{"id":12621,"date":"2011-03-13T02:38:10","date_gmt":"2011-03-13T02:38:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=12621"},"modified":"2013-02-27T02:27:38","modified_gmt":"2013-02-27T02:27:38","slug":"the-house-behind-the-cedars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=12621","title":{"rendered":"The House Behind the Cedars"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em><a href=\"http:\/\/docsouth.unc.edu\/southlit\/chesnutthouse\/cheshouse.html\" target=\"_blank\">The House Behind the Cedars<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Houghton, Mifflin and Company<br \/>\n1900<br \/>\n294 pages<\/p>\n<p>Electronic Edition<br \/>\nUniversity of North Carolina, Chapel Hill<br \/>\n1997<br \/>\nText scanned (OCR) by Jamie Vacca<br \/>\nText encoded by Natalia Smith and Don Sechler<br \/>\nFilesize: ca. 600KB<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Charles_W._Chesnutt\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Charles W. Chesnutt<\/strong><\/a> (1858-1932)<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/docsouth.unc.edu\/southlit\/chesnutthouse\/cheshouse.html\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/docsouth.unc.edu\/southlit\/chesnutthouse\/housecv.gif\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" \/><\/a>\u00a0\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/docsouth.unc.edu\/southlit\/chesnutthouse\/cheshouse.html\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/docsouth.unc.edu\/southlit\/chesnutthouse\/housetp.gif\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><em>The electronic edition is a part of the UNC-CH database \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/docsouth.unc.edu\/southlit\/\" target=\"_blank\">A Digitized Library of Southern Literature, Beginnings to 1920.<\/a>\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>Any hyphens occurring in line breaks have been removed, and the trailing part of a word has been joined to the preceding line. <\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>All quotation marks and ampersand have been transcribed as entity references. <\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>All double right and left quotation marks are encoded as \u201d and \u201d respectively. <\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>All single right and left quotation marks are encoded as \u2018 and \u2018 respectively. <\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>Indentation in lines has not been preserved. <\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>Running titles have not been preserved. <\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>Spell-check and verification made against printed text using Author\/Editor (SoftQuad) and Microsoft Word spell checkers.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Summary by <strong>Mary Alice Kirkpatrick<\/strong> from 2004:<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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 <em>Atlantic Monthly<\/em> and <em>The Outlook<\/em> and major publishers, including Houghton Mifflin and Doubleday. The popular and critical success of his short stories in <a href=\"http:\/\/docsouth.unc.edu\/southlit\/chesnuttconjure\/menu.html\"><em>The Conjure Woman<\/em> <\/a>(March 1899) and <a href=\"http:\/\/docsouth.unc.edu\/southlit\/chesnuttwife\/menu.html\"><em>The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line<\/em><\/a> (fall 1899) set the stage for the 1900 publication of his first novel, The House Behind the Cedars. His second novel, <a href=\"http:\/\/docsouth.unc.edu\/southlit\/chesnuttmarrow\/menu.html\"><em>The Marrow of Tradition<\/em><\/a>, was published a year later in 1901. Neither <em>The Marrow of Tradition<\/em> nor Chesnutt&#8217;s final novel, <a href=\"http:\/\/docsouth.unc.edu\/southlit\/chesnuttcolonel\/menu.html\"><em>The Colonel&#8217;s Dream<\/em><\/a> (1905), sold well. Consequently, his later publications were reduced to only the occasional short story. In 1928, Charles Chesnutt was awarded the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Spingarn_Medal\" target=\"_blank\">Springarn Medal<\/a> by the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/NAACP\" target=\"_blank\">National Association for the Advancement of Colored People<\/a> in recognition of his literary achievements.<\/p>\n<p>Following numerous revisions throughout the 1890s, <em>The House Behind the Cedars<\/em>, beginning in August 1900, was serialized in <em>Self-Culture Magazine<\/em>; Houghton Mifflin later published its book form in October 1900. <em>The House Behind the Cedars<\/em>, which Chesnutt originally titled &#8220;Rena Walden,&#8221; scrutinizes the problems afflicting those on both sides of the color line. Highlighting the fluidity of race, Chesnutt focuses on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=5864\" target=\"_blank\">passing<\/a>, 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&#8217;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\u2014under the name Rowena Warwick\u2014seamlessly enters the white social sphere and is soon engaged to the dashing young aristocrat, George Tryon. However, when the truth of her Rena&#8217;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&#8217;s life ends tragically. Clearly drawing from the &#8220;tragic mulatto&#8221; tradition, <em>The House Behind the Cedars<\/em> has been critiqued for its seeming sentimentality; however, Chesnutt&#8217;s novel complicates these conventions. His sympathetic portrayal of passing illuminates racism&#8217;s pernicious and oppressive effects for both blacks and whites.<\/p>\n<p>Read the entire book here\u00a0in <a href=\"http:\/\/docsouth.unc.edu\/southlit\/chesnutthouse\/cheshouse.html\" target=\"_blank\">HTML<\/a> or <a href=\"http:\/\/docsouth.unc.edu\/southlit\/chesnutthouse\/cheshouse.xml\" target=\"_blank\">XML\/TEI<\/a> format.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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) \u00a0\u00a0 The electronic edition is a part of the UNC-CH database \u201cA Digitized [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,8,15,6462],"tags":[333,898,897],"class_list":["post-12621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-media-archive","category-novels","category-passing-2","tag-charles-chesnutt","tag-charles-w-chesnutt","tag-charles-waddell-chesnutt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12621"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12621\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}