Mixed Race Studies

Crossing the Color Line: Narratives of Passing in American Literature

St. Mary’s College of Maryland
English 400.01
Fall 2008

Christine Wooley, Assistant Professor of English
     
This course will consider representations of passing (and thus also miscegenation) in nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. culture. While passing has often been depicted-and dismissed-as an act of racial betrayal, more recent criticism has suggested that we view these depictions of racial transgression and deception in more complicated ways. In this class, we will analyze various narratives centered around passing and miscegenation as sites through which we can better examine-and understand-the construction of racial identities in particular historical and political contexts. We will ask whether or not narratives about passing and miscegenation challenge the stability of racial categories. Likewise, we will pay close attention to how such narratives also engage issues of class, ethnicity, and gender. Syllabus may include works by authors such as Harriet Wilson, William Wells Brown, Lydia Maria Child, Frances Harper, William Dean Howells, Pauline Hopkins, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, George Schuyler, Toni Morrison, and Philip Roth. In addition, this class will also draw on a selection of historical and legal documents, current critical works on race, and films such as The Jazz Singer and Imitation of Life.

A Recovered Early Letter by Charles Chesnutt

American Literary Realism
Volume 40, Number 2 (Winter, 2008)
pages 180-182
DOI: 10.1353/alr.2008.0006

Randall Gann
University of New Mexico

In the preface to the first volume of their edition of Charles Chesnutt’s letters, Joseph McElraih and Robert Leitz III contend that Chesnutt “was among the most visible figures . . . testing the commercial viability of African-American authorship at the turn of the [twentieth] century.” In a letter to Houghton, Mifflin & Co. dated 8 September 1891, however, Chesnutt downplayed his racial heritage: In his case, he insisted, “the infusion of African blood is very small—is not in fact a visible admixture.” And in a recently discovered letter signed with a pseudonym—the earliest extant personal letter he sent anyone—Chesnutt both hid his biracial identity and seized the opportunity to vent his frustrations. Because this was a private letter, not intended for publication, it provides additional evidence that Chesnutt wanted to hide or at least obscure his racial identity.

In an article entitled “The Color Line” in Kate Field’s Washington for 19 December 1894, Field editorialized on a controversy over the admission of a black woman to the Chicago Woman’s Club. Although virtually unknown today, Kate Field (1838-1896) was the most prominent female journalist in the United States during the last half of the nineteenth century. She was a contributor to the early issues of the Atlantic Monthly and had numerous articles printed in the New York Tribune between 1866 and 1889. In her essay. Field argued that “Because men’s clubs draw the color line is the very reason why women should set their brothers a good example by displaying a more catholic spirit. . . . Were Christ to walk on earth he would assuredly make no distinction between while and black.” Chesnutt responded to Field’s editorial in a letter published in the paper a few weeks later but hitherto lost t0 scholarship:…

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Passing, segregation, and assimilation: How Nella Larsen changed the “Passing” novel

University of Texas, El Paso
December 2010
105 pages
Publication Number: AAT 1483825
ISBN: 9781124390468

Vivian Maguire

A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at El Paso in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS Department of English

In 1929, Nella Larsen wrote Passing, a novel that delves into the lives of two African-American women living in segregated society. Passing portrays the reunion of two childhood friends, Clare Kendry and Irene Westover. The relationship between Irene and Clare is at first one of fascination, as the two have lifestyles that intrigue one another. Things quickly start to change however, when Irene concludes that Clare and her husband Brian are having an affair. Irene’s suspicious attitudes toward Clare become hostile and she is more determined than ever to prevent Clare from joining her social circle and perhaps, from taking her place in black society. The novel takes an unexpected turn with a confrontation between John Bellew and Clare. She mysteriously falls to her death through an open window with Irene standing nearby. Clare’s demise is further muddled with a plethora of thoughts that run through Irene’s mind at the time, making her the lead suspect in Clare’s sudden death. Clare’s death is never resolved, leaving that event, like many others in the novel, open for interpretation. Irene, who prides herself on her honesty, has the most befuddled interpretation of how Clare died at the end of the story.

What makes Passing such an extraordinary novel is not only that it avoids the traditional conventions of the passing novel, which are typically concerned with the dire effects of leaving one’s race behind, but it calls those conventions into question. Clare does not redeem herself by returning to the black community; she dies, and possibly at the hands of a woman who was supposed to support her according to racial laws. The reader is compelled to sympathize with Clare while wondering what is wrong with Irene. The answer to that question is of course that Irene subscribes to the very ideas about race and ethics that the majority of Americans were invested in at that time. These racial edicts became far more pressing than the lives of individuals themselves, which Larsen recognized and set out to challenge.

