Making Up Race: Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and the African American Cosmetics Industry

JEAN MARIE LUTES Making Up Race: Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and the African American Cosmetics Industry aggie ELLERSLEY, the working-class heroine of Jessie Redmon .Fauset's There Is Confusion (1924), does not cry when her husband leaves her. Instead, she searches the pockets of the poplin suit in which she was married and pulls out a business card for "madame harkness , Hair Culturist" (127). The next day, she embarks on a career as a beauty specialist, an occupation that sustains her financially throughout the novel. Although linked by name, poverty, and description to the young girl-turned-prostitute of Stephen Crane's Maggie (1893), Fauset's Maggie avoids entering the ranks of sex workers by becoming a beautician.1 This story begins Fauset's career-long habit of testing the promises of the African American cosmetics industry—a testing that evolves, in her subsequent novels and those of her younger and betterknown contemporary, Nella Larsen, into a remarkable challenge to assertions of racial authenticity. This essay traces the "making up" of race in Fauset's Plum Bun (1928) and The Chinaberry Tree (1931) and Larsen's Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). Writing in an era marked by unprecedented sales of mass-produced beauty products, both Fauset and Larsen imagine women of color empowered in contradictory ways through commercial beauty culture.2 Reading these novels as a commentary on the convergence of "racial uplift" rhetoric and cosmetics consumerism, I suggest that their protagonists are best understood as consumers of a racialized beauty culArizona Quarterly Volume 58, Number i, Spring 2002 Copyright © 2002 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1 6 10 78fean Marie Lutes ture that, paradoxically, both integrates and isolates women of color. Deftly interweaving cosmetic rituals and racial conflict, Fauset and Larsen create beauty-conscious heroines who repeatedly reveal racial identity itself as an artífice. By drawing parallels between the artifices of beauty and race, these novels disrupt the logic of a formula that linked the manipulation of appearances with the goal of African American advancement.3 At the same time, they model new possibilities for identity , refusing to teeter on the black-white boundary and acknowledging instead a facial spectrum that depends less on physical difference than consumer choice. Constrained by a beauty system themselves, as women whose appearances were evaluated along with their writing, Fauset and Larsen risked further trivialization by choosing to dramatize cosmetic rituals.4 That choice has been read as a sign of their characters'—and sometimes their own—entrapment in a suffocating web of bourgeois values and white beauty standards.5 Even recent critics who have argued against this view tend to interpret their preoccupation with beauty as subotdinate to a larger critique of female consumerism.6 Yet cosmetics carry special symbolic weight in these novels and in early twentieth-century American popular culture. The bond between race politics and commercial beauty culture is evidenced by the layout of The Cnsis, where lynching tallies appeared next to ads for Madame C. J. Walker's Superfine Preparation For the Hair and For the Skin (Sylvander 95). In a milieu saturated with demeaning caricatures of African Americans, cosmetic promotions performed a peculiar double service.7 By promoting "white" features, they articulated whiteness as the racial norm. Yet they also delineated a generally unmarked category , by promising to alter some physical characteristics used to separate white from non-white. Cosmetics promised the most intimate of transformations; more directly than clothes, beauty aids offered to remake bodies by changing skin tone, hair texture, lip color. While black beauty culture extended no blanket invitation ofpassing for the masses, it did celebrate the manipulation of features that white culture relied upon as essential markers of a racial underclass. For Fauset and Larsen, then, the cosmetics market provided a way to undermine essentialist understandings of race. In their quests for intellectual recognition and social justice, Fauset, Larsen, and their contemporaries often had to negotiate with publishers who viewed exoticism The African American Cosmetics Industry79 and primitivism as the only authentic portrayals of black experience.8 By depicting the popularity of mass-produced artifices, Larsen and Fauset dismantled an essentialized image of the exotic Other and questioned the...