Jessie redmon Fauset

Fauset, Jessie Redmon (1882–1961), editor, teacher, and writer. The Harlem Renaissance—jazzy, funky, soulful; a time when “Negroes” were “in vogue,” when white people descended on Harlem's cabarets to amuse themselves, and when interracial soirees were frequent. One of its leading figures, Langston Hughes, remembers that Jessie Fauset provided a different social atmosphere in the midst of all that funk, jazz, and soul. At her parties, guests would discuss literature, read poetry aloud, and converse in French. She did not want “sightseers” in her home; therefore, only very distinguished white people were invited to her gatherings, and then only seldomly. Hughes also reports that Fauset used her position as literary editor of the Crisis (1919–1926) to feature his talents and those of other young black artists including Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer. For this effort, Hughes dubbed her literary “midwife” of the “Negro” Renaissance.

Fauset's considerable accomplishments go far beyond her having hosted social gatherings and nurtured fledgling writers. In keeping with her desire to teach black children pride in their heritage and to encourage their creativity, she cofounded and edited a monthly children's magazine, the Brownies’ Book (1920–1921). This magazine featured historical biographies of notable black people such as Denmark Vesey and Sojourner Truth, articles about Africa, current events, games, riddles, and music. Fauset also wrote poetry, numerous essays, and short fiction, which appeared in various periodicals—the Brownies'Book and the Crisis among them—as well as in anthologies such as Countee Cullen's Caroling Dusk (1927) and Alain Locke's The New Negro (1925). The most prolific novelist during the period, Fauset wrote four novels that were published over a nine-year span: There Is Confusion (1924), Plum Bun (1929), The Chinaberry Tree (1931), and Comedy: American Style (1933).

While the broad range of Fauset's productivity is essential to an understanding of her aesthetics, the novels provide an interesting and significant focus. The content of her first, There Is Confusion, was inspired by the publication of T. S. Stribling's Birthright (1922). Like so many stereotypical accounts of the “tragic mulatto”, Stribling's account depicts a protagonist who is the victim of persistent longing and unattainable desires aroused by his mixed blood. Fauset believed she could tell a more convincing story of black life. Light-skinned, educated blacks, some of whom “pass” for white, are always central figures in her novels, where they not only represent an existing group of black people but also best fulfill Fauset's aim to politicize issues of color, class, and gender. She revises conventional literary forms and themes by using the figure of the mulatto as metaphor to explore identity and difference as they concern blacks generally and black women, specifically. In challenging the myths of mulatto fiction by precursory white writers, in particular, Fauset reveals the fundamentally political nature of her novels.

Until recently, critics have missed the political and subversive aspects of her work. Their misreadings of the novels and of narrative intent stem largely from their using her personal life, real or imagined, to explain her plots and her reasons for creating characters in direct opposition to the kinds of black characters white publishers demanded at that time. The worst of these critiques uses Fauset's marital status and age as reasons for alleged limitations of imagination and creativity—that is, she was unmarried until age forty-seven and “already” thirty-eight by the time she moved to New York and began working at the Crisis. She has also been labeled “prim and proper” and criticized for writing so-called “genteel” novels about people too much like herself.

Yet the bare facts of Fauset's background do not support this kind of criticism of her work. On 27 April 1882, she was born in Camden County, New Jersey, not in Philadelphia as has so often been cited. She was the youngest of seven children born to Redmon Fauset, an African Methodist Episcopal minister, and Annie Seamon Fauset. After her mother's death, her father married a widow with three children and together they had three more. Far from “prosperous,” the family was “dreadfully poor,” according to Arthur Huff Fauset, her half brother and a noted anthropologist.

Indeed, Fauset's early successes are attributable to her intelligence and talent, not to any privilege of birth. She attended Girls’ High in Philadelphia, a school noted for high academic achievers. Having been denied admission to Bryn Mawr because of her race, she attended Cornell University and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1905. She taught full-time from 1905 to 1919 in Washington, D.C.'s public schools, while earning a master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania (1919). She also studied for six months at the Sorbonne during 1925–1926. After her stint at the Crisis, Fauset taught French at DeWitt Clinton High School (1927–1944), and her final teaching position was a brief visiting professorship at Hampton Institute (12 September 1949 to 31 January 1950).

During the period after her last book was published and between teaching jobs, Fauset traveled and lectured, wrote poetry, and contented herself with the duties of “housewife” but published very little. She and her husband, Herbert Harris, an insurance broker, lived in Montclair, New Jersey, until his death in 1958. Fauset then moved to Philadelphia and lived with her stepbrother Earl Huff until her own death on 30 April 1961. Carolyn Wedin Sylvander's book Jessie Redmon Fauset: Black American Writer (1981), the most comprehensive study of Fauset's life and writings to date, includes this kind of detailed information, as well as close readings of the novels. Thorough and insightful, Sylvander's book notes and discusses discrepancies, corrects biographical misinformation, dispels many myths about the author and her work, and challenges other critics to take up the task of deeper explications of all of Fauset's writings, but especially the novels.

Fauset once said that she liked to tell a “good story.” She insisted, despite the demands of the day, that black middle-class society could be interesting and dramatic. Although her work has been caught in the crossfire of the Black Aesthetic debate then and now, current scholars are beginning to give her the attention and recognition she so richly deserves.

Bibliography

Abbey A. Johnson, “Literary Midwife: Jessie Redmon Fauset and the Harlem Renaissance,” Phylon 34 (June 1978): 153.
Carolyn Wedin Sylvander, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Black American Writer, 1981.
Deborah E. McDowell, “The Neglected Dimension of Jessie Redmon Fauset,” in Conjuring, eds. Marjorie Pryse and Hortense Spillers, 1985.