RACIAL MIXING AND TEXTUAL REMIXING: CHARLES CHESNUTT
“I have just finished Thackeray’s ‘Vanity Fair,’ his first great novel” reports the twenty-two-year-old Charles Chesnutt, writing in the journal he kept as a teenager and young adult. “Every time I read a good novel, I want to write one,” he continues. “It is the dream of my life—to be an author!” Chesnutt follows this declaration with a frank analysis of his “mixture of motives,” which include “fame,” “money,” and the desire “to raise my children in a different rank of life from that I sprang from.” Looking ahead to his summer vacation, the recently installed principal of the State Colored Normal School in Fayetteville, North Carolina, vows to “strike for an entering wedge in the literary world.”1
This passage is perhaps the best known in Chesnutt’s journals, with the phrase “to be an author” even borrowed to serve as the title of a collection of his letters. Little attention has been paid, however, to the remainder of the entry, a short sketch entitled “Tom McDonald’s Lesson.” Tom is a young man who shows up at a wedding to which he was not invited. At first the host’s seemingly cordial greeting puts Tom at ease—“come in Tom come in; you ain’t invited here, but God knows you’re just as welcome as if you was”—but the constant repetition of this formula eventually leads him to flee the party in humiliation. “Must go, eh? Well I’m sorry,” announces the host. “You wasn’t invited here, but we’ve enjoyed your company just as much as if you had been.” The sketch ends as the roar of laughter accompanying Tom’s departure leads him to swear “a deep and solemn vow never to go again where he was not invited.”2
What is the relationship between the two halves of this journal entry? The sketch seems less an attempt to “be an author” like Thackeray than a commentary on the plausibility—or rather, the implausibility—of such a prospect. In other words, the sketch reads as an allegory of attempted authorship, and specifically of the fear of rejection and failure that the first half of the entry strives to keep at bay: “‘Where there’s a will etc,’ and there is certainly a will in this case” are the final words preceding the sketch,3 but the sketch itself calls into question the validity of the invoked truism—especially when the world into which one is trying to “strike . . . an entering wedge” is not merely competitive, as Thackeray emphasizes in his own depictions of the literary marketplace, but also fundamentally hostile to one’s presence.
“Tom McDonald’s Lesson” never explains why Tom was not invited to the wedding in the first place. However, it does point to a likely reason for Chesnutt’s figuring of “the literary world” as a party to which not everyone is invited and at which not everyone is welcome: “[T]here’s plenty to eat,” the host assures Tom. “You wasn’t invited here, but you’re just as welcome as if you was. Don’t be bashful; there’s plenty for all; and there’ll be some left for the niggers.”4 Chesnutt says nothing about race when discussing his ambition in his journal entry, and “Tom McDonald’s Lesson” does not portray explicitly African American characters. With this line, though, the sketch not only registers the status of African Americans in the society depicted but also aligns its protagonist with African Americans—or rather more pointedly, with “niggers”—as people excluded from full participation in society’s bounty.
The lesson of “Tom McDonald’s Lesson” notwithstanding, Chesnutt did of course become an author, and in fact this sketch, as the editor of his journals notes, “forms the germ of one of Chesnutt’s first published stories, ‘Tom’s Warm Welcome,’” which appeared five years later.5 More importantly, the journal entry as a whole forms the germ of one of Chesnutt’s most famous stories, “The Wife of His Youth.” In “The Wife of His Youth” as in the journal entry, the reading of Victorian literature and dreams of a better future are followed by the story of a party crasher. In fact, similar plots figure prominently in the first novel Chesnutt published, The House Behind the Cedars, and the last one he wrote, The Quarry. Repeatedly, that is, Chesnutt makes the reading of nineteenth-century British literature a feature and indeed engine of plot—in particular, a plot of aspiration, upward mobility, and conflicted racial identity.
Yet while Chesnutt’s interest in Victorian literature is sustained, it does not remain static. Instead, and in contrast to Frances Harper’s loyalty to the racial-loyalty rhetoric and plot of George Eliot’s The Spanish Gypsy (as we saw in the previous chapter), Chesnutt’s engagement with Victorian literature forms a plot of its own, developing over time and ultimately bringing to the surface aspects of this engagement that remain submerged in his earlier work. Moreover, Chesnutt not only leverages Victorian literature to tell the stories he wants to tell but also, and again in contrast to Harper, takes a more critical stance toward his intertexts, probing and exposing shortcomings in their treatment of race. Borrowing the title of his last novel, then, we might say that Victorian literature is Chesnutt’s quarry: both source and prey. As we shall see, the double-edged nature of this engagement manifests itself most fully and strikingly when Chesnutt seizes on Victorian references to an identity as marginal and marginalized in that literature as it is central to his own writings: that of the racially mixed individual, the mulatto.6
(DIS)CONTINUOUS LIFE: “THE WIFE OF HIS YOUTH”
In contrast to Tom McDonald, who showed up at a party to which he was not invited, the protagonist of “The Wife of His Youth,” as that story’s first sentence announces, “was going to give a ball.”7 Mr. Ryder is in a position to do so because he has succeeded in working his way up in the world, just as the young author of “Tom McDonald’s Lesson” resolves to do: “by industry, by thrift, and by study” he has achieved economic advancement and social status (111). Mr. Ryder is not an author, although his job does involve the materials of writing: he is the stationery clerk in charge of distributing office supplies for a railroad company. However, he does have “decidedly literary tastes” (102) and a passion for Tennyson that matches his creator’s enthusiasm for Thackeray. In its opening pages, then, “The Wife of His Youth” reads as a kind of happy sequel to the 1881 journal entry.
From the outset, though, this reimagining of the journal entry differs dramatically from its precursor in its treatment of race: largely a subtext in the journal entry, race is explicitly central to “The Wife of His Youth.” Mr. Ryder is introduced as “the dean of the Blue Veins”—“a little society of colored persons organized in a certain Northern city shortly after the war” whose members “were, generally speaking, more white than black” (101)—and the first of the story’s three sections details, mainly in a tone of bemused irony, the group’s fitfully and unconvincingly disavowed obsession with skin color. Mr. Ryder himself, for example, claims to “have no race prejudice” but longs nonetheless for “absorption by the white race” of “people of mixed blood” such as himself, a fate he opposes to “extinction in the black” (104). Indeed, he is giving his ball in honor of the woman to whom he intends to propose marriage, and her “many attractive qualities” include not only her “refined manners and the vivacity of her wit” but also the fact that “she was whiter than he” (103).
The greatest desire, then, of the man who is perhaps the first African American fictional character ever portrayed as a reader of Victorian literature, is to not be African American. I will return to the question of whether we are to understand Mr. Ryder’s love of “the great English poets” (102) and Tennyson in particular as a function of this desire, as it is often read; however, the second part of “The Wife of His Youth” certainly makes clear Mr. Ryder’s eagerness to put the poetry he loves to work in the service of his intertwined racial, social, and romantic aspirations. The section opens with Mr. Ryder preparing “to respond to the toast ‘The Ladies’ at the supper” by “fortifying himself with apt quotations” drawn “from a volume of Tennyson—his favorite poet” (104). Chesnutt shows him considering passages from three poems, all of which are quoted in the text. First Mr. Ryder reads aloud lines from “A Dream of Fair Women”: “At length I saw a lady within call, / Stiller than chisell’d marble, standing there; / A daughter of the gods, divinely tall, / And most divinely fair” (104). Evidently satisfied with this passage, he “marked the verse and turning the page read the stanza beginning,—‘O sweet pale Margaret, / O rare pale Margaret,” from the poem “Margaret” (104–5). Rejecting these lines because although “Mrs. Dixon was the palest lady he expected at the ball . . . she was of a rather ruddy complexion,” Mr. Ryder “ran over the leaves until his eye rested on the description of Queen Guinevere” from “Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere” (105). Chesnutt quotes two passages from the poem, a five-line description of Guinevere’s outfit and the last six lines of the poem, which concludes, “A man had given all other bliss, / And all his worldly worth for this, / To waste his whole heart in one kiss / Upon her perfect lips.” Satisfied, Mr. Ryder murmurs the words “with an appreciative thrill” (105).
In the first part of the story, Mr. Ryder’s literary taste was specifically exempted from the section’s otherwise pervasive irony: “He could repeat whole pages of the great English poets; and if his pronunciation was sometimes faulty, his eye, his voice, his gestures, would respond to the changing sentiment with a precision that revealed a poetic soul and disarmed criticism” (102). Here in the second part, though, criticism is re-armed, in two ways. First, Tennyson’s appeal for Mr. Ryder is shown to lie at least partly in the eloquence with which the poet celebrates the beauty of white skin. Yet Mr. Ryder is forced to acknowledge the mismatch between the Tennysonian ideal and his own reality. Second, and more subtly, the two passages Mr. Ryder chooses seem far less appropriate for the intended occasion when one recalls the women being described: the passage from “A Dream of Fair Women” describes Helen of Troy, who turns on the speaker “The star-like sorrows of immortal eyes” and announces, “Where’er I came / I brought calamity,”8 and the adulterous love of Launcelot and Guinevere has similarly destructive consequences.
