The Mirror and the Veil: The Passing Novel and the Quest for American Racial Identity - Critical Essay

Consciousness Redoubled: The House Behind the Cedars

When we begin to see the passing figure as an Esu / trickster, we begin also to realize three things: first, that the passing figure always functions to explode dualities, whether they be sentimental ("good" vs. "evil") or racial ("white" vs. "black"); second, that the passing figure, once imagined, is capable of exploding these dualities even in spite of the efforts of the author who creates him/her to reinscribe them; and, finally, that the subversive nature of the act of passing itself means that our reading of passing characters is always double - we must read them as fundamentally transgressive of and fundamentally capitulative to both moralistic and racial dualisms. This simultaneity, as we have seen, has clear implications for reading Johnson's ex-colored man, and we can profitably keep it in mind when we consider a novel like Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars, in which the implicit dual personality of the passing figure is made explicit: Chesnutt offers us not one passing figure, but two. The first, John Warwick/Walden, plays the role of the fully transgressive (and unapologetic) Signifyin(g) passer, while the second, Warwick/Walden's sister Rena, ultimately capitulates both to received notions of race and, ultimately, to the constraints of the sentimental novel in which she finds herself.

Of course, the passing figure's Signification on the simplistic American black-white duality is possible only because this duality has never been quite so simple as it appears, and to understand how this Signification operates in Chesnutt's novel, one must note the extent to which the terms black and white complement, underwrite, even create each other. In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison asserts that the American literary imperative has always been toward the construction of a "new white man" (Morrison 15). This construction - in both its "newness" and its "whiteness" - owes its existence and its continued vigor to the "blackness" which it takes as its antithesis:

. . . the image of reined-in, bound, suppressed, and repressed darkness became objectified in American literature as an Africanist persona. . . . the duties of that persona - duties of exorcism and reification and mirroring - are on demand and on display throughout much of the literature of the country and helped to form the distinguishing characteristics of a proto-American literature. . . . Emerson's call for that new man in "The American Scholar" indicates the deliberateness of the construction [of the black "other"], the conscious necessity for establishing [racial] difference. (Morrison 38-39)

There is perhaps more than an ironic connection between Morrison's "new white man" and John Warwick/Walden's description of himself and his sister as "new people" in Chesnutt's novel. Speaking to George Tryon, his sister's white suitor, he says,

"I think you ought to know, George[middle dot].. that my sister and I are not of an old family, or a rich family, or a distinguished family; that she can bring you nothing but herself; that we have no connections of which you could boast, and no relatives to whom we should be glad to introduce you. You must take us for ourselves alone. We are new people[middle dot]" (83)