Interrogating the Color Line: A Critique of Two-Race Culture and the Possibility of an Inclusive Blackness in “The Wife of His Youth”

Abstract

Charles Chesnutt’s works have been extensively studied for their exploration of cultural and racial hybridity, as they demonstrate a radical impulse to reject the postbellum American notion of a Manichaean racial divide. Chesnutt’s discussion of the black question revolves around cross-fertilization and inner conflicts that stem from cultural, racial amalgamation. In challenging the notion of race as a cultural construct, Chesnutt opposes two-race politics, envisioning a racial landscape that goes beyond both cultural assimilation and ethnic enclave-building.
 This paper explores Chesnutt’s “The Wife of His Youth”, analyzing how the protagonist, Mr. Ryder, a literate upper-middle-class mulatto, navigates cultural divides between the North and the South, and between dark-skinned blacks and mulattoes. He undergoes an identity crisis, having implicitly internalized white codes for social ascension that stigmatize blackness, and Chesnutt’s critique of such an assimilationist drive is made evident when he fiercely repudiates the black extinction theory and Jim Crow legislation with his non-essentialist concept of race. Ultimately, Mr. Ryder turns to bridging the intra-racial gaps by acknowledging his wife from a slave marriage, heralding a new direction for cultural convergence. Through such a move—his sense of belonging to both the North and the South, his affiliation with both the bourgeoisie and the lower class, and the tensions between his future aspirations and personal history—Chesnutt suggests, all might advance toward the possibility of reconciliation through inclusive black community building, though not without struggles.