“THE LIVING IS (NOT) EASY”: INVERTING AFRICAN AMERICAN DREAMS DEFERRED IN THE LITERARY CAREERS OF PAULINE ELIZABETH HOPKINS, JESSIE REDMON FAUSET, AND DOROTHY WEST, 1900-1995 by ERICA LORRAINE GRIFFIN (Under the Direction of R. Baxter Miller) ABSTRACT Often considered champions of Black bourgeois values, authors Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Dorothy West examine issues in their work that go beyond those of socioeconomic status and ultimately address their own personal and professional challenges. Hopkins became literary editor of the Colored American Magazine from 1903-04. Fauset held a similar position at The Crisis from 1919 to 1926 and co-founded the short-lived children’s magazine The Brownies’ Book (1919-20). Dorothy West founded both Challenge (1934) and New Challenge (1937) magazines. Despite their admirable efforts to publish both established and unknown writers at each publication, these women, professional authors in their own right, were all destined to forfeit their powerful positions because of gender and political pressure. Not surprisingly, each editor’s creative and journalistic writing reveals her awareness of the importance of mentoring, as does her professional maneuvering and contact with the authors she supported. Themes and images such as the heroic spirit, the romantic quest, and the inner child emerge in their novels and lesser-known magazine fiction, the latter of which is the focus of this study. Hopkins’s characters are of the good-or-evil variety, and the former always overthrows the latter in the name of justice. Fauset’s characters are often naive youngsters who seek grand, romantic adventures and ultimately acknowledge the gritty reality that defers their dreams. West’s child characters are generally wiser than their dreamy-eyed parents, fathers in particular. Adult characters are often emotionally childlike and embrace their inner innocence. In their professional lives, these women displayed similar traits. They show heroism in the face of conflict, a romantic- turned-realistic attitude in the male-dominated world of publishing, and a deep concern, one that is at once parental and childishly optimistic, for the welfare of future writers of color. They ultimately invert their deferred dreams of professional success into positive mentoring experiences. INDEX WORDS: Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Dorothy West, African American women writers (1900-1995), African American magazines (1900-1940), African American women editors (1900- 1940), African American publishers (1850-1950) “THE LIVING IS (NOT) EASY”: INVERTING AFRICAN AMERICAN DREAMS DEFERRED IN THE LITERARY CAREERS OF PAULINE ELIZABETH HOPKINS, JESSIE REDMON FAUSET, AND DOROTHY WEST, 1900-1995 by ERICA LORRAINE GRIFFIN B.A., The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1992 M.A., The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 1994 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2002 2002 Erica Lorraine Griffin All Rights Reserved “THE LIVING IS (NOT) EASY”: INVERTING AFRICAN AMERICAN DREAMS DEFERRED IN THE LITERARY CAREERS OF PAULINE ELIZABETH HOPKINS, JESSIE REDMON FAUSET, AND DOROTHY WEST, 1900-1995 by ERICA LORRAINE GRIFFIN Major Professor: R. Baxter Miller Committee: Barbara McCaskill Kristin Boudreau Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia December 2002 DEDICATION This work is lovingly dedicated to the memory of my maternal grandmother, ETHEL MARIE BEADEN TAYLOR, 11 May 1923 - 25 March 1998, and to the memory of my paternal grandfather, ROBERT LEE GRIFFIN, SENIOR, 9 June 1926 - 20 December 2001, for their constant love and encouragement on both the temporal and spiritual planes. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I have had many worthy mentors throughout my graduate school career. I would like to thank my major professor, R. Baxter Miller, for wise guidance in the formation and shaping of this project, which still grows and develops. I acknowledge my other committee members, present and past, for helpful guidance, thorough criticism, and good cheer: Barbara McCaskill, Kristin Boudreau, Valerie Babb, Douglas Anderson, and James Nagel. I especially thank Dolan Hubbard of Morgan State University for ten years of unfailing support, first at the University of Tennessee, then at the University of Georgia. I also thank him for assisting me long-distance in my work with the Langston Hughes Society. Leonard Slade of SUNY Albany has been a kind and constant friend over the years and has always encouraged my academic progress. I am also grateful to George Hutchinson, who introduced me to the world of scholarly publishing with my first book chapter on Jessie Redmon Fauset for Tennessee Studies in Literature. At the University of Georgia, Al Clarke and Ann Glauser have been kind and supportive writing coaches to me throughout the dissertation process. Without their encouragement and faith, this project would not have survived. The administrative support of Loretta Campbell at the Institute for