Larsen’s Passing is important because it captures the subtlety and nuance of race relations and identity at this point in American history in a way that other novels of the time failed to do. Larsen did this by using the established genre of the passing novel to create a depiction that draws the reader’s focus to a point deeper than the act of passing itself, and directs it toward the more difficult underlying questions about race relations and racial identity. In the next chapter I will look at the social environment that surrounded the passing phenomenon. I will discuss what social analysts and early authors of passing texts identified as motivations behind passing and examine what Nella Larsen felt actually led individuals to do so. Ultimately I will address what Nella Larsen argues all along: individuals cannot fit into social roles designated by racial categories, and the resulting tension leads to unwarranted racial violence.

In my second chapter, I will address two authors who influenced Nella Larsen to change the traditional passing novel. I will describe how one author, Charles Chesnutt, inspired Larsen to change the traditional passing figure in order to demonstrate that the race problem was not in passing, but adhering to racial constructs. The second author, James Weldon Johnson, inspired Larsen with his satirical take on passing, and motivated her to further challenge the racial restrictions on American society.

In chapter three, I will explore how Larsen uses mirrors, an unreliable narrator, and ambiguous situations to comment on the futile and dangerous affect segregation and assimilation had on American culture. Her use of an untrustworthy, but racially loyal heroine helped to reveal the pitfalls in allowing an entire civilization to be divided by racial and social roles. Finally, I will look at two authors who succeeded Larsen, adopting her position on Americans’ dependency on racial and social roles, and what is lost in succumbing to assimilation. The first author I will discuss, Ralph Ellison, writes a novel that seemingly is not about passing at all, yet his exploration of assimilation illustrates that there is little difference between passing and assimilation to meet social expectations when both require performance and the severing of one’s identity. The second author, Danzy Senna, directly addresses both assimilation and passing as the same with a heroine that passes and assimilates at different intervals in order to avoid discrimination. Neither author offers a solution to the passing problem. Their message resembles Larsen’s in that though race is imagined, society’s dependence on racial divisions is not. To live separately from race is difficult, but possible, and worthwhile in the search for identity.

Table of Contents

• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Crossing the Line: Nella Larsen’s Take on Transcending Racial Boundaries
• Shroud of Ethics: Nella Larsen and the Traditional Passing Novel
• Mirror on the Wall: What Nella Larsen’s Ambiguous Novel Reveals About Passing
• Passing in Time: Nella Larsen’s Impact on the Passing Novel
• Epilogue
• Endnotes
• Works Cited
• Curriculum Vita

Introduction

In 1892, Homer Plessy, a man who was seven-eighths white and one-eighth black, was forcibly removed and then jailed for sitting in the whites-only section of a railroad car in Louisiana. Plessy disputed these events in the Supreme Court in 1896, where he argued that his black ancestry was imperceptible, and that he was by all definitions a white person. The Supreme Court ruled that Plessy’s exclusion from the white railroad car was not a violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because while the amendment was created to ensure that all men are treated equally, it was never intended to eliminate social distinctions based on color.

However little a percentage of his ancestry was black, it was that percentage that mattered. Despite Plessy’s white appearance, the state of Louisiana viewed him as black and treated him accordingly, illustrating the illogicality of racial lines and the laws created to guard them. This left individuals who, like Plessy, were visibly white, but by definition still black, to either accept their position in society as inferior or to escape such oppressive markers by passing for white.

In 1929, Nella Larsen wrote Passing, a novel that delves into the lives of two African-American women living in segregated society. Passing portrays the reunion of two childhood friends, Clare Kendry and Irene Westover. The two had lost touch when Clare’s father died and Clare was forced to move in with her two white and racist aunts. When they meet again, Irene is living in Harlem with her two children and her husband, who practices medicine. Clare has married a successful businessman, John Bellew. Clare’s husband however, is a white racist who is unaware that Clare is in fact black. At first glance, the title Passing appears to refer to the lifestyle that Clare has chosen. However, she decides early in the novel that she would like to rejoin black society and no longer cares for racial pretenses. Irene, who Clare has adopted as her guide into the black community, treats Clare with civility. Yet all the while, she is resentful of Clare’s cavalier attitude and wishes to prevent her reentry into the black community. In the novel, Irene’s identity will come into question, as she wears a particular visage for society while masking her true thoughts and feelings…

