Jessie Fauset's <em>Plum Bun</em> and the City's Transformative Potential

Abstract

We are mainly indebted to writers of fiction for our more intimate knowledge of contemporary life. (3) Robert E. Park, City, 1925 In a moment of accumulated outrage at humiliations of everyday racism, Angela Murray, protagonist of Jessie Redmon Fauset's 1928 novel Plum Bun, decides to leave what she considers her staid hometown of Philadelphia and launch herself a freer, fuller life that can be had only in a truly great like New York (8o). To avail herself of greatest possible freedom, she also chooses to cross color line and pass as white. This is a decisive--if expected--moment in text, and rest of narrative details various repercussions of Angela's daring decision to set off as an unfettered woman. Fauset's novel thus traces Angela's movement over time and space: from her early years in a respectable black neighborhood in Philadelphia, through her adventures as a young woman passing as a white artist in bohemian Greenwich Village, and eventually to reclaiming her racial identity and moving to Paris to pursue her art. At novel's conclusion, Angela is coming into her own as a portrait artist and has been reunited with love of her life, Anthony Cross. Set exdusively in various and increasingly cosmopolitan spaces--from Philadelphia to New York City to Paris--Fauset's novel participates, at least to some degree, in urban of Harlem Renaissance literature that Maria Balshaw details in Looking for Harlem. In her book Balshaw considers then-nascent discipline of sociology as practiced by thinkers such as Robert E. Park, whose words serve as epigraph to my essay, and Charles S. Johnson. She demonstrates that their progressive ideas about space formed an important background to optimism of Harlem Renaissance (23). (1) Yet Balshaw does not discuss Fauset's work at any length, despite fact that Plum Bun--like Nella Larsen's Quicksand and Passing--clearly takes part in ongoing debate about the embeddedness of African American in consumer culture and in city (97, emphasis added). Because Plum Bun engages in important ways with both aesthetics and concerns of sociology, I will demonstrate that novel can be read as raising crucial and timely questions about emancipatory potential of space for upwardly mobile black women. By emphasizing centrality of space in Plum Bun, I add a new dimension to literary criticism on Fauset while reinforcing Kathleen Pfeiffer's claim that novel's narrative is neither anachronistic nor marginal but rather modern, complex, and worthy of serious scholarly attention (80). (2) Susan Tomlinson has convincingly argued that Plum Bun explores intersections of race and gender constructions of black and white American women (90). Angela Murray, Tomlinson suggests, manages to emulate two norms of womanhood: that of New Negro Woman--characterized by racial pride and sexual respectability--and that of New Woman--characterized by sexual experimentation and pursuit of a public career. Yet, according to Tomlinson, not until novel's end--when Angela is in Paris, has disclosed her racial identity, and begins to devote herself to her artistic career-- do both gender and racial advancement coalesce in unified female (90). The impossibility of combining these norms in one female subject in turn reveals their contradictions and mutual exclusivity. Cherene Sherrard-Johnson makes a similar point, suggesting that passing character as artist is locus of Fauset's oscillation between advocating an avant-garde womanhood and endorsing a more conventional New Negro womanhood (Portraits 49). Pfeiffer, on other hand, examines narrative in light of its even larger cultural context, suggesting that Fauset uses passing as a way to reflect on the multivalent transformations in which white American culture at large was then participating (80). …