcribed as entity references.
• All double right and left quotation marks are encoded as ” and ” respectively.
• All single right and left quotation marks are encoded as ‘ and ‘ respectively.
• Indentation in lines has not been preserved.
• Running titles have not been preserved.
• Spell-check and verification made against printed text using Author/Editor (SoftQuad) and Microsoft Word spell checkers.

Partial summary by Mary Alice Kirkpatrick from 2004:

…Chesnutt’s ambitious and complex novel, The Marrow of Tradition (1901), was based on the 1898 race riot in Wilmington, North Carolina, which some of Chesnutt’s relatives survived. This event left a considerable number of African Americans dead and expelled thousands more from their homes. Set in the fictional town of Wellington, The Marrow of Tradition centers on two prominent families, the Carterets and the Millers, and explores their remarkably intersected lives. Major Philip Carteret, editor of The Morning Chronicle newspaper, emerges as the unabashed white supremacist who, along with General Belmont and Captain George McBane, seeks to overthrow “Negro domination,” setting in motion those events that culminate in the murderous “revolution.” Dr. William Miller, following his medical education in the North and abroad, has returned home to “his people,” establishing a local black hospital in Wellington. Dr. Miller’s wife, Janet, is the racially mixed half-sister of Major Carteret’s wife, Olivia. Not surprisingly, Olivia Merkell Carteret struggles to suppress the truth of her father’s scandalous second marriage to Julia Brown, his black servant and Janet Miller’s mother. The novel also contains several intricate subplots involving a wide cast of secondary characters: a heroic rebel’s vow to avenge his father’s wrongful death; a staged robbery that results in an ostensible murder; romantic entanglements; and endless doublings and pairings of both white and black characters. Yet throughout The Marrow of Tradition, Chesnutt depicts the problems afflicting the New South, offering an invective that criticizes the nation’s panicked responses to issues of social equality and miscegenation…

Read the entire summary here.

Read the entire novel here in HTML or XML/TEI format.