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The passing of Charles Chesnutt: Mining the white tradition

Wasafiri
Volume 13, Issue 27
pages 5-10
DOI 10.1080/02690059808589583

Sarah Meer, Lecturer of English
Univeristy of Cambridge

In May 1880, the young Charles Chesnutt confided to his diary his ambition to write a book. Its object would be ‘not so much the elevation of the colored people’—the concern of most late nineteenth century reformers, both white and black—‘as the elevation of the whites,’; for he considered it was ‘the unjust spirit of caste’, rather than the moral or economic or educational conditions of blacks which lay behind racial inequities in America. Chesnutt’s focus on white Americans as the problem would be accompanied by a particular methodology. He did not propose ‘a fierce indiscriminate onslaught; not an appeal to force, … (for) the subtle almost indefinable feeling of repulsion toward the negro, which is common to most Americans …, cannot be taken by assault’. Instead, ‘their [garrison) must be mined, and we will find ourselves in their midst before they think it’. This metaphor, of the secret operation which carries the writer silently into the enemy’s camp, is a peculiarly apt one for Chesnutt’s writing. His first book would not be published until 1899 but the two collections of stories which came out that year, The Conjure Woman and The Wife of His Youth, were both as subtle and as determined to make his point as the image suggests. In those books too, and in a subsequent novel, The Marrow of Tradition, Chesnutt would often appear to be taking his stand on enemy ground and revisiting fictions which were themselves part of the problem. Chesnutt not only took white authors as his models but seemed at times to seek out genres particularly associated with that ‘feeling of repulsion toward the negro’ which he believed so prevalent.

In a sense Chesnutt’s literary tactics reflected his own anomalous position in a society obsessive about racial boundaries. The son of free North Carolina blacks, Chesnutt was probably also the grandson, on both sides, of white men. His appearance was pale enough to ‘pass‘ for white, though it was an option he rejected. Physically ‘white’ to the eyes of the unacquainted, culturally ‘white’ in his education and tastes, Chesnutt was nonetheless black historically; in the place he inherited in America’s rigidly stratified society. Chesnutt’s writing addressed his country’s racial inequality and its slave-owning history but formally it continued to resemble the ‘white’ tradition of writing on the subject…

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An Analysis of the Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt

Drake University
February 1988
121 pages

Harold James Bruxvoort

A Dissertation Presented to The College of Arts and Sciences Drake University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Arts

Summary of Author: Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932) is a black short story author and novelist whose two volumes of short stories and three novels of purpose depict racial tensions present in the South during the post-Reconstruction era. He addressed a culture dominated by the myth of white superiority and black inferiority. Chesnutt’s purpose in his fiction is to present a perspective of racial tensions and social issues confronting Southern whites and blacks that differed from the perspective presented by writers of the plantation tradition fiction.

Rationale: Since black authors from 1853 to the 1890s basically reflected the themes of plantation tradition fiction and thus ignored social and political issues facing blacks in the 1890s, this analysis of Chesnutt’s fiction is made to determine whether he did present a differing perspective of slavery and of white-black issues in the South.

Procedure: This study is based on the reading and analysis of primary sources—The Conjure Woman, The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, The House Behind the Cedars, The Marrow of Tradition, and The Colonel’s Dream—as well as his letters collected by Helen, his daughter. Material from the Charles Chesnutt Collection was also incorporated into this study. Secondary sources include articles by Chesnutt’s contemporaries as well as articles and books by later scholars.

Findings: Charles Chesnutt is the first black American author to ask his publishers for the freedom to treat social and racial issues from a black’s perspective: issues such as racial intermarriage, the franchise, and convict labor practices. He also explored the ramifications of “passing” into white society and other problems confronting people of mixed-race in the South and in the North. He pleaded for a quickening of conscience and for moral renewal in the hearts of Southern whites.

Conclusions: Chesnutt projects a sense of optimism for racial acceptance in The House Behind the Cedars and to a lesser degree in The Marrow of Tradition. However, his third novel, The Colonel’s Dream reflects his frustration concerning the absence of meaningful change in the South in 1905. Negative responses by white supremacy groups and apathy on the part of Northern whites are two factors which led to his decline as an early twentieth-century novelist.