African American Studies and Lisa Prather at the Graduate English office in Park Hall has been invaluable. I greatly appreciate their cheerful assistance in helping me throughout the red tape process of deadlines and scheduling. My family and friends continue to be my strongest supporters. My parents, Robert and Lorna Griffin, provided a safe haven in which I could complete the dissertation. They allowed me space and time and offered constant love and security. The Griffin and Taylor families have hounded me for years to leap this final hurdle, and my success is theirs. Margaret Eaglin is my best friend, conscience, and sometimes v devil’s advocate, who constantly encouraged me to keep the faith during this long and difficult journey. Tracy Butts, Liz Vasconcelos, Marlene Allen, Valerie Frazier, and Sharon Jones shared my graduate student struggles in Athens and made the rigors of academic life more bearable with the healing power of laughter -- and the occasional happy hour. vi PREFACE This project is the culmination of five years of research, writing, inspiration, and angst (1997-2002). It also has origins in the spring of 1993. I began studying the life and work of Jessie Redmon Fauset in a seminar on the Harlem Renaissance at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. I was interested in Fauset for several reasons, particularly for her editorial work for The Crisis. Her love of travel and higher education appealed to me as well. It was ultimately the novelty of learning about this Black woman of letters who evidently wasn’t aware that Black women didn’t do -- or rather, weren’t supposed to earn Master’s degrees, speak fluent French, or travel abroad in the early twentieth-century. They certainly didn’t hold many levels of professional power, although Fauset is regarded as a powerful literary mentor, or “midwife” of the Harlem Renaissance. I wrote a course paper on Fauset’s first novel, There Is Confusion (1924) and its connection to her early travel essays. She wrote these works during the outbreak of World War I in Paris in 1914, and during her less-than-romantic second encounter with postwar Europe and North Africa in 1925-1926. Both the novel and essays emphasized African Americans’ newfound sense of identity on foreign shores, as opposed to the second-class citizen treatment they receive in their homeland. George Hutchinson recommended the paper to Dolan Hubbard, who suggested several revisions before including it in Recovered Writers/Recovered Texts: Race, Class, and Gender in Black Women’s Literature (Knoxville: Tennessee UP, 1995). This first major publication introduced me to the rigors and challenges of scholarly research. I read Fauset’s four novels. In addition, I read her seven travel essays and some of her short fiction in order to present a more complete portrayal of the mutual effect of her fiction and nonfiction writing on the African American literary tradition. My central argument was that in her travel essays, Fauset wrote beyond the bourgeoisie – generally the focus of her novels -- vii in an attempt to embrace the common struggles of people of all races and nationalities. Her topics included poverty, class bias, sexism, abuse of women, and stereotypes of so- called “wealthy” Americans. I was still interested in Fauset’s publishing career, and at the time I was unaware that she was not unique in being African American literary midwife. In fact, she was a near-descendant of Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, known as “our literary foremother.” I began studying Hopkins in the spring of 1995 at the University of Georgia with Barbara McCaskill. Hopkins was an intelligent and powerful woman of letters who helped to found and promote the Colored American Magazine in 1900, an era that was even more restrictive, especially for Black women in post-Reconstruction, post-Victorian America. Hopkins nevertheless flourished as a novelist, short story writer, essayist, biographer, historian, and mentor to new writers. She was also a talented singer and stage performer as well as a temperance advocate. This is an ironic juxtaposition -- an “actress” of sorts who preaches against other unrespectable behavior -- that reflects her often ambiguous attitude toward women’s role in society. In her fiction and essays, Hopkins seems to subscribe to the dictates of the cult of true womanhood, i.e., purity, piety, domesticity, and submissiveness. She wishes to include Black women in that lofty category in order to lift the veil of ignorance and stereotypes about overt Black female sexuality and primitive instincts. On the other hand, Hopkins herself never married and remained a career woman throughout her life. Like Fauset, she is a fascinating study, i.e., an intelligent, independent woman whose ability to work beyond the domestic realm gains her praise and notoriety. Both women found themselves bereft of their literary editor titles, and they never regained that same level of professional success, although they tried desperately to do so.