The extraction of passages in disregard of their original context is of course a common practice, and the extent to which such extracts ask to be read or ought to be read in relation to the text from which they are drawn is a perennially open question. It is a question raised regularly, sometimes pointedly, by Tennyson’s own practices of allusion and rewriting of scenes from myths and legends, including those cited here. In “The Wife of His Youth,” Chesnutt’s emphasis on both Mr. Ryder’s familiarity with Tennyson and the physical activity of handling a specific volume of his poetry—marking verses, turning pages—encourages us to treat the quoted passages not as free-floating gems but rather as extracts from specific texts. Indeed, Chesnutt gives us enough clues to infer that Mr. Ryder owns a copy of the standard edition of The Poetical Works of Alfred Tennyson that was reprinted repeatedly in both Britain and the United States over the last three decades of the nineteenth century: in this edition, as in Mr. Ryder’s volume of Tennyson, “A Dream of Fair Women” is immediately followed by “Margaret,” with “Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere” some pages further on in the book. These contextualizing signals reinforce the irony of Mr. Ryder’s choices.9
This ironic treatment of Mr. Ryder’s taste for Tennyson—or at least, in a distinction I will continue to insist on, of the use he makes here of Tennyson—is ostensibly reinforced by the event that occurs just as he is feeling his “appreciative thrill” (105): a “very black” woman appears at his door—a woman “who looked like a bit of the old plantation life” (105), and whose appearance contrasts sharply with that of Tennyson’s Helen, Margaret, and Guinevere. Although Mr. Ryder and this woman, ’Liza Jane, do not recognize each other, it will emerge that she is the wife of his antebellum youth as a free black in the South, when his name was Sam Taylor; separated before the Civil War, she has been searching for him for a quarter-century, while he, after a brief search, moved up north, up in the world, and on with his life. As ’Liza Jane tells her story, her voice quite literally replaces Tennyson’s—“‘My name’s ’Liza,’ she began, ‘’Liza Jane. W’en I wuz young I us’ter b’long ter Marse Bob Smif, down in ol Missoura. I wuz bawn down dere” (106). The poet laureate is mentioned only one more time, at the end of the second section, when Mr. Ryder writes ’Liza Jane’s address “on the fly-leaf of the volume of Tennyson” (109). In the final section of the story, Mr. Ryder responds to the toast “The Ladies” not with his planned quotations but instead by telling ’Liza Jane’s story and acknowledging her as “the wife of my youth” (112). In accepting in the person of ’Liza Jane the black past and identity he has sought to escape, Mr. Ryder seems to be giving up Tennyson as much as his light-skinned fiancée.10
Yet Tennyson’s role in “The Wife of His Youth” is more ambiguous than this reading suggests. In fact, Mr. Ryder’s (and therefore Chesnutt’s) choice of Tennyson has a logic and a resonance that go beyond the poet’s celebration of beautiful women or the cultural capital he represents. To begin with, the turn from Tennyson’s women to ’Liza Jane can be read in terms of continuity as well as disruption: Mr. Ryder’s writing of ’Liza Jane’s address in the volume of Tennyson can be read as overwriting Tennyson, or as a move from reading white stories to writing black ones, but alternatively it might suggest a desire on Mr. Ryder’s part to include ’Liza Jane within Tennyson’s volume, to see her story as itself Tennysonian. Similarly, while ’Liza Jane’s arrival interrupts Mr. Ryder’s reading, Chesnutt presents this appearance as a phenomenon analogous to if not continuous with his readerly experiences: “She looked like a bit of the old plantation life, summoned up from the past by the wave of a magician’s wand, as the poet’s fancy had called into being the gracious shapes of which Mr. Ryder had just been reading” (105).
Continuity or break? ’Liza Jane’s appearance raises this question not only with regard to Mr. Ryder’s activity reading Tennyson, but with regard to his life as a whole. More precisely, the ensuing revelations about Mr. Ryder’s past show that the question of the relationship between his present, Tennyson-reading self and his prior, ’Liza Jane–marrying self has already been central to his life, and that he felt that he had answered it: “Suppose,” he says to his guests, in recounting his own history as that of someone else, “that he made his way to the North, as some of us have done, and there, where he had larger opportunities, had improved them, and had in the course of all these years grown to be as different from the ignorant boy who ran away from fear of slavery as the day is from the night,” and “Suppose, too, that as the years went by, this man’s memory of the past grew more and more indistinct, until at last it was rarely, except in his dreams, that any image of this bygone period rose before his mind” (111). There is good reason that “The Wife of His Youth” is “usually read . . . as a ringing endorsement of racial solidarity and a repudiation of . . . color prejudice.”11 Here we see, though, that the issue for Mr. Ryder as he himself frames it is one of loyalty not to one’s race but to one’s own past. And this subject, in various manifestations—the fixity or fluidity of identity over time, the extent to which the passage of time does or does not loosen one’s past attachments and commitments, the potential disappointments of reunions and homecomings—is one of Tennyson’s great preoccupations. It is little wonder that Mr. Ryder favors a poet who famously asks whether “men” can or should “rise on stepping-stones / Of their dead selves to higher things.”12
The passages we see Mr. Ryder reading do not foreground this aspect of Tennyson’s poetry, but the story does allude subtly to one especially relevant poem in this vein. Tennyson’s hugely popular “Enoch Arden” (also reprinted in the editions that model Mr. Ryder’s) tells the story of a sailor who returns home (“home—what home? had he a home?”) after over a decade’s absence, “so brown, so bowed, / So broken” as to be unrecognizable.13 Both the poem and story’s common scenario and their divergent dénouements are underscored by their identically worded revelations of identity: “I am the man,” says Enoch Arden; “this is the woman, and I am the man,” says Mr. Ryder.14 Yet Enoch Arden only announces himself to a third party: learning that his wife, believing him dead, is happily remarried, he keeps his identity secret from her until his death, so as “not to break in upon her peace.”15 “The Wife of His Youth” obviously plays out differently. Yet that difference, we might surmise, is why Mr. Ryder turns away from Tennyson: not away from his beloved English poets in general but away from a poet who repeatedly highlights the changes wrought by the irreversible passage of time—changes, we have seen, that have been central to Mr. Ryder’s self-conception. Matched with an agèd wife who comes like a ghost to trouble joy and remind him of his ties to a savage race in this rewriting of Tennyson’s rewritings of the Odyssey, Mr. Ryder . . . yields.16
When thus revising his view of himself and his concomitant attitude toward his past, Mr. Ryder turns to the preeminent figure in the literary tradition of which Tennyson is the preeminent living representative: “This above all: to thine own self be true, / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man.”17 These are, as Mr. Ryder says, “words that we all know” (112)—and they are also, one critic argues, an expression of “Polonius’s fatuous complacency” that begs the question of “to which self . . . the story’s protagonist [should be] faithful: Sam Taylor or Mr. Ryder.”18 But in fact these lines revise Mr. Ryder’s own earlier statement in a way that captures precisely his shift in thinking from viewing these two identities as discontinuous to affirming their continuity. Refusing to be blinded by these lines’ familiarity, Chesnutt breathes new life into Polonius’s facile simile: for the man who, as we have seen, had previously used the difference between night and day to figure opposition rather than continuity—the grown man, Mr. Ryder had said, is “as different from the ignorant boy . . . as the day is from the night” (111)—the fact that night follows day is no commonplace but instead a revelation.
In “The Wife of His Youth,” then, neither Tennyson nor British literature writ large stands simply or solely for whiteness: Chesnutt’s intertextuality is richer and subtler than that.19 The story also shows, however, that such a refusal to treat that literature reductively need not mean overlooking or excusing its racial assumptions and investments: Tennyson’s role and resonance in the story go beyond his status as a prestigious and quotable celebrant of fair skin, but that status remains central to his significance, not incidental. For Mr. Ryder, both this colorism and Tennyson’s emphasis on the irrecoverability of the past become reasons to leave the poet behind; for Chesnutt, by contrast, this combination underwrites his interest in continued investigation and dialogue. Thus, in his first published novel, The House Behind the Cedars (1900), he expands dramatically on “The Wife of His Youth”’s exploration of racial identity, upward mobility, and the burdens and rewards of leading what the novel will call “a continuous life.”20 Putting added pressure on these questions by taking as his protagonists mixed-race characters who, unlike Mr. Ryder, are capable of passing for or living as white, Chesnutt accords British literature, especially nineteenth-century British literature, an even more prominent role in the articulation of these concerns.
As he moves from sketch to short story to novel, Chesnutt makes increasingly explicit the ways in which the reading of such literature bears on characters’ aspirations, in particular as these aspirations involve acts of racial positioning. While the journal entry with which we began barely hints at the reckoning with race that Chesnutt’s Thackerayan literary ambition will require, and “The Wife of His Youth” implicitly aligns Mr. Ryder’s love of Tennyson with his desire to leave behind his black past, The House Behind the Cedars openly narrates the role such reading plays in the Bildung and self-presentation of mixed-race characters who decide to live as white.