Table of Contents

• I. Chapter 1 Introduction
• II. Chapter 2 An Analysis of Plantation Tradition Fiction
• III. Chapter 3 An Analysis of the Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt: His Hope for the South
• IV. Chapter 4 An Analysis of the Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt: His Growing Pessimism
• V. Chapter 5 Conclusions

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Into the box and out of the picture: The rhetorical management of the mulatto in the Jim Crow era

Duke University
2005
573 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3250085

Jené Lee Schoenfeld

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University

Contemporary conventional wisdom maintains that anyone who has any trace of black ancestry is black. This precept, known as the “one drop rule,” was not always so widely accepted; in fact, from 1850 to 1920 an intermediate racial category—mulatto—appeared on the United States Census. Visibly “both/and” in a society of “either/or,” the ambiguous body of the mulatto had the potential to obscure the color line and thus the system of racial hierarchy predicated on the division it marks. Therefore, the limited tolerance under slavery of an intermediate racial status became untenable during Jim Crow. In my dissertation, I argue that the fiction of the Jim Crow era helped the one drop rule gain hegemonic status.

Through sustained close readings of texts by Frances Harper, Thomas Dixon, Nella Larsen, Charles Chesnutt, Mark Twain, and William Faulkner, I argue that the biological determinism of the one drop rule is inadequate to explain what makes their characters—who are often physically, culturally, and even socially aligned with whiteness—”truly” black and suggest that in mulatto fiction, self-identification emerges as the fundamental basis of racial identity. I argue that fiction facilitated the containment of racial indeterminacy by “rhetorically managing” the mulatto into choosing blackness for herself through characterizations of those who remained racially liminal as tragically marginal and generally despicable, and contrasting characterizations of those who chose to identify as black as noble, privileged, and supported by the embrace of their families and their communities. The possibility of choosing one’s racial identification, however, undermines racial ideology’s essentialist pretense to racial authenticity. Therefore, choice must be supplemented by demonstrations of racial allegiance, such as “intraracial” marriage, which preserves at least the illusion of biological and cultural racial continuity, and seamless performances, of blackness or whiteness. Finally, I examine the relative authority—asymmetrical because of the construction of whiteness as pure and exclusive—of self-identification with respect to whiteness and blackness, and the near impossibility of self-identification outside this binary.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Introduction
• 1. “What are you?” And why it matters
• 2. “Genocidal Images” or “Imagined Community”: Converting the Marginal Mulatto into a Light-Skinned Elite Black
• 3. Keeping Race in the Family: Marriage as Racial Pledge of Allegiance
• 4. Indeterminacy on the Loose! Invisible Blackness and the Permeability of the Color Line
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Biography

Introduction

The mulatto figure in American fiction is too often treated by critics as though she is static, both within individual texts and over the course of American literary history. Critics tend to assume that the most famous version of the mulatto figure—the antebellum tragic mulatto, whose near-whiteness was used to evoke white readers’ sympathy for the abolitionist cause is the only significant template for the mulatto figure. Moreover, they take for granted the mulatto’s essential blackness, explaining away her apparent whiteness as solely a concession to white racism. My dissertation models an approach to the mulatto figure that is attentive to the figure’s development.

On the scale of American literary history, I argue that the representation of the mulatto is inextricably bound up with the (United States’) political context. Though I am also interested in the way that racial indeterminacy is represented in contemporary texts, in what I think of as the post-mulatto moment, I decided quite early on that this was better saved for a future project. I focus instead on representations of the mulatto during the Jim Crow era and how those representations differ from antebellum representations of the mulatto. At its heart, this project is fundamentally a literary one, but as I sought to explain why the mulatto was represented differently in the Jim Crow era, I became interested in the relationship between those representations and a broader social and political context.

Accordingly, I offer an interdisciplinary hypothesis that literature concerning the mulatto—what I call “mulatto fiction”—was instrumental in facilitating an historical shift in the racial structure of the United States from an antebellum racial system with some possibility of a third racial category (labeled “mulatto”) to a system that is much more rigidly a binary of black and white. The effect of this historical shift was that the mulatto “became” black. While I believe that this may be true, I want to qualify this as a provisional claim. I can and do offer (mostly in chapter one) concrete evidence that such a historical shift occurred. For example, “mulatto” appeared as a category on the United States’ census from 1850 to 1920, but from 1930 onward, mulattoes were moved into the box marked “Negro,” and thus rendered invisible as mulattoes. It is to this shift that my title, “Into the Box and Out of the Picture,” refers. To establish the causal relationship between mulatto fiction and the historical shift that I describe, at this stage I can only offer a theory about why other, more obvious, forms of racial discipline, such as the law, might have had limited power to control the mulatto’s racial identification.

