The House Behind the Cedars by Charles Waddell Chesnutt

First published: 1900

Type of plot: Social criticism

Time of work: The late 1860’s, shortly after the end of the Civil War

Locale: Rural towns and plantations in North and South Carolina

Principal Characters:

• Rena Walden, the heroine, a very beautiful young woman of mixed race, whose skin is light enough to pass as white
• George Tryon, her fiancé, an aristocratic white Southerner from North Carolina
• John Warwick, Rena’s brother and Tryon’s attorney, a gentleman planter, passing as a white man
• Molly Walden, Rena’s mother, whose relationship with a prominent planter produced Rena and John
• Jefferson Wain, the superintendent of black schools in Sampson County, who has lecherous designs on Rena
• Frank Fowler, an honest black laborer, who truly loves Rena for herself

The Novel

The House Behind the Cedars is a novel about deception of self and of others—and of the consequences of such deceptions. When John Warwick (formerly Walden) returns to the town of his birth, Patesville, North Carolina, he sets in motion a tragic chain of events. For several years he has been practicing a great deception; shortly before the beginning of the Civil War, he had moved to South Carolina and begun to pose as a white man. He had assumed the name Warwick, passed the South Carolina bar, and, ironically, had become the lawyer whom his white neighbors preferred over the detested carpetbaggers who flooded the region in the period immediately after the war. With the purchase of a plantation, he had become a Southern aristocrat. None of Warwick’s successes would have been possible, had it become known that he was not what he pretended to be—a full-blooded white man.

Warwick returns home to offer the opportunity of a lifetime to his sister, Rena Walden. He asks her to leave the black world of Patesville behind and join him in the white world of his South Carolina plantation. Their mother, Molly Walden, who has lived nearly all of her life in the shadow of white domination, is eager for her daughter to escape a certain future of menial, if not hard, labor. Though she will miss her daughter greatly, she encourages Rena to join John and take advantage of the opportunity to lead a life of gentility and respectability.

Rena Walden becomes Rowena Warwick when she is introduced in her brother’s social circles in South Carolina. She is adopted by the local women and becomes an integral part of the society scene. Her beauty is not lost on the young men of the region either; in fact, she becomes the Queen of Love and Beauty when the gentleman who wins a local jousting tournament selects her as the prettiest girl at the event. By virtue of her selection as Queen, she becomes the winner’s companion for the ball. George Tryon, her escort, is smitten with her, and the two are soon in love.

While the novel deals with deception, it is also the story of a passion that chafes at the bounds placed on it by cruel and arbitrary standards. Rena deceives herself that her relationship with George can continue with the fact of her mixed blood remaining hidden. When George proposes marriage, she considers the problems that might arise with maintaining the secret over a long period with someone as intimate as a husband. She worries about whether the complexion of their children might not reveal the deception, even if she were otherwise able to keep it from George. Though Rena longs to tell George her true identity, believing in the strength of his love for her, she cannot confide her secret to him, because to do so would be to betray her brother’s elaborate web of falsehood. She resolves to test George’s love by pointing to a black woman who is nurse to her nephew and asking if he would still love her, were she the nurse. Misunderstanding her meaning, George reassures her, in one of the most tragic cases of failed communication in the novel.

Before the wedding can take place, however, Rena answers the call of her lonely and ailing mother and returns to Patesville. In a strange twist of fate, George is called to Patesville at the same time to take care of some family business. One of his friends calls his attention to a beautiful black woman on the street. It is only then that he learns of Rena’s presence in Patesville, and it is through this accident that he learns her secret and she learns the folly of her deception—both of herself and of George.

George rejects her vehemently; he considers himself tainted for having loved a black woman. Rena retreats to the black world of Patesville, a shell of her vivacious former self. In an attempt to give her something for which to live, Molly arranges for Rena’s employment as a schoolteacher in the black school of Sampson County. Secretly, her mother hopes for Rena’s marriage to the seemingly worldly and influential superintendent, Jefferson Wain. Wain proves to be an evil degenerate, and his forced attentions take a heavy toll on Rena’s already damaged ego. The final blow comes when George, who lives near the school and cannot forget the great love of his life, attempts to reestablish contact with Rena. His feelings are still ambiguous and tentative, and Rena, permanently and deeply wounded by the first rejection, avoids his overtures. The combined pressures of Wain and George shatter her fragile health; her road to happiness, built on a foundation of deception, ends in her tragic death.

The Characters

Rena Walden is a character haunted by and forever running from guilt. Chesnutt gives the reader a poignant picture of a woman who is unable to understand and unwilling to accept her position as a second-class citizen. She is tragic; her inability to deal with who she is leads her into a situation that eventually forces her to come to terms with her identity and ultimately results in her death. When she leaves Patesville for the first time, she is running from the guilt inherent in being black in the Reconstructionist South; she is running to freedom. When she leaves her brother’s house to return to Patesville, she is running from the guilt of having abandoned both her mother and her sense of self. Her departure from Patesville a second time, to go to Sampson County, is not only a flight from guilt but also an attempt to atone for her abandonment of black identity. Finally, when she flees Sampson County, Rena is making a last desperate effort to run from the guilt that both Wain and George have come to symbolize for her—the guilt she associates with her own sexuality and desire for happiness.

