40 pages • 1 hour read
Charles W. ChesnuttThe House Behind the Cedars
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1900A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “A Stranger from South Carolina”
The story open on Patesville, North Carolina, a sleepy town whose peak has come and gone. On a spring day, several years after the end of the Civil War, John Warwick exits the Patesville Hotel and heads down to the market-house. He approaches the market-house and notices that little has changed since the time he has left the town. Most of the changes—a few burned ruins and a black policeman—have come from the war.
Warwick tries the door for the offices of Archibald Straight, but it is locked. He enters the coffin shop next door and learns that Judge Straight keeps irregular hours. Warwick walks to Liberty Point where he spots a beautiful young woman and follows her. She walks out of the prosperous part of town and into the slum. Warwick is impressed by her fine figure and beautiful features, reasoning that “a woman with such a figure […] ought to be able to face the world with the confidence of Phryne confronting her judges” (8).
A growing sense of familiarity dawns upon Warwick, and he realizes that the woman is Rena, his sister. Warwick watches Rena enter her house which is set back behind a stand of dwarf cedar trees. A pair of black men preparing barrel staves take notice of him. After a short wait, Warwick leaves and returns to the center of town.
Chapter 2 Summary: “An Evening Visit”
That evening, Warwick returns to the house and asks for Molly Walden, saying he has a message from her son. Molly quickly understands that he is her son, John, who left before the war. She is amazed to find that he has become a young gentleman and anxiously asks if anyone has learned his origins. He waves her concerns away and asks after his sister Rena. Molly calls Rena into the room and the siblings embrace. John is captivated by Rena’s beauty, and Rena is captivated by John’s confidence and status.
John informs his family that he is now a widower with a fine estate and a young son. John has avoided being drafted into the war, and as a young lawyer, he finds he has little local competition. When his mother asks if he is happy, John replies that he wishes he had someone more reliable, someone related to him, to watch after his son. Rena and Molly realize that John is proposing to take Rena away with him. Molly begs him to leave Rena with her, but he prevails upon her to let her daughter take a chance at a better life. Molly, who has always wanted the best for her daughter, agrees mournfully. John makes plans to bring Rena with him on the next boat, two days away.
Chapter 3 Summary: “The Old Judge”
The next morning, John calls upon Judge Straight. The judge is still not in, but the door is open, and John takes a seat. The judge enters but does not recognize John at first. Straight asks after John’s welfare and approves of John’s intent to stay for only a few days. The judge muses cryptically that the law is in John’s favor but that custom is often stronger than law. John departs, and Judge Straight muses about his old office assistant.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
In these first chapters, the reader is introduced to most of the story’s major players as well as the paradoxes inherent to the society in which they live. The relationship between John and Rena and her decision to join him in South Carolina sets the plot in motion, and the need to hide their family secret will draw their story towards its unhappy conclusion.
The inherent absurdity of the “one-drop rule,” an old principle that determined anyone with any African ancestry was considered legally black, is underscored by John and Rena’s failure to recognize each other. John and Rena were raised to see each other in a certain way; when they both grow and change during a period of separation, they can’t, at first, reconcile their memories with their immediate perceptions. John, for example, acts and dresses like a prosperous white man so well that he fools his own mother.
Judge Straight, during John’s visit to him, directly alludes to the central idea of the story that one’s race is a matter of social convention more than physical appearance or ancestry. When the old judge says, “custom is stronger than law—in these matters custom is law,” (26) he means that it is society’s perception of one’s race that is determinative.
The contradiction between the mythical timelessness of southern agrarian life and the radical social changes wrought by the Civil War is embodied in the town of Patesville. John has returned after ten years and finds that, aside from the destruction wrought by Sherman’s army, there has been little material change to the town. The social order, however, has been radically upended by Reconstruction. Just as John is wondering if the bell ordering black men and women inside for the night is still wrung by the old constable, he spots the new constable who is black which is “a stronger reminder than even the burned buildings that war had left its mark upon the old town” (5). The abandonment of the project of Reconstruction, however, is foreshadowed by the author’s comment that, thirty years after the novel, serving a full year for the murder of a black man will seem an excessive punishment.
Related Titles
By Charles W. Chesnutt