I would also qualify my related claim that mulatto fiction is invested in facilitating the development of the binary racial system through the disappearance of the mulatto. Additional research into authorial biography would allow me to make that claim more forcefully, however, I stand by that claim as a description of a trend in fiction of the early Jim Crow era (in the years shortly after Reconstruction). Some of the most interesting works of mulatto fiction—those by Faulkner and Larsen, for example—are critical of the binary racial schema. Those texts, however, tend to appear later in the Jim Crow era, when the binary is already well-established. Even in those texts, as I argue at length in the body of my dissertation, the critiques are limited by the existing terms of the discourse. In Quicksand, for example, Larsen locates the “problem” of the mulatto in the system—not in her mulatto protagonist, Helga—yet she cannot imagine any positive resolution to the situation. Though Helga eventually marries a black man and settles in the most apparently “authentic” black setting—among the folk of the rural South—almost as soon as she arrives, Helga is (as usual) looking for a way out. Despite Larsen’s critique of the racial system that so confines Helga, there is no way out for her. As in earlier works of mulatto fiction, Helga must fully embrace a black racial identity or die.

Another way in which my dissertation seeks to broaden the context in which we interpret the mulatto figure is by expanding the scope of the texts we might include. I argue for the consideration of what I call “mulatto discourse,” which, in addition to literary texts, includes representations of the mulatto in such fields as law and (pseudo)science. The mulatto, especially in the Jim Crow era, is a site of contestation over the establishment and location of the color line. That is to say, the mulatto figures centrally in arguments about where whiteness (along with “legitimate” access to white privilege) ends and blackness begins. Indeed, this is a question explored in the literature I discuss, but it is a battle fought in other contexts as well. Regarding the literature, I argue that authors on both sides of the color line, and from both racist and antiracist perspectives, are invested in the racial identification of the mulatto figure. The motivation behind such an investment differs; racists, obviously, are interested in supporting racial hierarchy, whereas antiracists may hope that a strategic cssentialism will create a richer base from which to mount challenges to that hierarchy. Similarly, racists and antiracists represent the mulatto differently with respect to the question of racial identity. Racists tend to emphasize the mulatto’s degeneracy, thereby suggesting that the mulatto should not exist. Antiracists tend to push the mulatto away from racial liminality by representing the tragically marginal mulatto negatively, while drawing the mulatto into blackness by representing the “light-skinned” member of the black elite positively. Despite these variations, these approaches are part of a common discourse. What all of the fictional texts under analysis in my dissertation have in common is an interest in the possibilities (in some cases, even the necessity) and the limits of self- identification for the mulatto.

Self-identification is particularly important in mulatto discourse because of the difficulty of using the external evidence of the mulatto’s phenotype to assign the mulatto a racial classification in accord with the rules established by racial ideology, in particular, the one drop rule, which dictates that anyone with a trace of black ancestry is to be considered as unequivocally black. My work focuses on the mulatto figure, exemplified by Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy, whose phenotype suggests a white racial identity; the most “problematic” figure from the perspective of those invested in racial hierarchy. (I deliberately do not say “who could pass for white,” because then I, too, would be assuming the mulatto’s essential blackness, which I do not.) This mulatto’s apparent whiteness often contradicts her legal status as a black. (I say “often” because in some cases the mulatto is not legally black.) Racial ideology developed and deployed a set of narratives in various fields to support its insistence on the mulatto’s essential blackness despite the potentially contradictory “evidence” of phenotype, legal status, or even social acceptance in white communities. Though some texts in mulatto discourse frame their exploration of the contradiction embodied by the mulatto as a critique of the “logic” of racial ideology, the driving force of mulatto discourse during the Jim Crow era seems to be an impulse toward containment of racial ambiguity.

The ramifications for Jim Crow of the problem of the mulatto’s ambiguous body were both practical and ideological. The mulatto presented a practical problem for segregation because she could move out of the places designated for her without being detected. In other words, she could access white privilege without (according to racial ideology) being legitimately entitled to it. Furthermore, the mulatto—whose body is a concrete reminder of intimate relationships between blacks and whites—presented an ideological problem for segregation, a form of racial hierarchy that sought to institute maximum distance between the races.