George Tryon also becomes a fugitive from guilt. As Chesnutt presents him to the reader in the beginning of the novel, he is the quintessential Southern aristocrat; he is gallant, proud, and a strict adherent to a code which categorically forbids intimate relations between the races. Immediately after his discovery of Rena Walden’s black heritage, George castigates himself for being so debased that he could fall in love with a “colored woman.” His guilt is so severe that he refuses to expose John Warwick’s perfidy; he is ashamed to admit that he was duped. Yet his love for Rena reasserts itself, and he must deal with the guilt he feels for having so cruelly snubbed the woman he had intended to marry. George is thus the victim of two conflicting guilts and vacillates between salving the one and the other. By the time he chooses love over the cruel standard of his caste, it is too late for Rena.

The author presents the reader with extremes of good and evil in the characters of Frank Fowler and Jefferson Wain. Fowler is a hardworking black man in Patesville who loves Rena enough to let her go. He recognizes that she has an opportunity to escape the limitations of being black in the postwar South. He wishes her success and even travels to South Carolina to observe her secretly and learn whether she is happy. It is Fowler who recovers her body in the end and returns her for the last time to Patesville. His is an unselfish but hopeless love. Wain’s interest in Rena is entirely different. He is a violent man who has already driven one wife away and seeks to replace her with Rena. He has a certain respectability outside his immediate neighborhood as a result of his position and relative wealth. Yet he knows something of Rena’s troubles, recognizes her beauty and desirability, and seeks to use her as an object of lechery.

Rena’s mother and brother rest between the extremes of Fowler and Wain. They love her and desire the best for her. Nevertheless, they are willing to see her attempt to build a life based on a lie, something to which Frank Fowler would not be a party. John had been passing as white as the only way out of a stifling existence; he had recognized this early and had gone about building a successful life as a white man. Only his sister’s agony shows him what he has given up by denying his own identity. Molly, too, sees passing as the way out. Nevertheless, she also sees the pitfalls of that pretense and relinquishes up her daughter with some misgiving. All the characters learn the folly of deception.

Critical Context

The House Behind the Cedars was Chesnutt’s first novel-length work. He had worked with the story for a period of years before it was finally published in 1900. Two volumes of short stories, The Conjure Woman (1899) and The Wife of His Youthand Other Stories of the Color Line (1899), introduced Chesnutt and his racial themes to the reading public (predominantly white) before the novel appeared. The stories in The Conjure Woman had been well received, primarily because Chesnutt had very carefully veiled his criticism on race issues. In The House Behind the Cedars, however, Chesnutt was very clear about his condemnation of prejudice among both blacks and whites. Some hailed the book as a courageous blow for equality; others spurned it as inflammatory. Its sales were poor, but Chesnutt continued to write, producing two more novels, The Marrow of Tradition (1901) and The Colonel’s Dream (1905). These, too, were controversial, one dealing with miscegenation and the other with eradicating racial prejudices in a Southern town. Chesnutt neglected his literary career after the popular failure of his three novels.

His story of the love between Rena Walden and George Tryon is a powerful one. Despite a plot that seems predictable and overly contrived at times, even in the face of characterizations that border on being stereotypes, the novel is compelling. Above all, it stands as the statement of a black man, in the midst of a society largely aligned against him, that a world that arbitrarily excludes a portion of its human resource does so to its own detriment.

Bibliography

Andrews, William L. The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. The chapter on The House Behind the Cedars explores the genesis of the novel as it relates to Chesnutt’s literary ambitions. Examines the work according to its features of nineteenth century realism.

Chesnutt, Helen K. Charles Waddell Chesnutt. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1952. A biography of Chesnutt by his daughter. The work contains letters pertaining to The House Behind the Cedars and other works by Chesnutt.

Gayle, Addison, Jr. The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1975. The House Behind the Cedars is discussed in chapter 2. The study focuses on Rena and Molly Walden, and notes that Chesnutt created them to plead the cause of the mulatto.

Harris, Trudier. “Chesnutt’s Frank Fowler, A Failure of Purpose?” College Language Association Journal 23 (March, 1979): 215-228. Examines the role of Frank Fowler in The House Behind the Cedars in respect to Chesnutt’s stated literary goals. Fowler’s failure to rise above the plantation stereotype is attributed to Chesnutt’s own racial prejudice toward dark-skinned blacks.

Keller, Frances Richardson. An American Crusade. Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1978. The best biography of Chesnutt. Reviews Chesnutt’s life and writings in a social context.

Render, Sylvia Lyons. Charles W. Chesnutt. Boston: Twayne, 1980. A critical interpretation of Chesnutt’s fiction. Emphasizes Chesnutt’s handling of such elements as irony, imagery, theme, and point of view.