As we shall also see, though, Chesnutt’s engagement with Victorian literature goes well beyond these explicit references in both scope and complexity. Indeed, his very depiction of readerly Bildung draws on and reworks specific Victorian models, as does his plotting. In an especially striking pattern, Chesnutt repeatedly brings into play moments where Victorian literature itself puts in play the figure of the mulatto. The recovery of this extensive and constitutive intertextuality reveals—in the terms made available by “The Wife of His Youth”—that The House Behind the Cedars follows from Victorian literature as the night the day.
SUSTAINING IDEAS: THE HOUSE BEHIND THE CEDARS
The House Behind the Cedars tells the stories of siblings Rena and John Walden, the products of a longstanding if unacknowledged union between a free, light-skinned woman whom “Tradition gave . . . to the negro race” (370) and a prominent white man in antebellum North Carolina. Rejecting the notion that he is “black” (373), the light-skinned John leaves home as a young man and eventually establishes himself as a successful white lawyer in South Carolina. The main action of the novel is set in the late 1860s, when, after a decade without any contact with his mother and younger sister, the recently widowed John returns to his hometown and suggests that Rena come live with him—as a white woman—and help raise his son. Rena agrees reluctantly, and, after a year at a finishing school, joins her brother, and is quickly courted by his friend and client, George Tryon. By chance, however, George catches a glimpse of Rena when she returns home to see her sick mother; learning that she is “negro” (362), he breaks off the engagement. George does not “out” John, who returns to his life as a white man and disappears from the novel. By contrast, Rena decides to dedicate her life to helping the “darker people” whom she had been “taught to despise” but now views as “her inalienable race” (396), and becomes a teacher at a rural school. The final section of the book shows Rena fending off the advances of a violent, vulgar man who is prominent in the black community and rejecting the renewed overtures of George, who is ostensibly engaged to another woman but can neither forget Rena nor resolve firmly to marry her despite her race. Fleeing from both suitors, Rena gets lost in a swamp during a storm and is taken to her mother’s house to die, acknowledging on her deathbed that she was “loved . . . best” by Frank Fowler, a loyal, working-class black man who has worshiped her her whole life (459).
Nineteenth-century British literature figures prominently in The House Behind the Cedars from the outset. The novel begins with John Walden’s return to his hometown—however, John does not return as “John Walden,” but rather as “John Warwick,” as is announced in capital letters in the second paragraph of the novel (quoting the hotel registry) and explained in the ensuing reunion scene with his mother: “From Bulwer’s novel, he had read the story of Warwick the Kingmaker, and upon leaving home had chosen it for his own. He was a new man, but he had the blood of an old race, and he would select for his own one of its worthy names” (287).21 Similarly, when Rena comes to live with him, he announces that “henceforth she must be known as Miss Warwick, dropping the old name with the old life” (296). Going further, he changes Rena’s first name as well, turning to another novel of English history, Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) for the similar-sounding but very differently signifying name of Ivanhoe’s bride, Lady Rowena.
Throughout the novel, John and Rena’s names index their racialized identity. The narrator’s practice of always referring to John as John Warwick, as opposed to Walden, acknowledges the success of his self-fashioning as a white man, whereas the narrator’s refusal to call John’s sister “Rowena” reflects the temporary achievement of this social identity and the limited purchase her time living as a white person has on her self-conception. To be sure, this purchase is limited but real, as the narrator also makes clear with reference to her name: “Miss Rowena Warwick could never again become quite the Rena Walden who had left the house behind the cedars no more than a year and a half before” (409). Rena herself uses her name to indicate this liminal, conflicted state when she writes to George to refuse his request to meet after he has broken off their engagement: “You are white, and you have given me to understand that I am black” (438), she writes, and in keeping with this nuanced formulation she signs her letter “Yours very truly, Rowena Walden.” This play with Rena’s name continues until the novel’s last line, which indicates powerfully that, no matter how split Rena’s sense of self is in life, in death her social identity is clear. The novel ends with the answer to George’s question “Who’s dead?”: “A young cullud ’oman, suh . . . Mis’ Molly Walden’s daughter Rena” (461). For these characters, then, to have a name taken from nineteenth-century British literature is to be (recognized as) white, and to be white is to have a name taken from nineteenth-century British literature.
As we have seen in previous chapters, nineteenth-century British literature served some of Chesnutt’s predecessors and contemporaries as a resource in their efforts to promote African American identity and solidarity. In The House Behind the Cedars, by contrast, this literature serves as a resource for characters who reject such an identity and are uninterested in such solidarity. But John’s relationship to nineteenth-century British literature is neither purely instrumental for him nor purely ironic for the novel. On the contrary, this literature is also inspirational: for John in particular, the literature he reads is not merely a tool to help him achieve his goals but also contributes significantly to the development of those goals in the first place. Thus, from the very beginning of the novel, Chesnutt emphasizes the centrality of reading to John’s childhood as he experienced and remembers it: in the early reunion scene with his mother, the first statement John makes that is not in direct response to something she says is, “There are the dear old books; have they been read since I went away?” (279), and his most common memory of his childhood is of being “sprawled upon the hearth . . . reading, by the light of a blazing pine-knot or lump of resin, some volume from the bookcase in the hall” (287). The books are also at the core of his remembered relationship with Rena—he greets her by saying “You’re the little sister I used to read stories to” (280)—and they have stood in for him in his absence: “I’ve kep’ ’em dusted clean, an’ kep the moths an’ the bugs out,” his mother explains, “for I hoped you’d come back some day, an knowd you’d like to find ’em all in their places, jus’ like you left ’em” (279).
As Molly’s pathetic statement indicates, however, the books that stand in for John in his absence also stand for his absence. The past to which the books connect John is a past defined by a longing to escape his home, to consign it to the past, and his youthful reading is bound up intimately with that longing and that escape. This dynamic is articulated more fully later in the novel, in a chapter that breaks from the narrative’s chronological organization to stage its own return to the past. After recounting Molly’s history, Chesnutt begins his sketch of John’s youth with the watershed incident in which John learns of his stigma: in 1855, at the age of fifteen, “the white boys on the street” with whom he plays, and from whom “no external sign . . . mark[s] him off,” inform he that he is “black,” and beat him for denying it (373). This scene is followed immediately by an extended description of John’s childhood reading and its effect on him. The source of John’s reading material is that “small but remarkable collection of books” mentioned earlier in the novel but which, we now learn in a crucial further piece of information, was left in his home by his father—“the distinguished gentleman who did not give his name to Mis’ Molly’s children” (373).
Chesnutt identifies the volumes in this collection in some detail:
Among the books were a volume of Fielding’s complete works, in fine print, set in double columns; a set of Bulwer’s novels; a collection of everything that Walter Scott—the literary idol of the South—had ever written; Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays, cheek by jowl with the history of the virtuous Clarissa Harlowe; the Spectator and Tristram Shandy, Robinson Crusoe and the Arabian Nights. On these secluded shelves Roderick Random, Don Quixote, and Gil Blas for a long time ceased their wanderings, the Pilgrim’s Progress was suspended, Milton’s mighty harmonies were dumb, and Shakespeare reigned over a silent kingdom. (374)
This literature fascinates and transports the young John:
he discovered the library, . . . and found in it the portal of a new world, peopled with strange and marvelous beings. Lying prone upon the floor of the shaded front piazza, behind the fragrant garden, he followed the fortunes of Tom Jones and Sophia; he wept over the fate of Eugene Aram; he penetrated with Richard the Lion-heart into Saladin’s tent, with Gil Blas into the robbers’ cave; he flew through the air on the magic carpet or the enchanted horse, or tied with Sindbad to the roc’s leg. (374)
No mere diversion, John’s reading transforms him: having “tasted of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge,” he loses any sense of “contentment” with his lot and comes to believe that “happiness lay far beyond the sphere where he was born” (375). This account of John’s reading is accordingly followed immediately by the narration of his first concrete step toward escaping that sphere, as he successfully appeals for help to a leading citizen of the town, Judge Straight, to whom he announces his desire to be a lawyer and his intention to live as the white man he considers himself to be.
Chesnutt portrays the young John’s refusal to be defined and constrained by an arbitrary, oppressive racial designation, as well as the role his reading plays in cultivating this defiant attitude, with sympathy and understanding. However, not only does the novel show the costs of John’s actions—costs borne primarily by his mother and sister—but it also implicates the very literature that inspires John to “[demand] entrance to the golden gate of opportunity, which society barred to all who bore the blood of the despised race” (378) in the barring of that gate. As we have seen, Chesnutt interrupts his cataloging of John’s library to label Walter Scott “the literary idol of the South” (374), and he develops this point more fully in an earlier scene depicting the Clarence Social Club’s annual tournament. Modeled on the tournament scene in Ivanhoe, these “bloodless imitations” (298) stand as a testament to what Chesnutt describes as “the influence of Walter Scott . . . upon the old South” (298): “The South before the war was essentially feudal,” the narrator explains, “and Scott’s novels of chivalry appealed forcefully to the feudal heart” (298).22 It is at this historically diminished, politically reactionary, doubly nostalgic (because nostalgic for the antebellum South as much as for a mythical English past) event that “Rowena Warwick” is chosen by George Tryon as the Queen of Love and Beauty (and chosen, we might add over the other “six Rebeccas and eight Rowenas” present [302]). This triumph is thus rendered as dubious by its setting as by its consequences.23
Despite his Scott-fueled aspirations, John himself seems to cast a satirical eye on southern society’s most egregious self-mythologizing: his ostensible argument for the superiority of the Clarence tournament over its model leads another spectator to accuse him of being “the least bit heretical about our chivalry—or else . . . a little too deep for me” (299). Nonetheless, John remains unequivocally committed to succeeding in this society; despite any failings, it remains for him what Tom McDonald might call the only party in town.
