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J essie Fauset’s Plum Bun was published in 1929 by Frederick E. Stokes in the U.S. and by Elkin, Mathews and Marrot in London , receiving mostly positive reviews upon appearance. Criticism of it, however, focused on its gentility and middle-class values, a charge leveled against Fauset’s work in general. As Carolyn Wedin Sylvander says, “Her work has been said to reflect the respectable, proper, educated, imitation-white values and goals of the elite Black American, divorced from the Black masses and from the wealth of folk art which is nourished by and nourishes those masses” (1). While Fauset herself, as a Cornell-educated scholar, as literary editor of the Crisis, and as one of the central personalities of the Harlem Renaissance, was one of the “Talented Tenth,” it would be reductive to read her work as elitist, and Jacquelyn McLendon rightly claims that “[c]ritical discomfort with the so-called bourgeois ethos of Fauset’s . . . novels” (2) has been caused by focusing too much on Fauset’s own class affiliation. Of course, Jessie Fauset’s own life story does enter the novel in a number of ways: Angela Murray’s early school experience, for example , mirrors Fauset’s. As she revealed in an interview in 1929: “I happened to be the only colored girl in my classes at high school, and I’ll never forget the agony I endured on entrance day when the white girls with whom I had played and studied through the graded schools, refused to acknowledge my greeting” (Sylvander 27). At the same time, Fauset’s ideology may have been more PanAfricanist and nationalist than she is usually given credit for. In an article on “Impressions of the Second Pan-African Congress” in the Crisis of November 1921, Fauset wrote, “All the possibilities of all black men are needed to weld together the black men of the world against the day when black and white meet to do battle” (Sylvander 112). It is this ideology that ultimately informs Plum Bun, even if in decidedly Chapter TWO Fanny Herself and Plum Bun: Art and Ethnic Solidarity less militaristic terms. One answer to Carol Allen’s question “How then does an intellectual who devotes a great deal of her time to nations and pan-cooperative organizations come to write four novels that concentrate so intensely on the home?” (53), a question asked in reference to Fauset’s journalistic work, is that in Plum Bun, Fauset examines nationalist dynamics in regard to their application at home, and that “home” is, indeed, the ethnic nation.1 Edna Ferber’s Fanny Herself was published serially in the American Magazine before appearing as a book. Frederick A. Stokes Company published the novel in late 1917, but it “sold only mildly,” according to Ferber herself (Treasure 233). As the author says about her novel, “A good deal of it was imaginary, a good deal of it was real. Certainly my mother, idealized, went to make up Molly Brandeis. Bits and pieces of myself crept into the character of Fanny Brandeis” (Treasure 223). Ferber, like Fauset, moved in the literary and journalistic elite of her day, and her novel reflects middle-class values as well, manifested in ideas about lifestyle, money, amenities, proper comportment, and marriage . More interesting for the purposes of this study is how Ferber thinks about ethnicity in this novel, though that issue is not separate from middle-class notions. Both Fanny Herself and Plum Bun advocate ethnic solidarity—and both in novels about passing. Barbara Christian has noted that there is something paradoxical about that strategy, and her remark holds for both novels: Ironically, passing is a major theme in the 1920s when race pride was supposedly at a peak [the time also marked a high interest in Zionism, following the Balfour Declaration]. One might first think that this theme fed into the American belief system that it is better to be white than black. In actuality, the theme, as it was presented in the twenties, heightened the white audience’s awareness of the restrictions imposed upon talented blacks who then found it necessary to become white to fulfill themselves. (Black Women 44) How ethnic solidarity and the rejection of passing manifest themselves, however, has a lot to do with the class standing of the protagonists and with Victorian notions of proper activities for women. Art is the medium of ethnicity in both novels, and artistic ability an ethnic domain. The ethnic...

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