Mixed Race Studies

Chesnutt and Realism: A Study of the Novels [Review]

Rocky Mountain Review
Rocky Mountain Language Association
Volume 61, Number 1 (Spring 2007)
pages 41-43

Susana M. Morris, Assistant Professor of English
Auburn University

Ryan Simmons. Chesnutt and Realism: A Study of the Novels. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006. 198p.

Ryan Simmons’ Chesnutt and Realism: A Study of the Novels is a timely work that proposes a key paradigm shift in critical studies about Charles W. Chesnutt. Simmons argues that all too often Chesnutt is on the periphery of studies on realism when he should be considered as a major contributor to the genre, alongside William Dean Howells, Henry James, and others. Nonetheless, Simmons’ goal is not to simply judge Chesnutt against canonical white authors. Rather, Simmons contends that criticism should recognize Chesnutt for his challenge to white readers to reconsider their racial politics and his life-long career goal to determine the best way to sway an often indifferent mainstream audience. For Simmons, labeling Chesnutt as a realist is not posthumous classification, but rather a recognition of how Chesnutt viewed himself as a writer…

…Simmons explores the “tragic mulatta” in the posthumously released novella Mandy Oxendine and The House Behind the Cedars and argues that while these texts may, on the surface, recycle the oft-told tragic nature of the mixed raced woman, they actually reveal a more complex negotiation about race, identity, and community. characters in these texts upset rigid classifications of race and, for Chesnutt, the very possibility of the passing motif illustrates both “cultural fluidity” and the fragility of the foundations of race-based discrimination (78). Thus, these works are part of Chesnutt’s mission to have his readers recognize that while they cannot change the history of slavery and oppression, they do have the power to not let these circumstances overdetermine their society’s future. While Simmons champions Mandy Oxendine and The House Behind the Cedars as complex renderings of race, he does, however, finds fault with what he sees as Chesnutt’s inability to forward solutions to the problems that he documents. This critique is a running commentary for Simmons and he cites it as one of Chesnutt’s major critical shortcomings…

Read the entire review here.

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.

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

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.

Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W. Chesnutt

University Press of Mississippi
2004
248 pages
bibliography, index
Cloth ISBN: 1578066670 (9781578066674)
Paper ISBN: 9781604732481

Matthew Wilson, Professor of English and Humanities
Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg

An examination of race and audience in an American innovator’s writings

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932), critically acclaimed for his novels, short stories, and essays, was one of the most ambitious and influential African American writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today recognized as a major innovator of American fiction, Chesnutt is an important contributor to de-romanticizing trends in post-Civil War Southern literature, and a singular voice among turn-of-the-century realists who wrote about race in American life.

Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W. Chesnutt is the first study to focus exclusively on Chesnutt’s novels. Examining the three published in Chesnutt’s lifetime—The House Behind the Cedars, The Marrow of Tradition, and The Colonel’s Dream—as well as his posthumously published novels, this study explores the dilemma of a black writer who wrote primarily for a white audience.

Throughout, Matthew Wilson analyzes the ways in which Chesnutt crafted narratives for his white readership and focuses on how he attempted to infiltrate and manipulate the feelings and convictions of that audience.

Wilson pays close attention to the genres in which Chesnutt was working and also to the social and historical context of the novels. In articulating the development of Chesnutt’s career, Wilson shows how Chesnutt’s views on race evolved. By the end of his career, he felt that racial differences were not genetically inherent, but social constructions based on our background and upbringing. Finally, the book closely examines Chesnutt’s unpublished manuscripts that did not deal with race. Even in these works, in which African Americans are only minor characters, Wilson finds Chesnutt engaged with the conundrum of race and reveals him as one of America’s most significant writers on the subject.

The Tragic Black Buck: Racial Masquerading in the American Literary Imagination

Peter Lang Publishing Group
2004
198 pages
ISBN: 978-0-8204-6206-6

Carlyle Van Thompson, Acting Dean, School of Liberal Arts and Education
Medgar Evers College, the City University of New York

The Tragic Black Buck examines the phenomenon, often paradoxical, of black males passing for white in American literature. Focusing on the first third of the twentieth century, this book argues that black individuals successfully assuming a white identity represent a paradox, in that passing for white exemplifies a challenge to the hegemonic philosophy of biological white supremacy, while denying blackness. Issues of race, gender, skin color, class, and law are examined in the literature of passing, involving the historical, theoretical, and literary tropes of miscegenation, mimicry, and masquerade. The narratives examined in The Tragic Black Buck are Charles Waddell Chesnutt‘s The House Behind the Cedars, James Weldon Johnson‘s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s The Great Gatsby, and William Faulkner‘s Light in August.

