Vision to Visionary: The New Negro Woman as Cultural Worker in Jessie Redmon Fauset's Plum Bun

Abstract

In June 1924, three months after the publication of There Is Confusion, Jessie Redmon Fauset confided in her friend and erstwhile protégé Langston Hughes that she planned to begin working on her next novel the following month (24 June 1924). From Paris four months later, she reported her difficult progress with this second novel, a project radically different from her earlier prose: "I like the stuff of my next novel—I have a good title for it too—but I am troubled as I have never been before with form. Somehow I've never thought much about form before except for verse. But now I think I am over zealous—I write and destroy and smoke and get nervous. I hate these false starts" (8 October 1924). The resulting novel, Plum Bun, represents a struggle with form on several fronts. As a feminist, anti-racist project, the novel explores the intersections of race and gender constructions of black and white American women. Written at the height of both the New Negro and New Woman artistic and political movements, it represents the aims, outcomes, and implications of both movements. While Fauset and her text occupy the intersection of the New Negro and the New Woman, both author and text represent the limitations of each movement completely to represent its constituency. At the same time as Fauset and Plum Bun demonstrate a congress between two progressive cultural movements sharing a historical moment, they also underscore the mutual exclusivity and even the contradictions inherent in both movements.