Jessie Fauset’s Not-So-New Negro Womanhood: The Harlem Renaissance, the Long Nineteenth Century, and Legacies of Feminine Representation Meredith Goldsmith Virtually all contemporary scholarship on the Harlem Renaissance novelist Jessie Fauset contains an obligatory move in which critics respond to her stylistic and apparent social conservatism. These critics recuperate as subversive Fauset’s ostensible failures in style and coherence and argue, as do Ann duCille and Jane Kuenz, that her apparent endorsement of conservative plot closures for women be read as self-consciously ironic.1 Other scholars respond to the critical treatment of Fauset during her lifetime as retrograde by contextualizing her work in its own cultural moment. Such critics show, for example, how Fauset responds to a rising consumer culture that, in Jean Lutes’s words, “paradoxically, both integrates and isolates women of color” (78).2 Such redemptive readings work to counter a number of hostile charges. While the most famous of these critiques may be that of the mid-twentieth-century literary scholar Robert Bone, who claims that Fauset’s third novel, The Chinaberry Tree (1931), “seems to be a novel about the first colored woman in New Jersey to wear lounging pajamas” (102), some of Fauset’s contemporaries level equally damning, often class- and gender-based charges that marginalize her contributions to the literature of the period. Alain Locke, whose guest-edited March 1925 issue of Survey Graphic, titled “Harlem, Mecca of the New Negro,” became the influential anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation, locates the problem of Fauset’s work in its belatedness. Chiding her for her final novel, Comedy: American Style (1933), Locke claims in the pages of the National Urban League journal, Opportunity, that the work is “too mid-Victorian for moving power today” (“Saving Grace” 222).3 Locke’s overdetermined phrasing illuminates tensions around class, gender, [End Page 258] generation, and modernity that circulate through Harlem Renaissance discourse. Fauset’s literary career had begun much earlier, with several celebrated short stories in the late 1910s and editorial work for The Crisis throughout the 1910s and early 1920s. The publication of her first novel, There Is Confusion, in 1924 seemed to usher in the new optimism of African American literary culture.4 While Fauset’s initial success coincided with popular enthusiasm for African American art, by 1933 the excitement of the Harlem Renaissance had given way to the economic realities of the Depression, when African American artists struggled with lost jobs and opportunities. “Too mid-Victorian” may have functioned as code for too middle-class, as a new cohort of Left intellectuals like Richard Wright and Dorothy West came to occupy the Harlem literary stage.5 Locke’s charge of mid-Victorianness was also gendered in its close identification of Fauset with the women writers who rose to prominence in the late nineteenth century. Such was the canon in which William Stanley Braithwaite situated Fauset in the same issue of Opportunity that featured Locke’s damning review. Braithwaite asserts, “I deliberately invite the objection of critical opinion when I add, that she stands in the front rank of American women novelists in general,” linking Fauset to a tradition that includes Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Margaret Deland, Edith Wharton, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow, Kathleen Norris, Gertrude Atherton, Julia Peterkin, and Zona Gale (49). In an era purportedly defined by the modern, urban, sexually active New Woman, Fauset became identified with the older regional women writers, turn-of-the-century novelists of manners, and even popular conservative fiction writers like Norris. Locke’s and Braithwaite’s opposing reviews placed Fauset in two completely different critical categories: the first, of race writers of her moment; the second, of a long tradition of American women’s writing. Failing in the first category, according to Locke, she was damned by her association with the second, despite Braithwaite’s laudatory assessment of her writing. By linking her with an earlier, seemingly outdated literary culture, Locke’s sneering characterization of Fauset marks the efforts of Harlem Renaissance intellectuals to appropriate the modernist tropes of originality and novelty, the very tropes created by authors who wished to chart a break with the nineteenth-century past...

