Abstract
Charles Chesnutt is a late 19th, early 20th century southern author who pushes the boundaries of race in literature. Because his literary career was short-lived in that he only published during the years 1887-1905, much is still left to be discovered about both his writings and the author himself. Chesnutt spent almost a decade working on one of his best known novels, The House Behind the Cedars. Because he spent so long working on the manuscript, much archival material related to the novel exists in the Charles Waddell Chesnutt collection at Fisk University. Visiting Fisk University to conduct research in their Special Collections allowed for closer examination of previous drafts of the novel. This research process provided a useful comparison with the more commonly known published edition, all of which this paper considers. In the text Chesnutt conveys serious issues of slavery and race through characters like Rena Walden and her relationship with the fecund southern landscape. Combining both the racial tensions in the South and the landscape itself, Chesnutt uses The House Behind the Cedars as a didactic tool, one that aims unflinching criticism at his primarily white readership. This paper explores how Chesnutt creates a kind of anti-Eden to explicitly discuss racism in his South.
How to Cite
Carter, L., (2013) “The Telling South: Landscape as Figurative Truth in Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars”, Capstone, The UNC Asheville Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship 26(1).
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