The Face of America: Performing Race and Nation in Jessie Fauset's There is Confusion

It would be difficult to name a New Negro writer more critically discredited than Jessie Fauset. Routinely slighted, even among her admirers, Fauset emerges in portraits and histories of the Harlem Renaissance as the hard-working and prolific, but essentially untalented and politically misdirected literary editor for The Crisis and author of four “uniformly sophomoric, trivial, and dull” novels. ¹ Hailed in 1934 by William Stanley Braithwaite as “the potential Jane Austen of Negro literature,” she is remembered by others as, at best, a literary “midwife” of younger and better writers and, at worst, as the prissy author of melodramas and romances, an “Old Philadelphian” left over from the 1890s, whose Cornell degree and Phi Beta Kappa key guarantee she would only ever produce novels so distant from the real life of her people that they could readily invoke comparisons to Austen and Wharton. ² Though by all accounts she didn’t particularly like white people, at least not in close proximity, Jessie Fauset is the one author from the era who is consistently singled out for wanting to be white, for trying to show that African Americans are just like white people, and for ignoring or revising in her novels the historical legacy of slavery in the present in order to accomplish both goals. ³ While W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke welcomed her 1924 There is Confusion as the novel “the Negro intelligentsia has been clamoring for,” ⁴ this praise has not saved it or her three subsequent novels from reproach for what appears to be their scripted form and for essentially copying popular novels rather than contributing to “racial culture” in the guise of the distinctly African-American aesthetic the Harlem Renaissance was ostensibly devoted to producing. The repeated pairing of Fauset with Nella Larsen, both in earlier criticism and now in feminist reappraisals, overdetermines these readings even more by making Fauset serve as the negative example of how not to represent the New Negro woman as she navigates the terrain of 1920s America. ⁵ Robert Bone’s infamous dismissal of her 1932 The Chinaberry Tree as “a novel about the first colored woman in New Jersey to wear lounging pajamas” gives a fair indication of the tenor of much of this commentary and the image of Fauset it has helped to promote. ⁶

If this brief tour through Fauset criticism says as much about those who have commented on her work as it does about the work itself, then perhaps the accuracy of this criticism is roughly proportional to its limitations. ⁷ Clearly the categories organizing it are gender and class, particularly as they intersect with the self-conscious cultural nationalism of Harlem Renaissance artists and intellectuals, convinced on the one hand of black art’s crucial role in the transformation of social norms and driven on the other by a need for cultural legitimation. Within this sometimes conflicted milieu, what have been traditionally understood as “women’s genres” often must be read as aesthetically retrograde or inept in order to be diagnosed as racially empty or politically reactionary. ⁸ The gist of the complaint is twofold: Fauset’s novels lack sufficient “black content” because of what they are about (middle-class black women) and because of how they are written (melodramatic family romances). Both claims argue implicitly for a kind of racial authenticity that can be or should be evidenced in choices regarding aesthetic form and content. Bernard Bell, for example, says Fauset “alienates the contemporary reader” with her “precious sensibility and narrow concern for the cultural dilemma of middle-class women,” but this only begs the question of what constitutes “breadth” in the representation of African-American experience. ⁹ The explicit charge is that Fauset’s subjects are too “narrow,” thus in some way misleading; the implicit claim is that middle-class African-American women are either not really black or their activities and concerns are not particularly relevant to understanding a broader, presumably more representative black experience. ¹⁰

Fauset’s failure in the eyes of literary history is compounded by...