It is in the community life of a great city that the library has its most challenging opportunity. The more homogeneous such a life the greater is the opportunity of becoming part of it, since all currents flow together, drawing one into the common whirl of experience while conflicting currents of thought and habit keep one tossing about on the surface. One of the most interesting and least-known of such communities is New York's black city, extending approximately from Eighth Avenue to the Harlem River and from 130th to 150th Streets. Picture to yourselves a great town of some 150,000 black people, with a few alien whites as scattered shop-keepers, and old residents, clinging to their homes. This city has its own churches, its theaters, its newspapers, its clubs and social life. There are three churches, each with a parish numbering more than two thousand, in Harlem and at least thirty others, varying in size. The Sunday School of Mother Zion Church has a membership roll of seven hundred, and an average attendance of five hundred. All denominations, from Baptist to Episcopalian, are represented; there are a large Catholic parish, several Jewish churches, and a number of Eastern and African sects. The theaters have their own colored actors, and increasingly one sees posters featuring colored artists. There are colored Y. M. C. A. and Y. W. C. A., the latter with an entire resident apartment house. In Liberty Hall, Harlem's town hall, of a Sunday, immense mass meetings are held. Does white New York know what is discussed there? Harlem supports six colored newspapers recognized as representing negro thought, as well as a number of lesser sheets. This negro world is swarming with clubs, societies, organizations of sorts, for the support of religious or political movements, as for instance, the Bahai faith, or Marcus Garvey's Back to Africa propaganda, as likewise for the mutual betterment or advancement of members. What gives all this point is the fact that these activities are sponsored and managed, to a large extent, by colored people. The offices of the Urban League are filled by negroes, although both races are represented on the national board of directors. The colored branches of the Y.M.C.A. and the Y.W.C.A. are managed entirely by colored people. The newspaper editors are negroes, and represent negro thought exclusively. The clergy are negroes, except in the case of the Catholic parish. On the corner of 135th Street and Lenox Avenue a bank has just been erected, which is financed by colored capital, and is under colored control. A large new theater also financed by negro funds is being erected. The reading world knows of Marcus Garvey and his Black Star steamship line. Increasingly, real estate is coming under black control. Even the police and fire stations have colored men on their forces, although the city-managed activities within the district are the most reluctant in succumbing to the inevitable tide. Until a few months ago the library had no colored assistants. Of the three public schools in this community two have colored teachers, one has fourteen on a teaching force of sixty-one, the other has only one. In this school, which faces the library on 135th Street, the registration is something over twenty-one hundred, of whom two thousand are colored. The community has also its literary and artistic life. Several artists of real worth work in Harlem, and there is a large music school, the colored director of which has given recitals at Carnegie Hall. All this seems to spell homogeneity Yet though this great group is held together by the tie of color, and by the same bond is separated from its white neighbors, within itself it is crossed and divided by many conflicting lines of thought, belief and hope. The most deeply-cut is that of nationality. Nearly half this population is foreign, from the British or Spanish West Indies or South America. From the British West Indies comes an educated, thinking and ambitious group, interpenetrated by white blood, unused to the color line and inexpressibly galled by it. …

s final, unfinished novel, The Buccaneers, published posthu- mously in 1938, charts the great excitement of its eponymous characters' initial journey to England and examines what happens when the exhilaration of travel ends and the reality of living abroad begins.Five young American women cross the Atlantic, marry, and settle into the storied homes of the British gentry.Playfully termed "buccaneers" by two older women who advise them and smooth the way for their social entrée, the young women are hardly, as the title implies, pirates, much less plunderers of traveling vessels.Rather than operating as rootless raiders free to transport their spoils across the globe, Wharton's buccaneers are invaders who, upon settling into marriage, must confront the cultural expectations of their adopted home:

