The House Behind the Cedars

by Charles W. Chesnutt

  There is little or nothing initially in Rena’s personality or character that makes her black beyond her acceptance and recognition of her racial status as defined by custom. Rena at first has no black consciousness. Her decision to teach black children, to place herself in a motherly and parental relation to the young, after circumstances prevail against her passing, stems from an obligation to further the well-being of her race, a moral obligation thrust upon her by her certainty that her racial identity is inescapable and the corollary sense of her natural relation to a black community. The failure of Rena’s attempt to pass forces her to see herself in a different light, not only in the light of her own eyes but in the light of the vision of the society around her that defines her race. Had she married George Tryon, she would never have thought of teaching black children because any such obligation would have been rendered null. Her compulsion stems not from idealism, but from her realization of the connection between race and domesticity. Her turning to “her race,” her support of “her people,” signals a realization on her part that she is unable to escape her tie to blackness that is, through her mother, biological and incontrovertible. Her dedication to race becomes possible only after she conflates race and domesticity. Her commitment to her mother becomes inseparable from her sense of her relation to race after her failed attempt to pass convinces her that she is eternally confined to the race, not only by custom but because of the love and regard she has for her mother.

  The connection between race and domesticity is nearly conscious to Rena: “I’ll not leave mother again. God is against it; I’ll stay with my own people.” Had her initial commitment been more African and less Victorian and American, she would much earlier have recognized an obligation to her mother, to family, and to her race as well. Taking into account such considerations, we can hardly read the following passage in any easy and straightforward way. By the time this moment occurs, Rena has begun to see how passing, race, class, and gender intersect. How are we to read this passage where the issue of conflict among passing, race, gender, and domesticity is brought so sharply into focus?“Listen, Rena,” he [John] said, with a sudden impulse, “we’ll go to the North or West—I’ll go with you—far away from the South and the Southern people, and start life over again....”1

  “And what about our mother?” asked Rena.

  It would be necessary to leave her behind, they both perceived clearly enough, unless they were prepared to surrender the advantages of their whiteness and drop back to the lower rank. The mother bore the mark of the Ethiopian—not pronouncedly, but distinctly; neither would Mis’ Molly, in all probability, care to leave home and friends and the graves of her loved ones.... She would not fit into Warwick’s scheme for a new life. [emphases added]

  “And what about our mother?” Rena’s question echoes throughout the narrative both backward and forward. The impulse underlying her question and the narrator’s understanding of why “Mis’ Molly” (whose is the voice that calls her “Mis’ Molly” and what tone is carried in the lapse into dialect?) would “in all probability” not wish to leave Patesville tells us why free black people did not leave the antebellum South to go “North or West.”

  “I left her once,” said Rena, “and it brought pain and sorrow to all three of us. She is not strong, and I will not leave her here to die alone. This shall be my home while she lives.”

  The conflict between passing and domesticity comes incisively to the fore at this moment. Because “their mother bore the mark of the Ethiopian,” a somewhat cold and stony description and assessment of one’s mother, she would stand in the way of their harvesting the “advantages of their whiteness” and cause them to lose the privileges of class that John (Chesnutt?) believes whiteness confers and “drop back to the lower rank.”

  It is altogether fitting that Rena should be called back to Patesville, back home, by a dream and at the behest of her mother, for the two are connected. That she would be as affected by the dreams about her mother’s illness (Chapter X, “The Dream”) as she is, that she would feel the strong urge to return home to care for her, is to be expected of one of her character and disposition. The narrator’s claim that “No lady in Clarence, perhaps, would have remained undisturbed by a vivid dream, three times repeated, of some event bearing materially upon her own life” suggests that Rena’s knowledge of folklore surrounding the meaning of dreams comes from a common store. The context of the narrative, however, makes it not in the least unlikely that her beliefs surrounding dreams were directly taught to her by her mother, who has “a profound faith in them. ”For Mis’ Molly, to whom science would have meant nothing and psychology would have been a meaningless term, the land of dreams was carefully mapped and bounded. Each dream had some special significance, or was at least susceptible of classification under some significant head.

  Hence the dreams are not only dreams about her mother, but her interpretation of dreams is a direct legacy passed to her by her mother and related to her homesickness described in the same chapter. She is “prostrated by homesickness,” and hers is a “profound ... longing for home.” It is her domestic relation and obligations that she yearns to be true to.

  Brother John recognizes no such responsibilities. He is a complete pragmatist who will do whatever is necessary to achieve his ends. He is cold, calculating, and manipulative; his feelings (if he has any genuine feelings) are entirely surface. He finds no difficulty being away from his mother and sister for ten years, four of these during the time of the Civil War, and not bothering to let them know even that he is alive. Twice in the narrative the question arises as to whether he will remarry, but it is relatively clear that he will not. He is too self-centered, too much the isolated individualist to need a wife. Opportunism motivated his first marriage. His first wife had money and property and no family to stand in the way of his aspirations, and suitable male marriage partners were in short supply after the war. He has had one child and clearly does not want or expect others.

