Difference In View: Women And Modernism

Gabriele Griffin

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781135748944
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

This collection of essays challenges conceptions of "high" modernism, its preoccupation with style at the expense of issues such as race, class and gender, and its exclusive focus both on predominately male writers, poetry and prose fiction by highlighting the diversity of cultural production in the modernist period. This book focusses specifically on women's cultural production, covering a wide range of arts and genres including chapters on painting, theatre, and magazines. The book investigates how women usually constructed as "others", themselves construct others in their work in a period prominently concerned with the construction of self as an issue. This diversity offers a new format of reading modernism in a cross-disciplinary context.

Chapter 1

Europe in the Novels of Jessie Redmon Fauset and Nella Larsen

Mary Condé

Deeply embedded in American thought is the idea that happiness is a place. The songs hope for somewhere over the rainbow, somewhere a place for us; but what American literature tells us is that no matter how far Natty Bumppo may move out west, or however hard Huck Finn may try to light out for the territory, there is nowhere. When Newland Archer tells Ellen Olenska (Wharton, 1920, p. 242) that he wants to go with her somewhere where they can be just two people in love, she asks him, ‘Ah, my dear— where is that country? Have you ever been there?’

Newland clearly supposes the good place to be in Europe, and France, especially, is desired by Wharton’s American characters as a land of civilized values affording freedom from the vulgar materialism of America. In Wharton (1923), as in Cather (1922), France does provide the lonely, alienated protagonist with a redemptive dream of beauty, but only at the very moment that this beauty is being destroyed. Even more pessimistic about Europe as a solution for their characters are two African-American writers, Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882–1961), author of There is Confusion (1924), Plum Bun (1929), The Chinaberry Tree (1931) and Comedy: American Style (1933), and Nella Larsen (1893– 1963), author of Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). Fauset’s and Larsen’s preoccupations are not with dreams of beauty, but with the possibilities of work, and workable social identities, for their heroines.

Neither writer is interested in Africa. Nella Larsen, born of a Danish mother and a West Indian father, presumably felt her own connection with Africa to be remote. Jessie Redmon Fauset certainly felt hers to be so, coming, as do most of her characters, from a longestablished American family. In her foreword to The Chinaberry Tree (p. x), she makes it clear that the prosperous middle-class American of whom her fiction treats, sees himself as part of a very early wave of immigration:

…he started out as a slave but he rarely thinks of that. To himself he is a citizen of the United States whose ancestors came over not along with the emigrants in the Mayflower, it is true, but merely a little earlier in the good year, 1619.

In There is Confusion (p. 182) Peter Bye’s friend, Tom Mason, tells him that he is considering settling in France with his sister, and Peter replies,

I don’t want to leave America. It’s mine, my people helped make it. These very orchards we’re passing now used to be the famous Bye orchards. My grandfather and great-grandfather helped to cultivate them.

Significantly, Tom loses his ‘sudden respectful interest’ when he realizes that the Byes cultivated the orchards as slaves. Throughout her fiction, however, Fauset insists on the shared history of black and white Americans and on their shared investment in America. This shared investment is not only economic but intellectual and it is strictly a Mayflower, European one. The critic Elizabeth Ammons has referred to Fauset’s own ‘access to the great texts of western civilization’ as ‘virtually unlimited’ (Ammons, 1991, p. 141). In Plum Bun (p. 133), the racist white Roger’s declaration that he would send all black Americans back to Africa if he could, is not only hateful but ridiculous, since there is in Faucet’s work no sense of Africa as a place of origin with any continuing meaning. Readers looking for a celebration of African heritage will be disappointed, as will readers looking for a celebration, or even some account, of the black American working class. Joyce Flynn remarks on

[Marita] Bonner’s early interest in telling the stories of the black working class, stories largely neglected in the writings of her Afro-American contemporaries such as Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen.

(Flynn and Stricklin, 1987)

The word neglected here implies a shameful omission. Fauset in particular has been accused of narrow, exclusively middle-class sympathies. Bernard W. Bell says disapprovingly of Fauset’s first novel There is Confusion that ‘neither the characters nor the author-narrator has much sympathy for commonplace minds or people.’ (Bell, 1987, p. 107) Conversely Deborah E. McDowell (in Larsen, 1928) has been disappointed by the novel’s ‘unconvincing’ ending, the heroine’s renunciation of a successful stage career for a commonplace marriage. Fauset does not fulfil any conventional expectations that she should be concerned with Africa, or with the black working-class, or that she should be a feminist. Barbara Christian has drawn attention to Fauset’s acute consciousness of audience:

She, together with Nella Larsen, wanted to correct the impression most white people had that all black people lived in Harlem dives or in picturesque, abject poverty.

(Christian, 1985, p. 173)

Ironically, however, this almost deprived Fauset of an audience altogether, since the first publisher to whom she submitted her first novel rejected it because ‘white readers just don’t expect Negroes to be like this.’ (Sylvander, 1981, p. 73).