Better a Bloody Shovel Than Ambivalence Joycelyn Moody Gabrielle Foreman’s “Riff” and its invocation of 1990s “Calls” by Barbara Christian, Ann duCille, and Nellie McKay echo Frances Smith Foster’s essay “The Personal Is Political, the Past Has Potential, and Other Thoughts on Studying Women’s Literature—Then and Now.” For in Foster’s and Foreman’s respective essays, the earlier black feminist directives function in precisely the same ways, validating for Foreman in 2013 what Foster observed in 2007: “we have both changed a lot and not changed enough” (Foster 36). The resonance fills me with sadness and frustration as it signals that too few people heeded Foster, as was the case with Christian, duCille, McKay, and the bold, often disremembered, eponymous “we” of Dorothy Sterling’s We Are Your Sisters. I wonder whether Foreman’s “Riff” and our “Responses” will matter any more than the alarms we raise(d) as long as a different, “abrading collective ‘we’” (Foreman 307) remains ambivalent about their desire for racial diversity.1 I encounter institutional ambivalence about diversity on two divergent fronts. On one, I am regularly asked to help departments in predominantly white institutions (pwis) identify “good” (read: of African descent) scholars who might be urged to apply for their open positions. In turn, I ask point blank: “How many black students are enrolled in your graduate programs?” Answers usually range from astonishment or befuddlement to defensiveness and protest. How do pwis expect to select from a sizable pool of African American scholars for new hires when they leave the work of building the faculty pipeline to historically black colleges and universities and to black professors everywhere—that is, to those they assume believe a pipeline is exigent? What compels a majority-white literature department to seek the “diversity” of blackness for its curriculum? For its faculty? On one hand, Foreman’s “abrading collective ‘we’” seems indifferent to who teaches black literature; as McKay admonished, they contentedly permit Any Untrained Teacher who so desires [End Page 60] to forge instruction in African American literature. Occasionally, on the other hand, an institution launches a desperate search for One Dark Body to fill the one token slot, and I receive an unthinking invitation to become complicit in exalting identity over anything else. Elsewhere, institutional ambivalence dogs my attempt to place my doctoral students—three white women—in professional positions. I have been privileged to teach them. Fifteen years after McKay named “the problem of making particular groups of people the targets for particular positions and relegating candidates’ qualifications to a secondary role in the hiring process” (22–23), each ignored the dissuasion she received against specializing in black literature. Although they are educated, diligent, smart, and devoted, they have already been denied professional opportunities and will be again because they are white—significantly, white women—seeking positions in institutions that refuse to fill African Americanist faculty lines with anything other than a black body. Now, my southern black parents taught me that white-skin privilege is a property no black person need ever envy or mourn, so I am aware that there are limits to the job discrimination my students face. However, I also know that the rejections of my students’ extensive qualifications for positions they have been denied (and likely will be denied again) reveal, at best, ambivalence about diversity. Of course, numerous factors come into play when institutions select faculty and postdoctoral fellows, but McKay’s reprimands bang around my brain when my students and I suffer the rejection blues. Ultimately, “we” only flatter ourselves that curricular diversity is a universal academic value. One almost wants to credit the American Antiquarian Society for having scarcely bothered with such illusions in July 2012, as Foreman recounts in “A Riff.” After all, a year later, the aas’s website for its e-journal Common-place proclaimed an editorial staff and advisory board of over forty members, among whom apparently none is of African descent and none is a trained African Americanist.2 Do any of these board members study any people of color? The aas’s stance on “diversity” could not be clearer. Can “we” privileged historians and entitled...

