We have thus far been baffled in all our attempts to account for the
differences between the races of man; but there remains one impor-
tant agency, namely Sexual Selection, which appears to have acted as
powerfully on man, as on many other animals.

-- Charles Darwin ( 1871)

I regard sex as the central problem of life. . . . [T]he question of sex--
with the racial questions that rest on it--stands before the coming
generations as the chief problem for solution.

-- Havelock Ellis ( 1897)

[T]he problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-
line.

-- W. E. B. DuBois ( 1900) ¹

Charles Waddell Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars ( 1900) was by no
means the first American novel to deal with miscegenation, nor was it the
first by a person of color. By 1900 approximately fifty American novels
had focused on miscegenation, among them William Dean Howells's An
Imperative Duty ( 1893) and Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson ( 1894). But
Chesnutt was the first African-American to claim a substantial place in
American fiction, and the first to develop the "tragic mulatto" or "tragic
octoroon" theme into a direct confrontation with the so-called Darwinist
or "scientific" racism of the Southern white supremacists. ² Resisting late-
nineteenth-century racial science as Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Sarah Orne
Jewett, and Kate Chopin, for example, had resisted "sexual science," Ches-
nutt was obliged to master the scientific terms of the debate in Anglo-
American society that had identified racial and sexual "outcasts from evo-
lution." ³ But, as no individual woman from those years can fully represent
"women's" thought on these questions, in general, Chesnutt is certainly

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