Because the mulatto’s blackness does not register visually, I argue that agency assumes a greater role in the mulatto’s racial identification than it otherwise might. Racism is implicated in the stakes of how the mulatto identifies racially, but because she is not visually identifiable as black, she may not be personally subjected to racism unless she identifies as black and publicly expresses this identification. For example, in Iola Leroy, set shortly after the Civil War, Iola takes a job in a Northern white establishment as salesperson. She informs the manager that she is “colored,” and he hires her, but cautions her not to tell her fellow employees. Iola does promise this, but she does not go out of her way to broadcast her racial identification either. Then one day, a coworker is where I go.” Confused by her own reluctance to make the connection between Iola’s church attendance and her racial identification—thereby admitting that she has been working with a “colored” woman without knowing it—the other salesperson asks why Iola attends a colored church. Iola finally makes her meaning plain: “Because I wished to be with my own people” Comprehending at last, the (presumably “legitimately”) white salesperson “looked surprised and pained, and almost instinctively moved a little farther from her.” By the end of the day, the entire staff knows about Iola’s racial identification and they insist that Iola be fired, which she is. This is a very clear example of the way in which agency plays a unique role in the apparently white mulatto’s racial identification and attendant experience (or lack thereof) of racism. If she had been characterized by more obvious phenotypic cues suggesting blackness, Iola would probably never have been hired, not even by the manager inclined to give a colored girl a chance. Yet if Iola had simply lied about her church (and other personal details that may have come up), the salespeople and their customers would have continued to assume that she was “legitimately” white, and she would not have been fired…

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Charles Waddell Chesnutt and the Solution to the Race Problem

Negro American Literature Forum
Volume 3, Number 2 (Summer, 1969)
pagess 52-56

June Socken

Charles Waddell Chesnutt, the first American Negro short story writer and novelist of recognized professional quality, squarely faced the problem of Negro-White relations in America.   Although his short story “The Wife of His Youth” (1898) and his novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901) have been credited as bold treatments of the race issue, particularly miscegenation, all of the implications of Chesnutt’s fiction have not been explored. The Negro’s acceptance of the white man’s culture as well as the identity crisis of the mulatto are two crucial themes that have not received adequate attention. Chesnutt’s non-fictional writings, in which he stated quite forthrightly that total assimilation was the only solution to the race problem, have not been studied at all.   The following pages will attempt to describe and explore some of the perceptive, and still relevant, ideas put forth by Charles Chesnutt.

Born in Cleveland in 1858, but raised and educated in North Carolina, Chesnutt was the prototype of the self-made man. Fair skinned, he consciously identified himself as a Negro and became a teacher and then principal of a colored school in North Carolina. Later, he trained himself to become a stenographerand lawyer; at the age of twenty-five, he moved back to Cleveland. His hometown, he believed, judged men according to their merit ana not their color. Chesnutt always wanted to become a writer but practiced stenography and law so as to earn a living, thus providing himself with the means to write.   His plan worked, and by 1900, Chesnutt was devoting himself largely to writing. However, the novels he produced during the 1900-1905 period did not sell sufficient copies to allow him to remain a full-time writer.   He had to return to stenography after 1905 in order to earn a living.

Miscegenationwas the dominant theme in Chesnutt’s fiction. However, white audiences and critics who repeatedly discussed this fact failed to appreciate that Chesnutt was satirizing the mulattoes, his major characters, as well as the intolerant whites.He mocked the light-skinned Negroes’ aping of white man’s habits; he poked fun at the mulattoes who imitated all of the white American’s fashions and prejudice The protagonists in Chesnutt’s stories “A Matter of Principle” and “The Wife of His Youth,” for example, formed an exclusive society called the Blue Vein society (the members being so light that you could see the blue veins in their faces.); the purpose of the group was to remove themselves from the mass of black men and to create a mulatto aristocracy. This first group of assimilated Americans, Chesnutt seemed to be saying, still believed in the superiority of the white man’s value system; they had not broken out of the cultural restraints sufficiently to recognize that the white man’s value; were not American or human values. The mulattoes lauded whiteness and deplored blackness because they lived in a white society that did so.   They believed, based upon their experience, that the only way to advance was to become whiter; the thought that two races, one black and one white, could live side by side harmoniously was beyond their vision of possibilities.

Chesnutt’s reproof of his mulatto characters was often gentle, but nevertheless, firm.   The rich mulatto restaurateur in “A Matter of Principle” lost the opportunity to marry his daughter to a substantial Negro Congressman who was light skinned (and therefore an appropriate match) because of a case of mistaken identity; the restaurateur thought that a black-skinned Negro bishop was the Congressman, and thus hurriedly prevented the meeting between the suitor and his…

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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…

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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.