Passing in the Works of Charles W. Chesnutt

University Press of Mississippi
March 2010
160 pages (approx.)
6 x 9 inches, introduction, index
Printed casebinding: 978-1-60473-416-4
Ebook: 978-1-60473-418-8

Edited by:

Susan Prothro Wright, Associate Professor of American and British Literature
Clark Atlanta University, Atlanta, Georgia

Ernestine Pickens Glass, Professor Emerita of English
Clark Atlanta University, Atlanta, Georgia

An exploration of a great American writer’s abiding concern with the color line

Essays by Margaret D. Bauer, Keith Byerman, Martha J. Cutter, SallyAnn H. Ferguson, Donald B. Gibson, Scott Thomas Gibson, Aaron Ritzenberg,Werner Sollors, and Susan Prothro Wright.

Passing in the Works of Charles W. Chesnutt is a collection that reevaluates Chesnutt‘s deft manipulation of the “passing” theme to expand understanding of the author’s fiction and nonfiction. Nine contributors apply a variety of theories–including intertextual, signifying/discourse analysis, narratological, formal, psychoanalytical, new historical, reader response, and performative frameworks–to add richness to readings of Chesnutt’s works. Together the essays provide convincing evidence that “passing” is an intricate, essential part of Chesnutt’s writing, and that it appears in all the genres he wielded: journal entries, speeches, essays, and short and long fiction.

The essays engage with each other to display the continuum in Chesnutt’s thinking as he began his writing career and established his sense of social activism, as evidenced in his early journal entries. Collectively, the essays follow Chesnutt’s works as he proceeded through the Jim Crow era, honing his ability to manipulate his mostly white audience through the astute, though apparently self-effacing, narrator, Uncle Julius, of his popular conjure tales. Chesnutt’s ability to subvert audience expectations is equally noticeable in the subtle irony of his short stories. Several of the collection’s essays address Chesnutt’s novels, including Paul Marchand, F.M.C., Mandy Oxendine, The House Behind the Cedars, and Evelyn’s Husband. The volume opens up new paths of inquiry into a major African American writer’s oeuvre.

Dislocating the Color Line: Identity, Hybridity, and Singularity in African-American Narrative

Stanford University Press
1997
280 pages
Cloth ISBN-10: 0804727740; ISBN-13: 9780804727747
Paper ISBN-10: 0804727759; ISBN-13: 9780804727754

Samira Kawash, Associate Professor Women’s and Gender Studies
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Inquiries into the meaning and force of race in American culture have largely focused on questions of identity and difference—What does it mean to have a racial identity? What constitutes racial difference? Such questions assume the basic principle of racial division, which todays seems to be becoming an increasingly bitter and seemingly irreparable chasm between black and white.

This book confronts this contemporary problem by shifting the focus of analysis from understanding differences to analyzing division. It provides a historical context for the recent resurgence of racial division by tracing the path of the color line as it appears in the narrative writings of African-Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In readings of slave narratives, “passing novels,” and the writings of Charles Chesnutt and Zora Neale Hurston, the author asks: What is the work of division? How does division work?

The history of the color line in the United States is coeval with that of the nation. The author suggests that throughout this history, the color line has not functioned simply to name biological or cultural difference, but more important, it has served as a principle of division, classification, and order. In this way, the color line marks the inseparability of knowledge and power in a racially demarcated society. The author shows how, from the time of slavery to today, the color line has figured as the locus of such central tenets of American political life as citizenship, subjectivity, community, law, freedom, and justice.

This book seeks not only to understand, but also to bring critical pressure on the interpretations, practices, and assumptions that correspond to and buttress representations of racial difference. The work of dislocating the color line lies in uncovering the uncertainty, the incoherency, and the discontinuity that the common sense of the color line masks, while at the same time elucidating the pressures that transform the contingent relations of the color line into common sense.