Gothic Signifying in Charles Chesnutt’s <i>Mandy Oxendine</i>

Abstract

Charles Chesnutt's novel Mandy Oxendine, which was rejected for pub lication in 1897 and never printed during the author's lifetime, responds to the myths of the black rapist and the 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 psycho cultural) 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 mis understood 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 writ ings 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 suf ferings and triumphs, the failures and successes of one of us are those of all of us. (Chesnutt, Remarks 514)