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 30-33Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 30 Summary: “An Unusual Honor
Only a week remains in Rena’s teaching contract, and she is anxious to avoid the attentions of both George Tryon and Jeff Wain. Wain has only grown bolder in his pursuit, leaping at any chance to insinuate himself into her presence. She almost lets herself hope that George wishes to see her so that he may propose to her but quashes the notion. Laying aside his earlier reaction, George’s mother has now met Rena; she would never be able to pass as white in his family.
George enlists Plato in a plot to engineer a meeting with Rena. He has Plato offer to walk Rena home through the woods after school. There, Plato will disappear so that George and Rena can talk privately. George swears Plato to secrecy.
Chapter 31 Summary: “In Deep Waters”
On Wednesday afternoon, Rena leaves the schoolhouse with Plato with a sense of foreboding. He insists they take the path through the woods as a storm approaches. At a crossroads, she realizes that Plato has disappeared. George is coming towards her one path, and Jeff Wain is approaching on the other. In terror and despair, Rena runs off the path into the woods. The storm beings pouring down, and she soon loses her way. She finds herself in the swamp and nearly drowns in a sinkhole. She faints after pulling herself out and stumbling over a root.
Wain searches for her in the driving rain until he is forced to take shelter. George soon realizes that he will only scare her further if he goes looking for her and returns home. When Rena is late to dinner, Elder Johnson organizes a search, and she is found. Rena is clearly ill and put to bed. She is delirious the next morning, and school is canceled.
Chapter 32 Summary: “The Power of Love”
George, still desperate to see Rena, decides to wait until after the school term when she will go to Clinton to collect her pay or home to Patesville. On the second day of waiting, George runs across Plato who tells him that the rest of the school term has been canceled because Rena disappeared from Elder Johnson’s house. George rushes there to get more information. Mrs. Johnson tells George that her husband has been searching all morning and is fetching a horse to cover more ground.
George sets out on the road to Patesville, asking everyone he meets if they have seen Rena. He pursues a lead down the route to Lillington, but the woman in question is not Rena. He finds lodging on the road to Patesville with the intent of continuing in the morning.
Chapter 33 Summary: “A Mule and a Cart”
In Patesville, Frank pines for Rena during her absence and is repulsed by the idea that she might marry Jeff Wain. When Frank hears that Wain is a fraud and an abuser from a passing traveler, he resolves to go to Rena’s aid. On the second day of his journey to Sampson County, he hears something stirring and moaning in the woods besides the road. It is Rena. Rena is delirious with grief, and Franks cries in pity.
He makes a bed for her in his cart and drives her back to Patesville. Along the way to Patesville he is questioned and threatened twice by white people suspicious of a black man driving a cart with a seemingly white woman passed out in it. Frank manages to convince them of his innocence and makes it back to Molly Walden’s house by sunrise.
The same morning, George sets out for Clinton but meets a traveler who has come across Frank and Rena. George now hurries to Patesville. As he rides, he reflects. He realizes his own arrogance and ingrained sense of white superiority has sabotaged his chance at love. He has banished all doubts and reservations; he now intends to propose to Rena. As he approaches Molly’s house, Rena is saying her final words to Frank, telling him that he has been her best and most loyal friend. She then dies. George waits in suspense outside the house, until a man emerges and tells him what has happened.
Chapters 30-33 Analysis
In the book’s concluding chapters, Rena comes to her tragic but inevitable end. Her appearance brought her no benefit, only misfortune. The trauma of separating from her community in Patesville to try to live as a white woman in Clarence and from then being cruelly rejected by George has left her psychologically fragile.
When she is caught between George and Wain—the two men she most wishes to avoid—she panics and ends up lost and alone in the woods, having fled into a foreboding wilderness that suggests her confused and tortured psychological state. Though she is rescued, she has contracted a fever and descends into a delirium. Bedeviled by her fear of Wain and her grief over George’s treatment of her, she loses her mind and, again, rushes out into the nighttime wilderness. In one of the novel’s many extraordinary coincidences, Frank finds her, but it is too late. Rena dies just before George can arrive to propose to her.
In these final chapters, Rena loses the last vestiges of her condescension towards Frank, seeing him, at last, as the person who has cared most for her and is most deserving of her kindness. Following her discovery by George, Rena has consciously chosen to identify with other black people rather than aspire to be more like whites the way her brother, mother, and cousin do. She, nevertheless, appears to retain some sense of superiority over Frank and other darker-skinned people. It is not until the novel’s end that she manages to fully connect with him.
George Tryon’s attitudes also evolve in these chapters. He has been torn between his desire for Rena and the white supremacist thinking which has surrounded him his entire life. George, after pursuing Rena for days, allows his emotional instincts to override the prejudices of his race and class and decides to propose to Rena. His change of heart is too late, which ends the story in tragedy.
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By Charles W. Chesnutt
