Jessie Fauset’s Not-So-New Negro Womanhood: The Harlem Renaissance, the Long Nineteenth Century, and Legacies of Feminine Representation

Virtually all contemporary scholarship on the Harlem Renaissance novelist Jessie Fauset contains an obligatory move in which critics respond to her stylistic and apparent social conservatism. These critics recuperate as subversive Fauset’s ostensible failures in style and coherence and argue, as do Ann duCille and Jane Kuenz, that her apparent endorsement of conservative plot closures for women be read as self-consciously ironic.¹ Other scholars respond to the critical treatment of Fauset during her lifetime as retrograde by contextualizing her work in its own cultural moment. Such critics show, for example, how Fauset responds to a rising consumer culture that, in Jean Lutes’s words, “paradoxically, both integrates and isolates women of color” (78).² Such redemptive readings work to counter a number of hostile charges. While the most famous of these critiques may be that of the mid-twentieth-century literary scholar Robert Bone, who claims that Fauset’s third novel, The Chinaberry Tree (1931), “seems to be a novel about the first colored woman in New Jersey to wear lounging pajamas” (102), some of Fauset’s contemporaries level equally damning, often class- and gender-based charges that marginalize her contributions to the literature of the period. Alain Locke, whose guest-edited March 1925 issue of Survey Graphic, titled “Harlem, Mecca of the New Negro,” became the influential anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation, locates the problem of Fauset’s work in its belatedness. Chiding her for her final novel, Comedy: American Style (1933), Locke claims in the pages of the National Urban League journal, Opportunity, that the work is “too mid-Victorian for moving power today” (“Saving Grace” 222).³

Locke’s overdetermined phrasing illuminates tensions around class, gender, generation, and modernity that circulate through Harlem Renaissance discourse. Fauset’s literary career had begun much earlier, with several celebrated short stories in the late 1910s and editorial work for The Crisis throughout the 1910s and early 1920s. The publication of her first novel, There Is Confusion, in 1924 seemed to usher in the new optimism of African American literary culture.⁴ While Fauset’s initial success coincided with popular enthusiasm for African American art, by 1933 the excitement of the Harlem Renaissance had given way to the economic realities of the Depression, when African American artists struggled with lost jobs and opportunities. “Too mid-Victorian” may have functioned as code for too middle-class, as a new cohort of Left intellectuals like Richard Wright and Dorothy West came to occupy the Harlem literary stage.⁵ Locke’s charge of mid-Victorianness was also gendered in its close identification of Fauset with the women writers who rose to prominence in the late nineteenth century. Such was the canon in which William Stanley Braithwaite situated Fauset in the same issue of Opportunity that featured Locke’s damning review. Braithwaite asserts, “I deliberately invite the objection of critical opinion when I add, that she stands in the front rank of American women novelists in general,” linking Fauset to a tradition that includes Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Margaret Deland, Edith Wharton, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow, Kathleen Norris, Gertrude Atherton, Julia Peterkin, and Zona Gale (49). In an era purportedly defined by the modern, urban, sexually active New Woman, Fauset became identified with the older regional women writers, turn-of-the-century novelists of manners, and even popular conservative fiction writers like Norris. Locke’s and Braithwaite’s opposing reviews placed Fauset in two completely different critical categories: the first, of race writers of her moment; the second, of a long tradition of American women’s writing. Failing in the first category, according to Locke, she was damned by her association with the second, despite Braithwaite’s laudatory assessment of her writing.

By linking her with an earlier, seemingly outdated literary culture, Locke’s sneering characterization of Fauset marks the efforts of Harlem Renaissance intellectuals to appropriate the modernist tropes of originality and novelty, the very tropes created by authors who wished to chart a break with the nineteenth-century past...