The same might be said for Chesnutt himself: although John represents a road not taken by his creator—who considered and rejected the idea of passing for white—Chesnutt also sought to succeed in the white world. Also like his character, Chesnutt finds models in nineteenth-century British literature. However, Chesnutt’s engagement with that literature far exceeds that of his character in its variety, extent, and sophistication, and bespeaks an attitude toward that literature as complex as the attitude toward the promotion of African American identity and solidarity with which it is entangled. Like John, though, Chesnutt drops hints that his attitude toward this literature may be “the least bit heretical”—hints, like John’s, that have proved “too deep” for his readers insofar as they have gone largely unrecognized. As we shall see, Chesnutt does eventually bring his deep game to the surface, but not in The House Behind the Cedars, nor indeed in any other work published in his lifetime.
As in “The Wife of His Youth,” I am suggesting, nineteenth-century British literature not only plays a key role in characters’ efforts to negotiate their relationships to their own past—to break from or remain loyal to it, to be cut off from or trapped by it, to choose among or be unable to choose among its constituent elements—but also plays a further, non-identical but equally key role in Chesnutt’s depiction of these efforts. These distinct levels of engagement are most dramatically on display in the episode that, for different reasons, Richard Brodhead has identified as the novel’s “primal scene”: the depiction of John’s childhood reading, discussed above. As Brodhead notes, this scene “is set at the bookcase that stands for [John and Rena’s] absent white father”;24 what has gone unnoticed is that this scene not only depicts literary affiliations but enacts one of its own. In fact, it rewrites another primal scene featuring another absent (white) father.
Describing his youthful suffering under his step-father’s cruel treatment, David Copperfield declares, “I believe I should have been almost stupefied but for one circumstance”:
It was this. My father had left a small collection of books in a little room up stairs, to which I had access (for it adjoined my own) and which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe, came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time,—they, and the Arabian Nights, and the Tales of the Genii,—and did me no harm; for whatever harm was in some of them was not there for me; I knew nothing of it. . . . It is curious to me how I could ever have consoled myself under my small troubles (which were great troubles to me), by impersonating my favorite characters in them—as I did—and by putting Mr. and Miss Murdstone into all the bad ones—which I did too. I have been Tom Jones (a child’s Tom Jones, a harmless creature) for a week together. I have sustained my own idea of Roderick Random for a month at a stretch, I believe. . . .
This was my only and my constant comfort. When I think of it, the picture always rises in my mind, of a summer evening, the boys at play in the churchyard, and I sitting on my bed, reading as if for life.25
The echoes of this well-known passage in The House Behind the Cedars are unmistakable. Just as the young David turns to his dead father’s collection of books, “which nobody else in our house ever troubled,” so too does the young John turn to his own dead father’s collection of books, “which for several years had been without a reader.” The collections contain many of the same books: Tom Jones, Roderick Random, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, Robinson Crusoe, Arabian Nights. Both accounts emphasize the readerly experience of identification—“I have been Tom Jones”; “[John] flew through the air on the magic carpet”—and both stress the impact of the characters’ reading on their dreams for the future: David’s books give him “hope of something beyond that place and time,” while John’s open “the portal of a new world” and lead him to believe that “happiness lay far beyond the sphere where he was born.”
Thus, while John’s reading shapes his aspirations and leads him to model himself on a character from a Victorian novel, Chesnutt’s depiction of this Bildung—the very process by which John arrives at those aspirations and identifications—finds its own model in a Victorian novel. Chesnutt shifts the emphasis from consolation to discontent and adds Scott and Bulwer Lytton to the reading list, but these departures from his Dickensian template do not seem particularly charged. Moreover, Chesnutt’s very transporting or transposition of the passage accords fully with the spirit of the passage itself, which is about acts of literary transport; the depicted acts may be readerly rather than writerly, but the passage’s emphasis on the active role of the readerly imagination diminishes the importance of this distinction. Just as David Copperfield “sustained [his] own idea of Roderick Random for a month at a stretch,” so too does Chesnutt sustain his own idea of David Copperfield.26
But Chesnutt’s idea of David Copperfield is not identical to Dickens’s, and the most salient differences between the two characters have to do precisely with the “sustaining” of ideas and identities. These differences underwrite two key revisions Chesnutt makes to Dickens’s passage. The first of these is paradoxically so basic as to be easily overlooked: the shift in narration from first- to third-person. This shift reflects the fact that David writes an autobiography and John does not, and this fundamental difference indicates in turn the gap between their respective relationships with their past. That is, the adult David’s writing of his autobiography (even one which “he never meant to be Published on any account,” as the wrappers of the novel’s original monthly parts had it) reflects his investment in remembering and memorializing his childhood, and his desire to view and make sense of his life as a whole; by contrast, John does not write an autobiography because he seeks to distance himself from his childhood and efface any record of it. David may be unsure “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life,”27 but John is ultimately not even the protagonist of the novel he inhabits, as he is able to sustain his own idea of himself only by cutting all ties with the social world it depicts.
Remarkably, though, Chesnutt’s sustained “idea” or version of David happens to be Dickens’s own, unsustained idea of David as well: just as the library scene in The House Behind the Cedars is preceded by John being informed that he is “black,” the library scene in David Copperfield is preceded by David “having made a Mulatto of myself”—a feat David accomplishes “by getting the dirt of the slate into the pores of my skin” while doing his lessons.28 If John Walden is a mulatto David Copperfield, then, so too is David Copperfield, at least briefly. Or rather: but only briefly. David’s use of this word hints at a self-pitying parallel between the abuse he receives at the hands of his step-father and her sister and the treatment of American slaves, and the proximity of this image to David’s account of his reading perhaps gestures toward Frederick Douglass’s account of the role of literacy in his struggle to survive and escape slavery.29 But these connections are not developed. Chesnutt’s other key revision of Dickens, then, is to literalize his metaphor, and to explore at length an identity the Victorian author invokes only momentarily—and hardly ever invokes at all: this is one of only two, equally fleeting appearances of the word mulatto in any of Dickens’s novels.30
The deliberateness with which Chesnutt seizes on what we might term the “mulatto moment” in David Copperfield is underscored—and the stakes of this reworking are clarified—by his invocation of another such moment in the same scene. Immediately after explaining that John’s reading leads him to believe that “happiness lay far beyond the sphere where he was born,” the narrator states, “The blood of his white fathers, the heirs of the ages, cried out for its own, and after the manner of that blood set about getting the object of its desire” (375). This ambiguously focalized sentence alludes to a line in Tennyson’s 1842 poem “Locksley Hall”: “I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time.”31 Brief as it is, this allusion does a good deal of work.32 For John, the line speaks to his claiming of his white ancestry and to the privileged status that makes white ancestry worth claiming. It looks both back in time and ahead, in a manner that recalls and extends the logic of his adoption of the name Warwick: “He was a new man, but he had the blood of an old race” (287); in Tennyson’s construction, it is the very age of this race that makes for the individual’s newness, that positions him to lead the way into the future.
However, if we return this line to its original context, its resonance changes. The speaker of Tennyson’s poem, embittered by the loss of the woman he loves to a wealthier suitor, imagines abandoning the civilized world for a tropical island, where “I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race” (l. 168). After imagining his mixed-race children frolicking in the natural world, “Not with blinded eyesight poring over miserable books” (l. 172), the speaker recoils from this vision—
I, to herd with narrow foreheads, vacant of our glorious gains,
Like a beast with lower pleasures, like a beast with lower pains!
Mated with a squalid savage—what to me were sun or clime? (ll. 175–77)
It is here that the speaker reasserts his identity as “the heir of all the ages.” Thus, the very passage John lights upon to assert his whiteness, his connection to his “white fathers,” signals the rejection or even negation of mixed-race progeny such as himself. John’s father has taken the course the speaker of the poem imagines but disavows, taking (what that speaker would view as) “some savage woman” as the mother of his children. Tennyson himself wrote a sequel to the poem, in which the speaker addresses his grandson, and The House Behind the Cedars, published fifty-eight years after “Locksley Hall,” stands as a kind of alternative “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After.”33
Thus, rather than African Americanize Victorian works in the manner of Hannah Crafts or George Henry Boker or Frances Harper—that is, rather than use a Victorian text about white characters as a model or template for his own texts about black characters—Chesnutt homes in on Victorian texts that invoke and flirt with such parallels themselves—or rather, homes in with remarkable precision on texts that invoke not black but rather mixed-race identities. How are we to read this pattern? Insofar as Chesnutt’s echoes and allusions invoke the mixed-race identity John seeks to escape, there is a definite irony here at the character’s expense.
