{"id":51742,"date":"2017-02-20T01:52:01","date_gmt":"2017-02-20T01:52:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=51742"},"modified":"2017-02-20T01:56:03","modified_gmt":"2017-02-20T01:56:03","slug":"the-forgotten-work-of-jessie-redmon-fauset","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=51742","title":{"rendered":"The Forgotten Work of Jessie Redmon Fauset"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Forgotten Work of Jessie Redmon Fauset<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New Yorker<\/a>
\n2017-02-18<\/p>\n

Morgan Jerkins<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Among the events that helped to crystallize what would come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance<\/a> was a dinner, in March, 1924, at the Civic Club, on West 12th Street. The idea for the dinner was initially hatched by Charles Spurgeon Johnson<\/a>, the editor of Opportunity<\/em><\/a>, a journal published by the National Urban League<\/a> and, under Johnson, one of the leading outlets for young black writers. Johnson planned to invite twenty guests\u2014a mix of white editors and publishers as well as black intellectuals and literary critics\u2014to honor Jessie Redmon Fauset<\/a> and the publication of \u201cThere Is Confusion<\/a>,\u201d her d\u00e9but novel, about a black middle-class family\u2019s struggle for social equality. But when Johnson ran the idea by the writer and philosopher Alain Locke<\/a>, who he hoped would serve as master of ceremonies, Locke said that the dinner should celebrate black writers in general, rather than just one in particular. So the purpose of the event changed, and the list of invitees grew; among those who ultimately attended were Countee Cullen<\/a>, Gwendolyn Bennett<\/a>, Langston Hughes<\/a>, and W. E. B. Du Bois<\/a>. That evening, attendees listened to a series of salutations, an address by Locke, and presentations by several black men. At the end of the dinner, Locke\u2014who had praised \u201cThere Is Confusion\u201d as what \u201cthe Negro intelligentsia has been clamoring for\u201d\u2014introduced Fauset. But though she was a guest of honor, she evidently felt like an afterthought. Years later, in 1933, she would write a scathing letter to Locke (who had just reviewed her most recent novel, about which he had some misgivings), declaring that he, with \u201cconsummate cleverness,\u201d had managed, on that evening in 1924, to \u201ckeep speech and comment away from the person for whom the occasion was meant\u201d\u2014that is to say, her…<\/p>\n

…\u201cInitially, Fauset\u2019s work was dismissed as sentimental and Victorian, primarily because she dealt with \u2018women\u2019s issues,\u2019 centering on the marriage plot,\u201d Cherene Sherrard-Johnson<\/a>, a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, said. Fauset\u2019s second novel, \u201cPlum Bun<\/a>,\u201d is probably her best, and it received the most attention when it was published, with reviews in The New Republic<\/em>, the New York Times<\/em>, and Saturday Review<\/em>. Like \u201cThere Is Confusion,\u201d it is a story about middle-class respectability. It centers on a mixed-race young woman named Angela Murray, who grows up in a posh black neighborhood in Philadelphia<\/a> where each house looks just the same. All the residents know their neighbors\u2019 names, and everyone goes to church on Sundays. Young women train to be teachers and young men do the same or strive to become post-office workers. Angela, tired of this bourgeois world, wants to become a famous painter, and believes that the only way to do so is to abandon her family, move to New York City<\/a>, and pass for white<\/a>. In New York, she meets a poor artist who falls in love with her and a wealthy white man she hopes to marry. At one point, she sees her sister at the train station in New York and pretends not to recognize her, so that she can keep up the charade that she is white. Later, however, in order to support a fellow art student, a black woman, she reveals her true identity. In a conversation with her sister, Angela says, \u201cWhen I begin to delve into it, the matter of blood seems nothing compared with individuality, character, living. The truth of the matter is, the whole business was just making me fagged to death . . . You can\u2019t fight and create at the same time.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Among the events that helped to crystallize what would come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance was a dinner, in March, 1924, at the Civic Club, on West 12th Street. The idea for the dinner was initially hatched by Charles Spurgeon Johnson, the editor of Opportunity, a journal published by the National Urban League and, under Johnson, one of the leading outlets for young black writers. Johnson planned to invite twenty guests\u2014a mix of white editors and publishers as well as black intellectuals and literary critics\u2014to honor Jessie Redmon Fauset and the publication of \u201cThere Is Confusion,\u201d her d\u00e9but novel, about a black middle-class family\u2019s struggle for social equality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1245,1196,8,20,25],"tags":[55,3687,18346,16819,3886],"class_list":["post-51742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-biography","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-usa","category-women","tag-harlem-renaissance","tag-jessie-redmon-fauset","tag-morgan-jerkins","tag-new-yorker","tag-the-new-yorker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51742"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51742\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51747,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51742\/revisions\/51747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}