  John Walden Warwick is among several of Chesnutt’s characters who do not want an actual wife but a surrogate. In Chesnutt’s short story “The Wife of His Youth,” the main character, Mr. Ryder, some twenty-five years previous to the time of the story and when he was a slave, married a slave. He thereafter escapes to the North, becomes successful, and joins a group of bourgeois blacks who exclude dark people. On the eve of the announcement of his engagement to a young woman of this group, his former wife, “the wife of his youth,” appears. She is old, black, and, in his eyes, lacks every attribute that his fianceé possesses. He decides to honor his old matrimonial commitments. But after living as a bachelor and a celibate for twenty-five years, Ryder did not want a wife anyway; thus he obtains a housekeeper, satisfies his scrupulous sense of honor, and avoids having to deal with sex and sexuality, for obviously the two will not live as equals.

  John’s motives for inviting Rena to join him at his residence in Clarence are not entirely dissimilar. They are somewhat complicated, but they do not center around his desire to help his sister improve her way of life by passing. He wants first of all to have a wife but, at the same time, he does not want to be married. It is not that he per se wants a wife, but he does want someone to fulfill that function, to do the things that wives do. He finds no moral or ideological difficulty in making his way up in the world during the Civil War by managing a slave plantation. The heritage he claims is the heritage of his slave-owning forebears. Does he love his wife? We do not know. We know only that “at the close of the war he found himself ... the husband of the orphan daughter of the gentleman who had owned the plantation, and who had lost his life upon the battlefield.” His patrimony, his “inalienable birthright,” is the land and money he accrues by virtue of being in the right place at the right time. He inherits the fruits of slavery: “Warwick’s residence ... was a fine old plantation house, built in colonial times, with a stately colonnade, wide verandas, and long windows with Venetian blinds.” When his wife dies, he needs to repla
ce her with someone with whom he can comfortably live, someone who will not betray him, who will manage the domestic domain, his house and his servants, while he does the things that in a patriarchal slave society men do: i.e., non-domestic things.

  When he returns to Patesville after his ten-year absence, he does not recognize her as his sister; he sees her, as men are prone to see women, as a sexual target. He does not know that the woman he sees before him is his sister, although the narrator/ author does. The narrator/author, thereby, forces the reader to infer incestuous longing on John’s part.

  Warwick’s first glance had revealed the fact that the young woman was strikingly handsome, with a stately beauty seldom encountered. As he walked along behind her at a measured distance, he could not help noting the details that made up this pleasing impression, for his mind was singularly alive to beauty, in whatever embodiment. The girl’s figure, he perceived, was admirably proportioned; she was evidently at the period when the angles of childhood were rounding into the promising curves of adolescence. Her abundant hair, of a dark and glossy brown, was neatly plaited and coiled above an ivory column that rose straight from a pair of gently sloping shoulders, clearly outlined beneath the light muslin frock that covered them.

  The semispousal interrelation between them after she takes control of her brother’s domestic establishment is mutually satisfying. “Here [at the former slave plantation], for the first time in her life, she was mistress, and tasted the sweets of power” (as had many a white mistress before her). She assumes her position as Albert, John’s son, “puts out his puny arms to Rena at first sight” and is “clasped ... with a motherly caress” [emphasis added]. The psychologically incestuous relation prevailing between Rena and John is reflected in John’s sense that Rena’s presence cements the newly created family ties: “Warwick found pleasure in their growing love for each other, and was glad to perceive that the child formed a living link to connect her with his [John’s] home.”

  Rena is very much to John the surrogate wife he wants; his view of her conflates the roles of wife and sister both psychologically and functionally:It was a source of much gratification to Warwick that his sister seemed to adapt herself so easily to the new conditions. Her graceful movements, the quiet elegance with which she wore even the simplest gown, the easy authoritativeness with which she directed the servants, were to him proofs of superior quality, and he felt correspondingly proud of her. His feeling for her was something more than brotherly love,—he was quite conscious that there were degrees in brotherly love, and that if she had been homely or stupid, he would never have disturbed her in the stagnant life of the house behind the cedars. [emphases added]

  What is this “something more than brotherly love”? I would wonder whether his love is “something more” or “something other,” for it seems to me that ordinarily sibling love relations are not based on appearance or intelligence. She lends “grace and charm to his own household,” and she is only valuable to him as she is pragmatically useful to him. Were she homely or stupid he would not want her in his home, or, for that matter, in his presence. The qualities he sees in her are more likely sought in a mate, in a wife, not in a sister.

  The narrator tells us that John also wants Rena around for a psychological reason, to provide him another person with whom to share his secret in order that he will feel less lonely in bearing it. One might think that one could trust a sibling with whom one is on good terms to keep such a secret out of love and trust. John believes Rena will keep the secret of their past for another reason:There was a measure of relief in having about him one who knew his past, and yet whose knowledge, because of their common interest, would not interfere with his present or jeopardize his future. [emphasis added]

  Again he looks to the pragmatic. If Rena can be trusted to keep the secret of their past, it must be for a reason relating to self-interest, not to her sisterly regard for him.