John’s very choice of “Warwick” as a name reinforces this irony—not because Bulwer Lytton figures Warwick as a mulatto, but rather because John’s literary self-renaming recalls the famous real-life precedent of Frederick Douglass, especially given Chesnutt’s alignment of Bulwer Lytton with Scott. We are given no reason to believe that John would have been aware of this precedent—certainly no work in which it is described is included in his youthful library. However, the episode would have been fresh in Chesnutt’s mind, as he had recounted it in the biography of Douglass he published in 1899, the year before The House Behind the Cedars came out:
In New York [after escaping from slavery] he had called himself Frederick Johnson; but, finding when he reached New Bedford that a considerable portion of the colored population of the city already rejoiced in this familiar designation, he fell in with the suggestion of his host, who had been reading Scott’s Lady of the Lake, and traced an analogy between the runaway slave and the fugitive chieftain, that the new freeman should call himself Douglass, after the noble Scot of that name. The choice proved not inappropriate, for this modern Douglass fought as valiantly in his own cause and with his own weapons as ever any Douglas [sic] fought with flashing steel in border foray.34
Just as John’s association with works by Dickens and Tennyson paradoxically reinforces his identity as mixed race, then, so too does his choice of a name, meant to facilitate his abandonment of his mother’s race and embrace of a white identity, align him with the mixed-race Douglass, whose comparable choice marks his opposite commitment.
Yet Chesnutt’s irony cuts against the Victorian authors as much as it does against Chesnutt’s own character. By writing a version of David Copperfield who really is a mulatto—that is, by literalizing a figure Dickens is only interested in, and barely interested in, as a figure—Chesnutt does not follow Dickens’s lead or even simply redeploy the latter’s work for his own purposes, but instead points up the limitations of Dickens’s vision and sympathies. Indeed, the juxtaposition with the allusion to Tennyson casts Dickens’s practice as a milder version of “Locksley Hall”’s vision of mixed-race progeny: the figure of the mulatto is not invoked in David Copperfield in order to be rejected in disgust, as for the speaker of the poem, but is invoked nonetheless as a symbol of abjection and as shadow to the story’s real substance and focus. Critics such as Susan Meyer and Jennifer Devere Brody have taught us to recognize the figurative violence Victorian literature does to people of color by reducing them to the status of figures, or otherwise marginalizing them—by refusing, we might say, to sustain the idea of these characters.35 Charles Chesnutt’s rewriting of Victorian literature’s mulatto moments—his insistence on sustaining the idea—signals and acts upon a similar recognition. “I wish I could write like Dickens,” the teenage Chesnutt wrote in his journal in 1875, “but alas! I can’t.”36 In The House Behind the Cedars the adult Chesnutt found a way to fulfill, cancel, and surpass that desire.
Despite the close resemblance between the formative scenes of childhood reading in The House Behind the Cedars and David Copperfield, John Walden’s and David Copperfield’s stories diverge sharply. Put differently, the close resemblance between these scenes highlights the differences between the characters: David’s momentarily darkened skin notwithstanding, The House Behind the Cedars suggests that to be a mulatto David Copperfield is to live a life very unlike David Copperfield’s. To sustain the conceit of a mulatto David Copperfield, in other words, is to abandon the parallels between the two characters, since John’s youthful reading inspires him to break from his childhood traumas—to lead a discontinuous life—whereas David finds in his reading the tools to integrate his. However, it is the character in The House Behind the Cedars who aspires to lead a continuous life and is doomed to lead such a life—John’s sister, Rena—who bears the most sustained resemblance to Victorian predecessors. The mulatto-minded Victorian intertextuality that underwrites the “primal scene” of John’s life shapes and shadows his sister Rena’s story as a whole, in a less concentrated but more pervasive way.37
Consideration of this intertextuality is important not only because it captures a formative aspect of the novel that has gone largely unrecognized—and not only because it illuminates the novel’s Victorian intertexts as well—but also because it makes newly compelling the part of the novel critics often deem weakest: its treatment of Rena, and in particular the fact that she dies. For these critics, Rena’s death makes her a disappointingly conventional “tragic mulatta,” and represents Chesnutt’s capitulation to the expectations of the white literary marketplace. In a typical expression of this view, for example, Matthew Wilson writes that “The House Behind the Cedars is the most conventional of the three novels published in Chesnutt’s lifetime in its willingness to accommodate itself to its genre, to what William L. Andrews has termed ‘the protocols of “tragic mulatta” fiction,’ the racialized genre of the novel par excellence for a white audience at the turn of the century.”38 Whatever the merit of such claims regarding the novel’s resemblance to existing American novels (and these claims rarely descend from their invocations of generic convention to the identification and discussion of specific precursor texts), my argument is that in its depiction of Rena, as in its depiction of John, The House Behind the Cedars is also in dialogue with a series of Victorian novels, and it is through this dialogue that the novel’s literary-historical intervention emerges most fully.
Even more so than his portrayal of John, Chesnutt’s depiction of Rena shows that while his characters inhabit nineteenth-century British novels, they do not inhabit novels of their own choosing, or in the manner they choose. This is partly due to the difference racial status makes, as we have just seen with John and will see again with Rena. However, and somewhat paradoxically, it is also because that tradition includes powerfully sympathetic representations of characters whose stories resemble Rena’s. In his dialogue with nineteenth-century British literature, Chesnutt shows himself equally alert to the existence of such representations and to their limitations.
Even Ivanhoe, the novel Chesnutt links most closely to southern white society’s values and self-conception, shows the victims and costs of that society’s constitution. Chesnutt alludes to this aspect of Scott’s novel in a scene in which the literary and historical antecedents of Rena’s assumed name are noted. Directly preceding George’s discovery of Rena’s “true” identity, this discussion points not to the end of Ivanhoe’s relevance to her identity or story but rather to the refinement of that relevance, an improvement of its fit to her situation: George’s announcement that his beloved is “a Miss Rowena Warwick” sparks the following exchange:
“A good, strong old English name,” observed the doctor.
“The heroine of ‘Ivanhoe’!” exclaimed Miss Harriet.
“Warwick the Kingmaker!” said Miss Mary. “Is she tall and fair, and dignified and stately?”
“She is tall, dark rather than fair, and full of tender grace and sweet humility.”
“She should have been named Rebecca instead of Rowena,” rejoined Miss Mary, who was well up in her Scott. (358)
Miss Mary is right: Rena proves to resemble more closely the Jewess Rebecca than she does the Saxon Rowena, not only because of her complexion and manner but also because she is a member of an oppressed minority—and because, like Rebecca, the man she loves will not marry her because of this status. Read thus, Ivanhoe makes plain the barriers Rena faces.39
To John and Rena’s—especially Rena’s—misfortune, the Walden siblings obviously do not read Ivanhoe thus. The novel’s sole reference to Rena’s own reading (as opposed to her brother’s reading to her) might be taken to suggest that Rena has read novels too credulously: “But would her lover still love her, if he knew all? She had read some of the novels in the bookcase in her mother’s hall, and others at boarding school. She had read that love was a conqueror, that neither life nor death, nor creed nor caste, could stay his triumphant course” (318). However, the example of Ivanhoe suggests instead that her mistake as a reader is misidentification: love does overcome obstacles in Ivanhoe—just not the obstacle that most resembles her own.
To identify with Rebecca as opposed to Rowena arguably requires one to read against the grain of Scott’s novel, but such reading practices did exist at the time. In fact, Rena could have found an exact model in a novel published in the period between John’s departure from the family home and her own arrival at boarding school. “I’m determined to read no more books where the blond-haired women carry away all the happiness,” The Mill on the Floss’s Maggie Tulliver famously declares. “If you could give me some story, now, where the dark woman triumphs, it would restore the balance. I want to avenge Rebecca and Flora MacIvor, and Minna and all the rest of the dark unhappy ones.”40
As Maggie’s protest makes plain, criticism of (some of) the prejudices inscribed in nineteenth-century British literature is also inscribed in that literature, as are at least the seeds of counternarratives. And while The House Behind the Cedars is silent on the question of whether Rena has read The Mill on the Floss, let alone read it well, the novel gives abundant clues that her creator has done so and is alert to this element of immanent critique. But Chesnutt does not give us the story Maggie asks for any more than George Eliot does: refusing to fulfill that wish, he gives Maggie’s own story to Rena.
