Gothic Signifying in Charles Chesnutt’s Mandy Oxendine

Charles Chesnutt’s novel Mandy Oxendine, which was rejected for publication in 1897 and never printed during the author’s lifetime, responds to the myths of the black rapist and the white male hero, culminating in the chilling near-lynching of Tom Lowrey, a man who, like Homer Plessy and like Chesnutt himself, is “white in fact and black in theory” (Chesnutt, Mandy 4). Submitted one year after the Supreme Court’s landmark Plessy vs. Ferguson decision upheld the Jim Crow laws,¹ Mandy Oxendine is, like much of Chesnutt’s fiction, an exploration of the psychic (and psychocultural) toll exacted by the “one-drop rule.” In an 1890 letter to George Washington Cable, Chesnutt used the term “white Negro” to describe his own racial identity, claiming that “‘white Negroes’ must accept their unique positions in US culture, even though that position has been misunderstood by both blacks and whites” (qtd. in Edwards 89). As Chesnutt explained in accepting the Spingarn Medal from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1928:

My physical makeup was such that I knew the psychology of people of mixed blood in so far as it differed from that of other people, and most of my writings ran along the color line, the vaguely defined line where the two major races of the country meet. It has more dramatic possibilities than life within clearly defined and widely differentiated groups. This was perfectly natural and I have no apologies to make for it, for we are all one people, and the sufferings and triumphs, the failures and successes of one of us are those of all of us.

(Chesnutt, “Remarks” 514)

Despite his claim for unity here, however, Chesnutt’s writing is noted by critics for its ambivalent, if not indeterminate, stance on the issues of class, passing, and assimilation,² and Mandy Oxendine is an even more ambivalent text than Chesnutt’s better-known works.

Mandy Oxendine has received little critical attention.³ Indeed, it is a difficult novel to analyze, largely because it occupies a much more ambiguous discursive space than turn-of-the-twentieth-century works that support or challenge racial ideology in a straightforward way. In fact, however, the text’s ideological and stylistic ambiguity marks it as an important contribution to the category of post-Reconstruction American fiction that we might call the racialized gothic. As in works by Chesnutt’s contemporaries Pauline Hopkins, Stephen Crane, Mark Twain, and Kate Chopin, Mandy Oxendine’s gothic elements form a major part of its intervention into the pervasive cultural concerns about the overlapping ideologies of race, class, gender, sexuality, and national identity. With its unique combination of textual signifying and uncanny effects, Mandy Oxendine both mirrors and defamiliarizes the horror of post-Reconstruction-era racism and violence against African Americans, providing an unsettling deconstruction of dominant ideologies. Through tropes of doubles, shadows, and ambiguous identities and a rapidly building atmosphere of dread and gloom, Chesnutt’s narrative stylistically performs its themes of racial and sexual anxiety, signifying on accepted cultural discourses surrounding race, sexuality, and power. A reconsideration of this lost novel by Chesnutt helps reveal the complexity of turn-of-the-twentieth-century literary responses to racial ideology, deepening our understanding of how authors on both sides of the color line sought literary analogues for the personal and cultural hauntings engendered by unspoken racial trauma.⁴

The protagonist of the novel is Tom Lowrey, an educated school teacher whose racial and cultural liminality mirrors Chesnutt’s own. Tom is a light-complected, racially mixed man who moves to a new town in North Carolina to follow his lover Mandy, a mixed woman who has decided to pass as white. Tom, who chooses not to pass, tries to win Mandy back from an upper-class white rake. Much of the plot is mundane, and the return of the repressed in passing novels is a familiar trope in African American literature. What sets Mandy Oxendine apart is the uncanny energy of the concluding chapters. These chapters produce a sense of gothic excess in the narrative, as...