Passing in the Works of Charles W. Chesnutt

"They Were All Colored to the Life”: Historicizing “Whiteness” in Evelyn’s Husband

110 “They Were All Colored to the Life” Historicizing “Whiteness” in Evelyn’s Husband Scott Thomas Gibson In his introduction to Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W. Chesnutt, Matthew Wilson asserts that Chesnutt “strove [in his writing] for a universal subject position that he perceived as outside of race” (xvii). Indeed, an aspiring Chesnutt refers to himself in his journal as an author who writes primarily “for the people with whom I am connected—for humanity!” (Journals xvii).1 From the beginning of his career he had no interest in being pigeonholed as a “Negro” writer, which, in the eyes of the white literary establishment and his white readership, meant severe limitations on what was considered appropriate subject matter and style. Wilson and other critics refer to Chesnutt’s acceptance speech upon receiving the Spingarn Medal in 1928, just four years before his death, as evidence that Chesnutt never gave up on this position. In this speech, Chesnutt claimed that he wrote “not primarily as a Negro writing about Negroes, but as a human being writing about other human beings” (Essays 514). It would be difficult to argue that he ever compromised this vision of writing for a common humanity, despite the failure of much of his work to affect social change. Unfortunately, his white critics and audience often received his writing with ambivalence and the perception that “race” alone was the appropriate topic for black writers, while reserving “universal” humanity for whites. The issue of race is nonetheless an inextricable component of Chesnutt’s writing and of American literature in general, as a result of the deeply ingrained racist legacy of the United States. Part of the failure among critics to recognize the pervasiveness of racial discourse has been the neglect of “whiteness” itself as a racial category, remaining complicit with its assumption of “universal” appeal. Recent interpretations of Chesnutt’s work have drawn attention to his depiction of “whiteness,” but they have also been limited by a theoretical lens contoured by the same distinction between nonracial “whiteness” and “racial” blackness that Chesnutt’s white editors used to exclude his work from publication. This illogic, Historicizing “Whiteness” in Evelyn’s Husband 111 positioning unmarked “whiteness” in opposition to marked “race,” reinforced by the heretofore unquestioned distinction between Chesnutt’s “white-life” and “racial fiction,”2 is not far removed from the racist thinking that eventually led to the consolidation of a homogenous, unmarked white identity and the “hardening of racial lines” in the first half of the twentieth century (Wilson x). My contention, and the subject of this chapter, is how to read against the grain of white racial identity in Chesnutt’s Evelyn’s Husband,3 to show how this ostensibly “white-life” novel interrogates whites’ claims to racial “superiority” and the “universality” of white experience, and how it creates spaces of overlap within and between sharp racial categories. This chapter will specifically show how Evelyn’s Husband actively critiques white supremacists’ redefinitions of white identity not only by suggesting “the possibility that whiteness could be changed and modified,” as Wilson concludes (44), but also by critiquing the way whites have already “changed and modified” the definition of whiteness throughout modern history in order to maintain white power and the fiction of white racial purity. The first step in understanding how Evelyn’s Husband achieves this goal is to ask what whiteness meant in Chesnutt’s time.4 The short answer is that the definition of “whiteness” was in a constant state of flux due to the increasingly apparent heterogeneity of American demographics. For example, the American sociologist Peter Kivisto marks the years 1880 to 1924 as time when the second major wave of European immigrants entered the United States, reaching its peak in the early 1900s, when Chesnutt was working on Evelyn’s Husband. The wave of immigrants was subsequently met with popular resistance and formal legislation to curb the massive influx of people, particularly those Europeans who were not unambiguously considered white, including the Irish, Jews, Slavs, and other European ethnicities. Identifying “race” as “the most powerful determinant shaping policies regarding citizenship,” Kivisto argues that this new wave of immigrants forced Americans to redefine what it means to be an American citizen (44–45). Since full citizenship was theoretically democratic, but in practice restricted only to whites, part of this redefinition involved the “redrawing of the racial boundaries [that] resulted in the expansion of groups who were considered to be white” in the first half...