Rena’s Two Bodies: Gender and Whiteness in Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars |
Rena’s Two Bodies: Gender and Whiteness in Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars
Studies in the Novel
Volume 43, Numbers 1 (Spring 2011)
pages 38-54
E-ISSN: 1934-1512 Print ISSN: 0039-3827
Melissa Ryan, Associate Professor of English
Alfred University, Alfred, New York
In a letter thirty years after The House Behind the Cedars was published, Charles Chesnutt referred to the novel as his “favorite child,” because its protagonist, Rena Walden, “was of ‘mine own people’. Like myself, she was a white person with an attenuated streak of dark blood, from the disadvantages of which she tried in vain to escape, while I never did” (An Exemplary Citizen 257). That he should refer to his character in such personal terms, so many years later, suggests that Rena functioned as his imagined second self, offering a way for him to try out in fiction what he chose not to do in life. Able but not willing to pass, he sent Rena across the color line in his stead. But while there is nothing unusual about such a relationship between author and protagonist, it is interesting that he cast himself as a tragic mulatta. In other words, in this tale of passing he is in some sense himself crossdressed.
Despite this provocative possibility, there has been little critical exploration of gender issues in the novel. At its most basic level, it is a love story whose fundamental conflict, as many critics have observed, is that between natural affection and unnatural law. Given this framework, perhaps Chesnutt’s treatment of gender roles seems to be so conventional as to merit scant attention; his tragic heroine may strike readers as insufficiently complex, a flat character whose femininity is shaped by the demands of sentimental fiction and the limitations of the masculine imagination. A closer look, however, suggests that there is more to be said. Gender difference is central not only to the plot but also to the larger questions of identity Chesnutt pursues, both in this novel and in tales of the color line like “Her Virginia Mammy” and “The Wife of His Youth.” Taken…
Read or purchase the article here.
Tags: Charles Chesnutt, Charles W. Chesnutt, Charles Waddell Chesnutt, Melissa R. Ryan, Melissa Ryan, Studies in the Novel