The Mirror and the Veil: The Passing Novel and the Quest for American Racial Identity - Critical Essay

African American Review, Fall, 1999 by John Sheehy

Since Warwick/Walden exemplifies every trait of the spirit Emerson calls for in "The American Scholar," his very existence can be read as an ironic Signification on Emerson's theory of American identity. A new man on new soil, Warwick/Walden has made a break with his past, rejected inherited paradigms so that he might seize his opportunities and make the most of them. We might extend Warwick/Walden's Signification by pointing out that he can also be seen as the "new white man" Morrison argues the American tradition - or at least that tradition descended from an Emersonian ideal - is destined to produce.

Warwick/Walden's seeming unending ability to Signify on both received notions of "race" and received notions of "America" is important here. More than Johnson's ex-colored man - and more than his sister Rena - Warwick/Walden seems to enjoy an unambiguous identity. His easy assumption of this identity stems largely from his refusal to accept the imposed category of blackness, coupled significantly with his ability to reimagine himself and the society of the post-bellum South on his own terms. His is the mind of a lawyer, a rhetorician, and as his mentor Judge Straight points out, "Lawyers go by the laws - they abide by the accomplished fact; to them, whatever is, is right" (170) - which is to say that Warwick/Walden, perhaps more than any passing character in the literature, is aware that the "problem" of race is ultimately a problem of signification and meaning, and is thus open to Signifyin(g) reconstruction. What is right, and what is this: Warwick/Walden is white, by appearance, by blood, and, more importantly, by law. Warwick's power as a Signifyin(g) voice stems from his power to manipulate these signifiers - "appearance," "blood," "law" - that is, to make them mean what he wants them to mean, by seizing control of the rhetorical context in which they must be understood.

If this seems a neat sidestepping of the identity crisis faced by the ex-colored man, it is - but not simply so. Even when it is backed by the legitimacy of South Carolina law, within the sentimental structure of The House Behind the Cedars Warwick/Walden's "whiteness" can never be an attribute gained without loss - the loss, in Warwick/Walden's case, of both his mother and his given name, "Walden." His repression of his mother can be seen in two ways, however: On the one hand, it is merely "denial," part of a larger tendency in Warwick/Walden's character to ignore the issue of his race altogether. For instance, after his first encounter with Judge Straight, during which he declares, "'From this time on I am white,'" (172) Warwick/Walden refuses to use even the words black, white, negro, etc., translating instead all possible conversation about racial identity into a less problematic Emersonian dialogue which turns on less loaded words - chiefly, history, pedigree, and past.

But again our reading is doubled: What looks, seen through a sentimental lens, like Warwick/Walden's "denial" of his genetic history can be seen, simultaneously, as a profound challenge to an easy semantic equivalence between the words race and past. Operating always in Warwick/Walden's "denial" of race is his ability to Signify on race - to shift the rhetorical grounds from which his audience must consider his racial status. And, as is clear even in the paragraph quoted above, whatever Warwick/Walden is "hiding" is not, to him, his race that, for him, is already a settled matter - but his "past," his "connections," his "pedigree."