The significant echoes of The Mill on the Floss in The House Behind the Cedars begin with the similarly structured titles—titles that reflect the similarly central role of the protagonists’ childhood home, not only as a home but as a site of fraught departures and returns. Crucial to both novels is an older brother–younger sister relationship that generates crises of familial loyalty. Tom Tulliver represents the “continuous life” Maggie alternately cherishes and chafes against (“I desire no future that will break the ties of the past. . . . I can do nothing willingly that will divide me always from him”),41 whereas John models and engineers Rena’s (failed) break from the past (“Thus for the time being was severed the last tie that bound Rena to her narrow past, and for some time to come the places and the people who had known her once were to know her no more”).42 In both cases, though, the brothers are much less conflicted in their ambitions and desires and much more successful in achieving them, and in both novels the sister’s final return home estranges her from her brother, with Rena refusing John’s invitation to again move away from her mother’s home (“I left her once . . . and it brought pain and sorrow to all three of us. . . . I will not leave her here to die alone”)43 and Maggie’s return unmarried from her scandalous outing with Stephen Guest leading her brother to cut off contact with her (until their dying reconciliation). Unlike Rena, Maggie cannot live in her childhood home, since it is now her brother’s. However, she, along with her mother, is taken in by Bob Jakin, the loyal working-class admirer who has worshiped her since childhood, and The House Behind the Cedars features a very similar character, Frank Fowler: like Bob, Frank provides intermittent but lifelong support to the woman he adores, including when she is abandoned by her older brother as well as separated from her erstwhile lover.
Rena’s resemblance to Maggie is clinched by her death, and it is in his treatment of this death that Chesnutt comes closest to openly alluding to The Mill on the Floss. The threat of drowning hangs over both novels: early in Eliot’s novel, Maggie’s mother declares, “where’s the use o’ my telling you to keep away from the water? You’ll tumble in and be drownded some day,”44 and of course this prophecy is fulfilled in the flood that ends the novel. Similarly, Frank saves Rena from drowning as a child, and two mentions of a possible flood are so extraneous to the narrative that they beg to be read as foreshadowing: Rena’s mother reports to her in passing in a letter that “there has been a big freshet in the river, and it looked at one time as if the new bridge would be washed away” (330); soon thereafter, a minor character comments, “There was a freshet here a few weeks ago . . . and they had to open the flood-gates and let the water out of the mill pond, for if the dam had broken, as it did twenty years ago, it would have washed the pillars from under the judge’s office and let it down in the creek” (340). This repetition primes the reader to expect a Mill-like cataclysm—and perhaps, through its juxtaposition of the words “mill” and “flood,” to think of Eliot’s novel itself. The expectation of a fatal flood is fulfilled in the antepenultimate chapter, titled “In Deep Waters”; while the waters that kill Rena ultimately prove metaphorical rather than symbolic, this is barely so: although she does not literally drown, she is carried to her deathbed after being found “lying unconscious in the edge of the swamp” after this chapter’s violent storm, in which “the rain fell in torrents” (448). Like Maggie, Rena dies a death that releases her from her double bind and brings the novel to an abrupt close.
Just as John is a mulatto David Copperfield, then, so too is Rena a mulatta Maggie Tulliver. And just as John’s Victorian-novel predecessor is not himself a mulatto but is described as resembling one, the same is true of Rena’s: according to Mrs. Tulliver, Maggie has “brown skin as makes her look like a mulatter.”45 This ostensible mulattaness, unlike David’s, does not wash off, and it is what leads Maggie to identify with Rebecca instead of Rowena. Eliot does not explicitly develop this analogy any more than Dickens does, but the permanence of Maggie’s brown skin does correspond with the more lasting resemblance of her story to Rena’s.
In literalizing and sustaining the idea of Maggie Tulliver as mulatta, then, Chesnutt departs much less dramatically from his intertext than he does when sustaining the idea of David Copperfield as mulatto. This commonality between female protagonists suggests the determining role of gender in the scenarios conjured in both novels—even as Mrs. Tulliver’s comment hints at George Eliot’s awareness of the abiding relevance of racial dynamics, and the tragic-mulatta trope in particular, to the stories she wants to tell (as discussed in the previous chapter). At the same time, Chesnutt’s elaboration of the parallels between stories shows his own alertness to Eliot’s hint, and his own recognition of the relevance of Eliot’s project to his own.
The echoes of The Mill on the Floss make it clear that even or especially when Rena fails to secure her place in the traditional society represented for her by Scott and Bulwer Lytton, Chesnutt is working in the tradition of the British novel. Put differently, notwithstanding nineteenth-century British literature’s association with whiteness in the eyes of Chesnutt’s characters, Rena is never more of a Victorian novel heroine than when she is no longer attempting to pass as white—when she is no longer willing or able to break from her past, when she is attempting to both return and move on after this attempt fails, when she dies. To be sure, very few prominent Victorian novels end with the death of a female protagonist, and indeed such an ending is rare enough to have been controversial (rather than trite, as critics today often view the fate of “tragic mulattas”). But The Mill on the Floss is one of two Victorian novels that famously end not only with the female protagonist’s death but with her death at the very sort of impasse Rena’s story reaches (which raises them to the level of tragedy), and The House Behind the Cedars is in dialogue with both. As Jay Saunders Redding observed in his pioneering work on African American literature:
Rena faces the same problem that faced Hardy’s Tess—whether to disclose her secret (of Negro blood) on the chance that her happiness would not be destroyed thereby. Like Tess, she sees the problem as a moral issue. The Hardian flavor is strong: the primary sin which was, however, not her sin, the struggle between the desire for happiness and the propulsion to truth, the innumerable circumstances that work for and against, and finally, the stark, bare tragedy and the resolution in death.46
Published in 1891, just nine years before The House Behind the Cedars, Tess of the d’Urbervilles conducts its own, more ostentatious interrogation of the literary tradition it nonetheless (and thereby) extends. Chesnutt’s engagement with Hardy’s novel reinforces this dynamic, as his use of Tess aligns it with the earlier novels Chesnutt himself both builds on and critiques. In other words, the presence of the near-contemporaneous Tess in Chesnutt’s novel suggests the continued authority and even currency of the tradition Chesnutt is working with and on. And a finer-grained comparison of Tess and The House Behind the Cedars shows that this presence is even greater than Redding indicates. For example, like Angel Clare, who recoils from Tess when he learns of her sexual history despite being an “advanced and well-meaning young man,”47 George Tryon breaks from Rena when he learns her racial ancestry despite his “liberality, of which he had spoken so nobly and so sincerely” (362). Just as Angel “looked upon [Tess] as a species of impostor, a guilty woman in the guise of an innocent one,”48 George thinks of “the fraud of which he had been made the victim[:] A negro girl had been foisted upon him for a white woman” (362).
In both cases, moreover, this line between tainted sexuality and tainted ancestry blurs: Angel tells Tess, “I cannot help associating your decline as a family with this other fact—of your want of firmness,”49 while Rena’s physical collapse upon George’s discovery of her mixed-race parentage leads to her being described tellingly as “the young woman who had fallen” (361). And yet in both cases the man eventually attempts to restore the relationship, but too late: by the time Angel finds Tess, she has returned to Alec d’Urberville and is in a state of death-in-life—“his original Tess had spiritually ceased to recognize the body before him as hers—allowing it to drift, like a corpse upon the current, in a direction dissociated from its living will”50—while by the time George arrives in Patesville to tell Rena “that he loved her, that she was all the world to him, that he had come to marry her, and take her away where they might be happy together” (461), she is already dead.
What Redding calls “the Hardian flavor” of The House Behind the Cedars is also discernible in Chesnutt’s prose at the level of phrase and sentence. It is perhaps strongest in this final chapter, when the narrator pulls back from the image of Frank sobbing over the delirious, dying Rena:
Meantime the sun shone on as brightly as before, the mocking-bird sang yet more joyously. A gentle breeze sprang up and wafted the odor of bay and jessamine past them on its wings. The grand triumphal sweep of nature’s onward march recked nothing of life’s little tragedies. (458)51
This bitterly ironic zoom-out to record the natural world’s indifference to human suffering is a classic Hardian move, as when Hardy pivots away from Alec d’Urberville’s rape of Tess to note the “gentle roosting birds” and “hopping rabbits and hares.”52 Indeed, Chesnutt seems to have paid particularly close attention to that famous scene: for example, the narrator’s statement that Rena “was yet to learn that the innocent suffer with the guilty, and feel the punishment the more keenly because unmerited. She had yet to learn that the old Mosaic formula, ‘The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children,’ was graven more indelibly upon the heart of the race than upon the tables of Sinai” (318), recalls (while shifting the emphasis of) Hardy’s “But though to visit the sins of the fathers upon the children may be a morality good enough for divinities, it is scorned by average human nature; and it therefore does not mend the matter.”53 Chesnutt similarly incorporates while tweaking the sentiment expressed in the next sentence from this passage: “As Tess’s own people down in those retreats are never tired of saying among each other in their fatalistic way: ‘It was to be’”54 echoes in the suggestion that “From some ancestral source [Rena] had derived a strain of the passive fatalism by which alone one can submit uncomplainingly to the inevitable” (328).
