The House Behind the Cedars (Masterplots II: American Fiction Series, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Charles Waddell Chesnutt
- First Published: 1900
- Type of Plot: Social criticism
- Time of Work: The late 1860’s, shortly after the end of the Civil War
- Setting: Rural towns and plantations in North and South Carolina
- Principal Characters: Rena Walden, George Tryon, John Warwick, Molly Walden, Jefferson Wain, Frank Fowler
- Genres: Long fiction, Social realism
- Subjects: African Americans, Racism, Love or romance, Race, South or Southerners, Nineteenth century, Guilt
- Locales: South (U.S.), Carolinas, North Carolina, South Carolina
The Novel
The House Behind the Cedars is a novel about deception of self and of others—and of the consequences of such deceptions. When John Warwick (formerly Walden) returns to the town of his birth, Patesville, North Carolina, he sets in motion a tragic chain of events. For several years he has been practicing a great deception; shortly before the beginning of the Civil War, he had moved to South Carolina and begun to pose as a white man. He had assumed the name Warwick, passed the South Carolina bar, and, ironically, had become the lawyer whom his white neighbors...
[The entire page is 2589 words long]
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