The Wavering Image Analysis

The short stories, The Wife of His Youth and The Wavering Image, both deal with the issue of racial identity in post-Civil War America. Both of these stories center around biracial characters who struggle with being mixed-race in America. While the two characters face similar struggles, they go on very different journeys. While the protagonist in the The Wife of His Youth, Mr. Ryder, tries to move up the ranks in society by rejecting his blackness; the protagonist in Its Wavering Image, Pan, who had always embrace her Chinese roots, begins to question her identity when she is confronted with notion that she must be either “white” or Chinese. However, both stories end with the main characters embracing their heritage. In a period of intense

In the end of The Wife of His Youth, Mr.Ryder comes to accept his blackness by acknowledging “the wife of his youth”, a dark-skinned black woman (Chesnutt). While Its Wavering Image ends with Pan embracing her culture by wearing a Chinese costume and affirming her identity as a Chinese woman (1334). During this time period, minorities in America were subjected to vast racial discrimination. The Wife of His Youth was set at the time of the collapse of Reconstruction. The South began to rise to power and as a consequence, Jim Crow Laws were enacted, terrorist groups such as the Klu Klux Klan began to grow in numbers, and the legality of segregation laws was affirmed in the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson (1105). Meanwhile, Chinese immigrants suffered at the hands of racism as anti-Chinese sentiments grew. In the late 1800s, the U.S. government passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which created barriers to immigration and prevented Chinese immigrants from becoming U.S. citizens (1112). Given the oppression minorities faced at this time, many of them began to internalize racist ideologies and aligned themselves with whiteness in an attempt to climb the social ladder. The authors of these stories critiqued this culture of white supremacy and encouraged minorities to reject the