12.

JESSIE FAUSET’S FICTION: RECONSIDERING RACE AND REVISING AESTHETICISM

Jessie Redmon Fauset, writer of the Harlem Renaissance, begins The Chinaberry Tree with a Foreword that announces an apolitical literary agenda for her novel. As the opening sentence declares, “Nothing,--and the Muses themselves would bear witness to this,--has ever been farther from my thought than writing to establish a thesis.” By the time she has arrived, however, at the conclusion of that Foreword (a mere five paragraphs later), she has offered a loving defense of what she calls the “homelife of the colored American” with its “joy and rue” and must admit, though with an air of pride in her apparent self- contradiction, “So in spite of other intentions I seem to have pointed a moral” (Chinaberry ix-x). But she has done more than merely end with an ethical statement of the sort implied by the word “moral.” In the racist climate of the 1930s, to offer such a defense of African American life was also to create a political manifesto, the very antithesis of what an invocation of “Muses” might suggest.

Like the Foreword that introduces it, the The Chinaberry Tree--as the mixed character of her authorial pronouncement signals--is a work of self- conscious ambivalence and duality that foregrounds its own contradictoriness. As such, it reflects the divisions that run throughout her fictional oeuvre in general. In each of her four major novels-- There is Confusion (1924); Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral (1929); The Chinaberry Tree (1931); and Comedy, American Style (1933)--Fauset depicts the ambiguities associated with race in early- twentieth-century America through a literary methodology that is itself rife with ambiguities of other sorts. In her role as novelist, she assumes the position simultaneously of a political moralist and a devotee of “Muses”; a historically precise recorder of contemporary social injustice and a devotee of so-called timeless dreams; a realist engaged in exposing the ugliness of gender and racial 254 Literature and Racial Ambiguity hierarchies and an apostle of the Beautiful; a feminist proponent of civil rights for both African-American women and men and also an Aesthete, consumed by the immediacy of her impressions of the sensuous world.

That Fauset’s narratives should be marked by contradiction is no surprise. Patricia Hill Collins has reminded audiences that “contradiction” and “dissonance” have been and continue to be the distinguishing features of African American experience--doubly so for Black women, as they move between and among various kinds of “segregated spaces” that are also hierarchical ones, ranked according to gender and class, as well as by race (Collins). Yet the philosophical movement with which Fauset allied herself, in order to explore and express these contradictions, proved an unexpected choice nevertheless. Given its associations with an exploded and discarded Victorian past, aestheticism was rarely the preferred allegiance of the white male Moderns of her day and, to put it bluntly, even more rarely the vehicle for Black women.

How was it possible for Jessie Fauset to be a politically astute figure in the first decades of the twentieth century and still to consider herself an Aesthete? I would like to raise the issue of how Fauset adapted and revised aestheticism, a movement first conceived to meet the needs of white male Europeans, to make it valuable to herself as an African American woman. But what I shall offer here is not a study of how one writer merely sought an individualistic solution to a personal artistic dilemma. Instead, I hope to suggest that in fashioning her own new definitions of the twin cornerstones of aestheticism--that is, its theories regarding the function of art and the nature of beauty--Fauset was also striving to open a way for all Black women to participate in the aesthetic experience. To the stirring challenge that W. E. B. DuBois had thrown out to his listeners in “Criteria of Negro Art,” a speech published in The Crisis in 1926--“Thus it is the bounden duty of black America to begin this great work of the creation of Beauty, of the preservation of Beauty, of the realization of Beauty” (Du Bois 488)--Jessie Fauset responded by demonstrating that art and beauty were indeed already present and had been present all along, but in the circumstances, cultural productions, and also the bodies of Black women. They were there despite having always been overlooked, and a perspective derived from aestheticism could help to uncover this truth. Such a perspective could, moreover, both embrace and reveal the