In a striking convergence, Maggie Tulliver, Tess Durbeyfield/d’Urberville, and Rena Walden/Warwick all descend into “the valley of humiliation.”55 While it would be a stretch to read Chesnutt’s use of Bunyan’s evocative phrase as alluding to Eliot or Hardy (let alone both), the three authors’ shared recourse to this image—which appears almost nowhere else in now-canonical Victorian fiction56—further attests to Chesnutt’s place in this lineage.57 Or rather, Chesnutt himself helps construct and make visible a transatlantic, interracial lineage in which the novelistic treatment of scandals of fallenness and mixed-race ancestry (interracial lineage) are mutually informed and illuminating. Unlike Maggie, Tess is not compared to a mulatta, but Chesnutt’s reworking of Hardy’s novel shows how much she too is “like a mulatter,” for reasons other than the color of her skin. Indeed, Chesnutt newly motivates a prominent yet seemingly insignificant detail in Tess: Tess’s native village, we learn in the very first sentence of the novel, is located in the “Vale of Blakemore or Blackmoor.” While the existence of alternative names for the locale speaks to the lingering orality of its inhabitants’ culture, the actual content of the variant opens up Hardy’s provincially anchored story to a more global and interracial horizon. The nearly identical variant name “Blackmoor,” we might say, hints punningly at the possibility of a variant story that is also nearly identical—only more black (if not the story of a “blackamoor”). With The House Behind the Cedars, Chesnutt provides such a story.58
In his depiction of Rena as in his depiction of John, Chesnutt is not only extending the tradition of the British novel but also at times working athwart or against it. In light of what we have seen with regard to Eliot and Hardy, we should keep in mind that this tradition itself is characterized by or even formed through continuity, revision, and critique; nonetheless, the distinctive revisions Chesnutt enacts and the insights these revisions in turn afford are not necessarily present (elsewhere) within this tradition. Moreover, at times the critical edge of these revisions seems particularly sharp. With the treatment of Rena as with that of John, this sharper edge emerges when Chesnutt moves from literalizing figurative mulattoes to invoking or reworking a Victorian text that depicts, or flirts with depicting, an actual mixed-race character. In Rena’s story, this intertextual role—which we saw played by “Locksley Hall” in John’s narrative—is filled by the novel that portrays the most notorious (if ambiguously) mixed-race character in Victorian literature: Jane Eyre.
As with “Locksley Hall,” Chesnutt signals this intertextual engagement through an allusion, although this latter allusion—and the sustained connection it hints at—seems to have gone unrecognized (as have the links to David Copperfield and The Mill on the Floss). The explicit allusion comes in the name Chesnutt assigns Rena’s romantic rival, who is a more caste-appropriate choice for the man she loves: Blanche. Perhaps the too-obvious racial signification of this name has kept critics from reading it as an allusion to Blanche Ingram, Rochester’s supposed love-interest in Jane Eyre. In both novels, though, the protagonists’ engagements are broken off not because of the would-be groom’s preference for a Blanche but rather because of the discovery of a “creole” (370), in the person of Bertha Mason or Rena herself. Moreover, the post-broken-off-engagement phase of Rena’s story tracks Jane’s: after Jane’s engagement falls through, her flight from temptation leads her to strangers who turn out to be her kin—cousins with whom she comes to share “sisterly love”;59 after Rena’s own engagement falls through, Rena gains a new sense of kinship with her “rediscovered people,” whom she views with the “sympathy of a sister” (396). Jane takes a job teaching peasant girls in a remote village schoolhouse, keeping busy by day and “rush[ing] into strange dreams at night . . . dreams where . . . I still again and again met Mr Rochester,”60 while Rena takes a position as the teacher at a small rural school for black children, “her absorption in the work . . . keep[ing] at a distance the spectre of her lost love,” although “her dreams she could not control” (430). At this stage of the narrative, Jane seems to have replaced Maggie and Tess as Rena’s closest precursor.
Of course, Rena’s fate differs dramatically from Jane’s. Yet this divergence is precisely to the point: the ending Brontë engineers for Jane is not available, and emphatically not available, for Rena. It is not available because while the death of Jane Eyre’s “dark double” (as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar famously labeled Bertha) clears the way for Jane’s marriage to Rochester, Rena is her own dark double, a status paradoxically only possible because she is not “dark” in pigmentation.61 The idea of a mulatta Jane Eyre proves unsustainable because Jane’s ultimate fate depends on the fact that she is not a mulatta (or at least not a “creole”). Jane Eyre was perhaps the nineteenth-century novel’s most celebrated and influential disseminator of the conviction that, as we have seen, Rena acquires from her own reading of fiction: “that love was a conqueror, that neither life nor death, nor creed nor caste, could stay his triumphant course” (318). Over half a century before Wide Sargasso Sea, The House Behind the Cedars reworks Brontë’s novel to put the lie to this claim. Reader, she died.
In considering Chesnutt’s response to Jane Eyre, moreover, we should also note that the “she” who dies is not the Bertha-figure instead of the Jane-figure, but rather a character who embodies both these figures. This revision might be read as reflecting a generic switch from a gothic externalization or splitting of aspects of identity to a more realist mode of internalized tension. Viewed in the context of Chesnutt’s inscription and expansion of Victorian literature’s “mulatto moments” more generally, however, it can be seen to register a fundamental difference in the very conception of the mulatto assumed and promoted by British and American literature. More specifically, what Chesnutt makes visible is a basic but easily overlooked difference in visibility: when Maggie Tulliver and David Copperfield are compared to mulattoes, the basis for the comparison is the darkness of their skin. By contrast, to be a mulatto in The House Behind the Cedars, as so often in American literature, means potentially being light-skinned enough to live as a white person: there is “no external sign to mark [them] off” (373). As he transforms the narrative role of the mulatto/a from figure and foil to protagonist, then, Chesnutt does not just criticize and correct for the marginalization and instrumentalization of mulattoes in Victorian fiction. He also uses the mulatto to undermine the very purpose it serves in that fiction, whether casually or concertedly: to reinforce what Irene Tucker calls “the logic of racial self-evidence.”62
In the preceding account of The House Behind the Cedars’s transatlantic, cross-racial intertextuality, works that are alluded to faintly if at all emerge as equal or greater in importance than those that are explicitly referenced by name. One way to understand this disparity would be to view novels such as David Copperfield and The Mill on the Floss as sources Chesnutt sought to move beyond and leave behind; on this account, the detectable traces of their presence reflect his failure to fully transmute or transcend his influences. However, the multiple drafts of the novel Chesnutt wrote over a period of years tell a different story: as he wrote and rewrote the novel, Chesnutt consistently revised it in ways that strengthened its parallels with, and (thereby) sharpened its departures from, nineteenth-century British literature. In other words, his process of composition reveals a pattern not of increasing separation but rather of heightened engagement. It suggests that instead of looking to nineteenth-century British literature for models to adapt to a new context or for new purposes, Chesnutt was actively probing the nature and limits (and the nature of the limits) of this literature’s relevance to the stories he wanted to tell.
This is true with regard to the depictions of both Rena and John. In early versions of the novel, entitled “Rena,” Rena has no brother and does not try to pass as white.63 She marries the character, Wain, whom she resists in the final version, but then learns that he is already married, at which point she returns home to die. Thus most of the aspects of the novel that will recall The Mill on the Floss are not yet present, from the title to the crucial sibling relationship to the structuring tension between loyalty to one’s childhood home and desires that would cut one off from that home.64 Similarly, in a version of the novel closer to the published form, John is now present and the story of Rena’s abortive relationship with George Tryon is largely in place, but there is no ersatz Ivanhoe tournament scene and Rena’s post-engagement experience has not yet acquired its Jane Eyre–like trajectory, as instead of discovering a sense of kinship and becoming a teacher, Rena recovers at her mother’s home for six months and then meets and marries Wain.65
Most striking of all is the evolution of the Copperfieldian scene of reading. No late addition, a version of this scene is present from early drafts of the novel—even before the inclusion of John as a major character, and thus even before the revisionary engagement with the (male) bildungsroman in which this scene figures so prominently. In these drafts, the novel is a first-person narrative narrated not by a main character but rather by a visitor to the town where Rena grows up. In the first chapter, the narrator explains that he came to know Rena and her mother because of the family’s collection of books, which constituted “the most striking personal evidence” of Rena’s white father that “remained about the house”: this “library,” the narrator says, was “the chief attraction that drew me to Mis’ Molly’s.”66 The narrator then provides a description of the library’s contents that overlaps to a large extent with the version in The House Behind the Cedars, from the opening specification of a volume of Fielding “in fine print,” followed by mentions of Bulwer and Scott (although the latter not yet identified as “the literary idol of the South” and represented by a hefty four volumes but not a complete set—details that reflect the greater role he plays in the final version), to the listing of all the same books that the final version shares with David Copperfield. The narrator describes his experience reading these books in terms that will be reassigned almost verbatim to describe John’s experience: “Seated on Mis’ Molly’s front piazza . . . I followed the fortunes of Tom Jones and Sophia; I wept over the fate of Eugene Aram; I went with Richard Coeur de Lion into the tent of Saladin, and with Gil Blas into the robber’s cave.”67 (Recall the published version: “Lying prone upon the floor of the shaded front piazza, behind the fragrant garden, he followed the fortunes of Tom Jones and Sophia; he wept over the fate of Eugene Aram; he penetrated with Richard the Lion-heart into Saladin’s tent, with Gil Blas into the robbers’ cave; he flew through the air on the magic carpet or the enchanted horse, or tied with Sindbad to the roc’s leg” [374].) (See figure 4.1)
4.1. Manuscript page of “Rena,” copy 3 (early draft of The House Behind the Cedars). Fisk University, John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library, Special Collections, Charles W. Chesnutt Collection, box 9, folder 4.