  Completely unable to trust anyone, John feels he must make sure that Frank, whose fidelity to Rena the reader knows assures his silence regarding the Waldens’ affairs, must be quieted. He must pay him in some way (just as he pays Rena to assuage her feelings of loss when he leaves Patesville for the first time by giving her a dime).

  Frank, too, knew the secret—a good, faithful fellow, even where there was no obligation to fidelity; he ought to do something for Frank to show their appreciation of his conduct. But what assurance was there that Frank would always be discreet about the affairs of others?

  Frank finds a fine new mule and cart in his stable the next day.

  John is so egocentric, so self-centered, so much concerned about his own well-being in order to be the self-reliant nineteenth-century American individualist he becomes. His is the American success story again. He goes out into the world with nothing, and by working hard, shrewdly watching for the main chance, and practicing frugality, he finds success. Fortune and respectability become his. But because his hold on respectability is such an insecure one, and his position has been gained at such great cost, it becomes questionable that Chesnutt intends to present John as a model of conduct or that he wants to suggest that John’s aspirations are worth the cost of their realization. At the very least, Chesnutt allows the doubt about the rightness or desirability of John’s conduct to obtrude.

  The novel brings several troublesome issues surrounding race, class, and gender to the fore. Chesnutt seems in his ideas and attitudes caught between the pre- and post-Darwinian worlds. He also seems caught up in the mythology built up by defenders of slavery who wanted to convince themselves and the world that slavery was justified and even necessary. Time after time he refers to the “blood” of his characters and seemingly believes that the character of individuals is determined by who their ancestors are. In describing John’s reading as a young boy the narrator says that it inspired John to want to travel far beyond the constricted world of Patesville: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.

  Such an observation, with no hint that such belief as expressed here is held by the narrator or by the character and not the author, leads unfortunately to the racist and untenable conclusion that whites are indeed superior to blacks. It should be said that Chesnutt distinguishes among whites: He speaks of certain whites as being superior when he speaks of the “best” people, “best” indicating a class distinction. Rena, in passing, living with John in Clarence, will be associating with the “best” (also obviously white) people. There is much in the novel to suggest that Chesnutt literally believes that social class matters and not money alone. The “best” people belong to the higher classes and they have money.

  The people of mixed race who appear in the novel and who are less white than Rena and John seem to be considered by the narrator (and Chesnutt) inferior to them. Black Frank is considered by Rena to be a good friend. Even he knows, though, that, as indicated earlier in this essay, he can never aspire to court Rena on a basis of equality. Caste and coloring in this case create a chasm nearly as broad as that separating black and white—more broad if it is considered that the chasm separating black women and white men was, because of the power of the slaveholder and of whites in general over blacks, a very narrow one.

  Where, by the end of the novel, does Chesnutt intend to leave his audience? What, finally, does he want us to think, feel, and believe? It seems that we are invited to divide our sympathies among the three chief characters—Rena, John, and George Tryon, each of whom shows great strengths and great weaknesses. Rena and John are sharply contrasted in their conversation in Chapter XIX, “God Made Us All.” Rena says to her brother, “I do not love him any longer, John; I would not marry him if I were white, or he were as I am.” She apparently accepts the “one drop of black blood” definition of race prevailing among most people, identifying herself as black: “I’ll stay with my own people.” John apparently has maintained the belief expressed years ago in Judge
Straight’s office: “I am white.” Two operative definitions of color are at work here; one is simply logical and works outside of cultural context. Of course it makes no sense that John should be defined as black, any more than it makes sense that a child born of black and white parents should be considered black. Racial definition exists only within the confines of history and geography. Only within the United States was slavery ever in history defined by race. The other definition of race, Rena’s, is likewise limited: One’s race is defined by the social context in which one exists. On the one hand, race is existentially defined; on the other, it is socially and historically defined. Chesnutt chooses neither alternative. He presents both, not allowing the reader to decide but simply presenting both possibilities.

  There are third and fourth alternatives. The third is George Tryon’s, who says ultimately, cutting through and across all logical and historical sense of any “real” or “universal” meaning of race, “Custom was tyranny; love was the only law.” This sentiment takes the issue beyond logic and overrides all considerations of logical definitions of race. George’s conscious resolution is suspect because it exists in conjunction with the unconscious but very real conflict projected in his earlier dream:He dreamed of her sweet smile, her soft touch, her gentle voice. In all her fair young beauty she stood before him, and then by some hellish magic she was slowly transformed into a hideous black hag. With agonized eyes he watched her beautiful tresses become mere wisps of coarse wool, wrapped round with dingy cotton strings; he saw her clear eyes grow bloodshot, her ivory teeth turn to unwholesome fangs.