Part of what white readers just did not expect was the educational background of Fauset’s characters, and of their creator. Michel Fabre speaks of ‘her rather snobbish delight’ in using French titles for her poems (Fabre, 1991, p. 118). In an introduction to a selection of her poems published in the 1927 Caroling Dusk anthology, Fauset enlists Chaucer’s help to boast about knowing ‘the difference between the French of Stratford-atte-Bowe and that of Paris’ (Cullen, p. 118). Reviewing Langston Hughes in 1926, she feels compelled to validate one of his poems by a reference to Latin, German and English poetry (Scott, 1990, p. 165). All this is part of her assertion of her identity as a cultured American, her refusal to play the part of the ‘other’.

Elizabeth Ammons quotes Fauset’s words of 1923, addressed to would-be writers and teachers of writing in the black community:

Do our colored pupils read the great writers and stylists? Are they ever shown the prose of Shaw, Galsworthy, Mrs. Wharton, Du Bois or Conrad, or that old master of exquisite phrase and imaginative incident—Walter Pater?

(Ammons, 1991, p. 140)

Ammons is struck by the absence of any white male American from this list. Also striking is the fact that four out of the six are Europeans. In Fauset’s own work, it is European poetry (particularly the English Romantics and especially Wordsworth and the ‘Immortality Ode’) rather than European prose which is quoted by author and characters. A rare exception is her reference to a French novel of 1902. When Fauset moves her scene to Chambéry during the First World War in There Is Confusion, she identifies it as the scene of a novel by Henri Bordeaux, La Peur de Vivre (Bordeaux, 1902), the story of a young girl who, afraid to face the perils of life, forfeited therefore its pleasures (Fauset, 1924).

She then goes on to make a connection between one of Bordeaux’s characters and one of her own:

Certainly Alice Du Laurens, the young woman of Bordeaux’s novel, would have been no more astonished to find herself in New York than Maggie Ellersley, whom she so closely resembled in character, was to find herself in Chambéry.

(Fauset, 1924, p. 254)

What is curious about this reference is that Maggie is not in the least like Alice, as her very presence in a foreign country proves, but almost her opposite. Alice is far too weak to contemplate going to Algeria with Marcel, her true love, whom she abandons because she is dominated by her mother—as Maggie dominates hers. Maggie, essentially a worker, always acts on impulse—Alice feebly lets her opportunities slide away from her. Alice signally fails to become the widow of the man she loves—Maggie, because of her determination, triumphantly succeeds. Perhaps Fauset had genuinely forgotten the gist of the Bordeaux novel or perhaps she meant to say that Alice and Maggie resembled each other in appearance: they do both look fragile and pale. Oddly enough, Alice is extremely like Teresa in Fauset’s last novel (Fauset, 1933).

Whatever the reasons for Fauset’s strange lapse, it occurs in a very characteristic passage, in which she is writing about knowing: about how far Americans know Chambéry at all, and the various ways in which they might know it (as the location of the château of the old dukes of Savoy, as Rousseau’s birthplace, as a First World War ‘rest center for colored soldiers’, as a place where you cannot get a lost telegram repeated, but you can get excellent, cheap manicures and delicious little cakes). Fauset is consistently concerned with the meanings Europe has for her characters. One meaning it never has is home.

Maggie looks every night at the huge cross on top of the Mont du Nivrolet, but what she is planning is her chain of American Beauty Shops (pp. 261–2). Maggie and Philip finally decide to marry as they meet in the chapel of the old Dukes of Savoy, but their brief married life is to be in New York (p.268). Plum Bun, Fauset’s second and bestknown novel, ends in Paris with the happy reunion of Angela Murray and Anthony Cross, but it is clear that they will not settle there. Angela is halfway through her year studying art in Paris, and ‘within those six months she had lost forever the blind optimism of youth’ (p. 376). She does not appear to meet anyone except other Americans, and Paris, which ‘at first charmed and wooed her’ (p. 374), ceases to charm as the autumn sets in.

Paris, so beautiful in the summer, so gay with its thronging thousands, its hosts bent on pleasure, took on another garb in the sullen greyness of late autumn.
The tourists disappeared and the hard steady grind of labour, the intent application to the business of living, so noticeable in the French, took the place of a transient, careless freedom.

(Fauset, 1929, p. 376)

Angela recognizes this as ‘good discipline’, but it destroys the magic of France for her. If Fauset’s delight in France were entirely ‘snobbish’, her heroine would prefer Paris without the tourists. Fauset, however, indicates that an American’s business in Paris is to be a tourist, or at least a merely temporary visitor—and then to go home. Houston A. Baker classes Angela’s ‘European exile’ at the end of Plum Bun with Helga’s despair at the end of Quicksand and Clare Kendry’s death at the end of Passing (Baker, 1991, p. 35).

