40 pages • 1 hour read
The House Behind the Cedars
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Symbols & Motifs
Molly Walden’s House
Molly Walden’s house, the titular house behind the cedars, is an embodiment of the liminal social and racial status of Molly and her children. The house, bought for Molly by the wealthy, white man who takes her as a kept woman, is located in the non-white portion of town, far from the hill on which the town’s elite have their mansions, but it is set back from the road and hidden from sight behind a row of dwarf cedar trees. The house’s location indicates that it is the residence of a black person, but its physical and visual separation from the other houses of the area indicates that the inhabitants are somehow different from their neighbors.
Despite her light skin and straight hair, Molly’s complexion means that she is considered black and cannot access the privileges and economic opportunities that are available to whites. Increased visual proximity to whites, however, does provide opportunity. So, when a wealthy white man notices young Molly, her family see an opportunity to climb the social ladder. As free blacks with a white patron, they can ascend to the highest rung available to nonwhites; it is in this context that Molly’s family decides to essentially prostitute her.
The house behind the cedars, therefore, represents Molly’s ambiguous position as someone neither fully black nor fully white. Her appearance and prosperity grant her privilege, but she can never actually breach the separation between black and white society. Her house is much nicer than her neighbors—but she would never have been allowed to live in the white part of town.
Patesville
The town of Patesville is inspired by Charles Chesnutt’s hometown of Fayetteville. The town shows the changes wrought by the Civil War and as foreshadows the eventual unraveling of the progress made by Reconstruction. Upon his return to the town, John notices a black policeman and shops owned by Jewish people on the main street, but he finds that there have been no obvious improvements or additions to the town. The husks of burned buildings have not been cleared and rebuilt.
Change has been forced onto Patesville and the rest of the South; but there is no apparent desire to move forward; and whites with power and influence such as Dr. Green are too invested in reviving the old system to care about creating a new one. Patesville represents a rupture with the past but only a temporary one. The roots of the old Patesville have not been uprooted, and the old system of white supremacy will be imposed once again, just as Dr. Green promises (95). The historical context of Reconstruction’s promise and failure parallels Rena and John’s attempt to escape their circumstances. They are successful for a time, but the deep roots of white supremacy mean that they will always be at risk of exposure. They cannot escape their past any more than Patesville can.
Dialect
In The House Behind the Cedars, dialect is used to deepen the racialization of characters. The darker a character’s skin, the more marked or nonstandard their dialect of English is. George, Judge Straight, Dr. Green, and other white characters speak a southern form of Standard American English (SAE), a marker of their education and elite social position. John, who must pass a peer among wealthy, educated white, has also adopted the dialect. The dialect of Frank, his father, and the other dark-skinned black characters is now called African American Vernacular English (AAVE). The speech of Molly, Rena, and the other mixed-race people of town are presented as mostly conforming to SAE but with bits of AAVE in the mix.
Stereotyping and overexaggerating the speech patterns of black people was a key component of the crude racial caricaturing called blackface. Therefore, there was debate concerning the appropriateness of using AAVE for black characters in writing even in the late 19th century. Some felt that the practice denigrated the characters, presenting them as inarticulate and childlike to a white readership. Others, such as Chesnutt, felt that it was important to attempt to portray the speech of black people accurately and that a sense of black people’s humanity could only be accomplished by portraying the full range of that humanity.
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By Charles W. Chesnutt