The most obvious difference between these two accounts is syntactic—the switch from first- to third-person. Paradoxically, however, the switch away from David Copperfield’s first-person narration corresponds to a heightening of the parallel between the scenes and the readers: the adult narrator has no prior connection to this library, whereas for the young John as for the young David the books belonged to his father—in both cases, moreover, a father the boy never knew. In keeping with this change, The House Behind the Cedars recalls David Copperfield in explicitly assigning this childhood reading a formative role in the reader’s life, whereas in the early draft the passage (and chapter) end anticlimactically with the narrator’s summary statement that “I lived in fairy land; and when I had read all the books—I read them all over again.”68 Finally, it is only in Chesnutt’s reworking of his initial reworking of David Copperfield’s scene of reading that David’s self-description as a “Mulatto” comes into play, both because John is a mulatto and because his initiation into this identity, like David’s self-description, immediately precedes this scene. Chesnutt’s revisions thus amplify both the scope and force of his engagement with Victorian literature.
THE QUARRY’S QUARRY
The composition history of The House Behind the Cedars suggests the deliberateness and care with which Chesnutt aligned his novel with specific nineteenth-century British texts, in particular texts with “mulatto moments,” and did so in order to explore and reveal the difference it makes to expand—that is, sustain the idea of—these moments. And yet in the face of all this effort and ingenuity on Chesnutt’s part, one is forced to acknowledge an uncomfortable fact: these aspects of the novel have gone largely undetected for over a century. However, Chesnutt’s subsequent career suggests that he himself noticed and responded to his readers’ apparent failure to pick up on his elaborate but largely submerged dialogue with nineteenth-century British literature. After The House Behind the Cedars, no longer will Chesnutt engage in such extensive and subtle intertextual play.69 Ultimately, though, instead of simply abandoning the critical and creative intertextuality of his first published novel, he makes its stakes newly visible by converting its sly grappling with Victorian literature into grand gestures.
Thus, the title of Chesnutt’s next novel, The Marrow of Tradition (1901), again bears a relationship to a nineteenth-century British text, but instead of a subtle resemblance (The House Behind the Cedars / The Mill on the Floss) we get a direct quotation. Ensuring that his readers attach the phrase to its source, Chesnutt uses the poem from which it is drawn as his epigraph:
I like you and your book, ingenious Hone!
In whose capacious all-embracing leaves
The very marrow of tradition’s shown.
CHARLES LAMB
To the Editor of the Every-Day Book.
Ironically, however, what this citation helps make visible is the looseness of the match between source-text and novel: Chesnutt’s repurposing of Lamb’s resonant phrase seems neither closely linked to nor a pointed departure from the original context. Although the significance of the title is somewhat obscure, Chesnutt seems to replace Lamb’s positively valued, implicitly literary tradition with the South’s crippling history of racial prejudice and oppression as the “tradition” in question. Tempting as it may be to see this shift as implying a link between the two traditions, especially when viewed through the lens of The House Behind the Cedars’s treatment of the South’s “literary idol” Walter Scott, the novel itself does not develop this idea.
In the last novel Chesnutt published in his lifetime, The Colonel’s Dream (1905), nineteenth-century British literature is mentioned as casually and fleetingly as that literature typically treats mulattoes: one character is shown reading Jane Eyre, but the novel serves her mainly as a means of avoiding eye contact with another character, and Brontë’s novel has no particular resonance in the novel as a whole.70 However, the last novel Chesnutt wrote, The Quarry (written in 1928 but not published until 1999) strikingly renews and extends The House Behind the Cedar’s intertextual strategies. Revisionary tropes we have teased out of the earlier novel are brought to the surface in the later one, in a manner that makes especially clear the combination of homage and aggression that marks Chesnutt’s career-long engagement with Victorian literature and brings this engagement to a fitting conclusion.
The Quarry returns to the familiar themes of racial identification and racial uplift but manages to scramble and upend the usual narratives. Raised by his adoptive parents to be a race leader, the protagonist, Donald Glover, resists opportunities to pass as white or, alternately, to take up residence in England and live a largely post-racial life among the aristocracy. In a stunning variation on the unwitting-passing plot I discuss in chapter 3, Donald (like the title character of Chesnutt’s other posthumously published late novel, Paul Marchand, F.M.C.) discovers that he is not in fact of mixed-race ancestry but rather entirely white. In other words, he has been unwittingly passing as African American. Decisively severing racial identity and solidarity from descent, Chesnutt has his protagonist choose to “remain”—or simply remain—African American: “Circumstances had made him one of a certain group. He had been reared as one of them. He had been taught to see things as they saw them, he had shared their joys, their griefs, their hopes and their fears—in fact he had become psychologically and spiritually one of them. . . . He could only desert this group at the sacrifice of love and loyalty and the whole setup of his life.”71
As is so often the case in novels where racial identification and solidarity are at stake, the protagonist’s choice of a race correlates with his choice of a mate. In a manner we have come more specifically to identify with Chesnutt, these choices also involve a relationship to nineteenth-century British literature. Donald’s own “views concerning women” are formed through his reading of Victorian fiction, indeed of a very Chesnuttian canon: “Dickens, Thackeray, Bulwer Lytton, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy.”72 And in developing his romance plot, Chesnutt returns to another of the novels he reworked in The House Behind the Cedars (and mentioned in The Colonel’s Dream): as in The House Behind the Cedars, one of the love interests is named Blanche—Lady Blanche, in this case, for she is an English aristocrat, and as such represents Donald’s potential abandonment of racial uplift (even before he knows his real parentage) for a cushy life abroad. Also as in The House Behind the Cedars, the blatant symbolism of the name “Blanche” threatens to muffle the echo of Jane Eyre. In The Quarry, though, Chesnutt meets this threat head on: Donald passes over Blanche in favor of a darker woman named—yes—Bertha.
Yet Chesnutt’s reworking of his predecessors is more complex than the mere choice of a Bertha over a Blanche suggests. Heightening the literary stakes of Donald’s choice of a wife, Chesnutt stresses the Victorian-novel associations in ways that offer a more radical revision of literary history. To choose Lady Blanche Merrivale and her life in England, the novel makes plain, would also mean choosing Victorian literature, and indeed an especially conservative vision of that literature. In the manner we have come to expect, Chesnutt forges this link through his depiction of a party: extending his own tradition of the party Tom McDonald crashes, Mr. Ryder’s ball, and the ersatz Ivanhoe tournament, Chesnutt sends Donald with Lady Blanche to a garden party. Thoroughly charmed, Donald “could not imagine anything more genuinely hospitable and friendly,” and he praises the party accordingly: “It was the ideal garden party that Trollope wrote about and Marcus Stone painted. It might have furnished the setting for Barchester Towers.”73 It is this welcoming world Donald ultimately rejects, and we can see this rejection as a fitting conclusion to a trajectory that began with Tom McDonald’s embarrassing experience at the party to which he was not invited.
As an ambivalent literary guest, however, Chesnutt goes one step further. In rejecting this world, Donald rejects Lady Blanche as well—but Lady Blanche herself, it turns out, “has some dark blood.”74 This twist attenuates her status as an emblem of whiteness. Surprisingly, though, it also ends up reinforcing her connection to the Victorian novel. For if with the introduction of a character named Bertha, Chesnutt alludes to the most famous (possible) mulatta in Victorian literature, with Lady Blanche Merrivale he brings in perhaps the second most famous:
Lady Merrivale was well read in English literature, and Donald discovered during the conversation that their tastes were quite similar. Among the Victorian novelists she was most fond of Thackeray.
“I ought to be,” she said, “for one of my ancestors appears in Vanity Fair. She was the original of Miss Schwartz, the West Indian fellow pupil of Becky Sharp at Miss Wilkinson’s Academy.”75
While Lady Merrivale’s references to Vanity Fair are cavalier in their sloppiness—the name of Becky Sharp’s West Indian fellow pupil is Miss Swartz, and the academy they attend is run by Miss Pinkerton—Chesnutt’s citation is stunning in its audacity. Returning to the very novel that inspired both the dream of authorship and the anxiety of exclusion almost half a century earlier, Chesnutt now switches the vectors of chronology and influence. Whereas before he literalized figurative mulattoes, in this passage he works a kind of ontological reversal whereby Thackeray’s marginalized, literal mulatta is revealed as a fiction within—a copy derived from—the “original” world of Chesnutt’s fiction. Here indeed is the revenge of the “dark”—and not so dark—“unhappy ones”: Victorian fiction itself, at least for a moment, stands revealed as an African American fiction, the figment of Charles Chesnutt’s imagination.