Fauset’s last novel, Comedy: American Style, presents the grimmest of all her pictures of Americans in France. France has here become the living hell to which Olivia, the ‘confirmed Negro-hater’ and her fatally weak daughter Teresa are consigned as punishment. Everything the country had appeared to offer is bitterly transformed. The ‘traditional fondness of the French for the Negro’ (p. 223) becomes the appraisal of the Senegalese as ‘all right as cannon fodder’ (p. 182). Teresa’s French husband’s useful energy in driving a shrewd bargain becomes his horrific meanness about money, which he defines in all seriousness, indeed, in a towering fury, as ‘the most precious thing on earth!’ (p. 325). His sublime competence as a tour guide is revealed as a hateful insularity: he likes only his home-town, Toulouse, and Toulon because its fortresses gratify his aggressive patriotism (pp. 180–2).

Olivia, stranded for life in Paris, now finds all the little details of French life which might have delighted her as a tourist alien and repulsive: ‘the horrid little stuffed larks’ in the delicatessen, the ‘sickeningly sweet sirop’ (pp. 322–3). She meets absolutely no one but another American expatriate, Mrs Reynolds, who urges her to get back to America as soon as she can because ‘it made her sick to see a woman, past middle age, with a home and husband in God’s country, pass them up for the fabled freedom of Paris’ (p. 324). We know that Olivia has always failed to provide a home for her children and has been bitterly loathed by her husband since she drove her black-skinned son Oliver to suicide. So we can enjoy without compunction the irony of her surviving son’s reply when he is asked where Olivia has gone: ‘Why, to Europe of course. She’s completely hipped on foreign life’ (p. 315). Olivia’s desire for Europe has always been a contaminated one, ever since she passed for white as an Italian girl in America at the age of nine (pp. 5–6). It is part of the horror of her daughter Teresa’s exile that her racist French husband believes her to be white.

Teresa’s desire for Europe is, in Fauset’s terms, perfectly wholesome, for two reasons: she wanted to come only for a few months, to perfect her French, and not to settle for life, and she wanted to gain a qualification so that she could earn her own living. If, like Maggie Ellersley, or Angela Murray after the end of Plum Bun, she had returned home knowing more of the beauties of Europe, but more capable of working in America, she would have had the best of the Old and the New Worlds. As it is, she is reduced to taking in sewing from the American students she previously invited as guests; and she is tied to a man who, although ‘indifferent, miserly and hard-headed with the cold pitiless logic of the French’ (p. 324), is without even the ambition to become a full professor at the University of Toulouse where he teaches.

It is no accident that Fauset’s heroines’ distancing of themselves from emotional ties has European connotations. Joanna Marshall in There Is Confusion replies impatiently to Peter when he asks her for reassurance, ’…But, Peter, I have so much to think about—my tour, my booking, you know, my lessons in French and Italian, my dancing...’ (pp. 132– 3). The ‘bit from an old Italian song’ she sings him after their first kiss is about parting— ‘You’ll make me cry’, says Peter (p. 105)—and in the first long love-letter she sends him, which comes too late, she can express her erotic feelings only through quoting Goethe. When Angela Murray in Plum Bun decides to pass for white and rejects her sister Virginia (whose name suggests not only innocence but an American state), she changes her own name to a mixture of French and Spanish, Angèle Mory.

Again and again Europe is presented as a dishonest escape route. In There Is Confusion the old white Meriwether Bye offers to take the small black Meriwether Bye away from his parents to Paris and Vienna (p. 294). Laurentine in The Chinaberry Tree (1931) could have chosen to desert her unhappy mother by going to Paris (p. 13).

One reason for Europe’s construction as a place feeding escapism is Fauset’s attitude to work. The title of There Is Confusion has its direct source in the epigraph, taken from Tennyson’s poem The Lotus Eaters:

There is confusion worse than death,

Trouble on trouble; pain on pain,—

lines which continue but are not quoted in Fauset,

Long labour unto aged breath

which is ‘worse than death’ in the eyes of lotus-eaters who take a dishonest escape route into utter lethargy. The most eloquent argument against African-Americans leaving for Europe is, for Fauset, the work they have invested in America. Yet this work need not bring fame or material gain. Joanna Marshall, whose sinking into a comfortable marriage at the expense of a stage career Deborah E. McDowell has deprecated (Fauset, 1929), has in Fauset’s eyes already achieved greatness by her literal representation of America on stage. Joanna does this wearing a mask, theatrically passing for white, but when at the end of one performance ‘America’ is asked to unmask, and reveals herself as black, Joanna trenchantly claims her place in American history:

I hardly need to tell you that there is no one in the audience more American than I am. My great-grandfather fought in the Revolution, my uncle fought in the Civil War, and my brother is ‘over there’ now.

(Fauset, 1929, p. 232)

Most African-American women writers of the 1920s and 1930s were unlike Faus...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Notes on Contributors