Most women of the past were not writers. Most produced few, if any, texts in the conventional sense of the term. Some of these women lived in predominantly oral cultures in which neither men nor women engaged in textual production. Some lived in literate cultures but were excluded from this elite expression of agency by male control of the educational system. Many were never taught to read and write. Others were taught to read but not to write. In colonial New England, for example, literacy levels for both men and women were high because all persons, irrespective of gender, were encouraged to read the Bible for themselves. Nevertheless, the distinction between reading literacy and writing literacy reinforced women's subordinate status. Because they could fulfill their duties as both Christians and goodwives without writing, such education was considered superfluous, especially for women in lower socioeconomic statuses (Hall 32). But even women who could write apparently did not do much of it, or if they did, the sorts of texts they produced were less likely to survive over time, to become objects of historical and literary interest. First-person writings such as diaries and letters--the gold standard for scholarly research--are rare; poems, novels, and nonfiction writings are even more so. The fact that many women who once lived rich, articulate lives are now silent creates both an impediment and a dilemma for scholars. It limits whom we can study and what we can know about their lives. All who study women of the past have confronted these limits and experienced in some measure the frustrations they create. If we confine ourselves to those women whose voices have survived, we rule out most women. If we are not satisfied working within these boundaries, how do we access the lives of voiceless, or textless, women? One fruitful approach has been to study the lives of women in the aggregate, which has produced important composite portraits of the normative roles for women who lived in past times. But because these constructions may not accurately represent the lived experience of any one particular woman--whose life undoubtedly differed from the norm in various ways--the inarticulateness of women from the past becomes a much greater impediment in the particular. And it is the study of particular women that I want to focus on. Some years ago I found my attention drawn to one particular woman from the past. In 2012, I published a reconstruction of this woman's life, a project that brought home to me the challenges inherent in recovering the lives of early American women. My subject's name was Elizabeth Tuttle. (1) In many ways Tuttle was an ordinary colonial woman. She was born in New Haven in 1645. After her marriage to Richard Edwards, in 1667, she moved to Hartford, where her husband's family lived. Over the next twenty years she gave birth to the expected succession of children. Two additional facts, however, distinguish her from a typical goodwife. The first is that her marriage ended in divorce, and the second is that she is the paternal grandmother of the great Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards. In combination, these two facts have perpetuated a particular image of Elizabeth Tuttle as Edwards's crazy grandmother. Modern biographers of Edwards have routinely depicted Tuttle as a rebellious woman who by her mad threats and promiscuous behavior drove her long-suffering husband to petition for divorce. George M. Marsden, for example, describes her as an incorrigible profligate who was afflicted with a serious psychosis characterized by repeated infidelities and fits of perversity (22). To complicate this neatly gendered distribution of praise and blame we need to hear Tuttle's side of the story. But like most women of the past, she is silent. My curiosity about this story and this representation of Elizabeth Tuttle forced me to address directly the dilemma of how to access the life of one particular inarticulate woman. …

In the spring of 1894, American newspapers captivated their readers with intense coverage of the latest political scandal. Madeleine Pollard, around thirty years old, had sued Kentucky congressman William C. P. Breckinridge for Breach of Promise for failing to marry her. Court testimony revealed Pol-lard's brief course of study at Cincinnati Wesleyan Female College, her acceptance into Washington DC society, a summer at Vermont's Bread Loaf Inn, and her relationships with Charles Dudley Warner, William Dean Howells, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, among others in the arts and literature. Pollard's lawyers used all of this as evidence of her nascent intellectual gifts and her dream of a literary life, thwarted by the congressman's seduction and betrayal; Breck-inridge's lawyers used this same history as evidence that Pollard was an adventuress, manipulating a host of powerful men to suit her own ambitious desires. (1) Pollard had learned early on the necessity and the challenges of relying on men. When she was ten years old, her father died suddenly, leaving her mother with scant financial resources and a houseful of children. The family was split up, and Madeleine spent her childhood with a succession of aunts with whom she witnessed unending domestic labor on top of what she had seen of her own mother's struggles to raise her family. At an aunt's near Lexington, Kentucky, Pollard began to focus her attention on higher education but knew that without financial resources she had little hope of formal schooling. She needed means, and that meant men to pay her way. She found an ingenious way to achieve her goal: she convinced a local farmer, James Rodes, to pay her tuition, and in exchange she promised to repay or marry him. But very early in her college career she had a change of heart and sought extrication from this agreement. In 1884, recognizing the prominent lawyer and soon-to-be elected US congressman on a train, the then twenty-one-year-old Madeleine Pollard engaged Breckinridge in conversation, following up this chance encounter with a letter seeking his advice on resolving her dilemma. He came to Cincinnati to discuss the matter; a few days later, their illicit relationship had begun. For Pollard the relationship was perhaps a mixed blessing: she left school and endured three pregnancies, but Breckinridge eventually provided entree to the life she wanted to lead. In 1887 she moved to Washington, worked for the Department of Agriculture and the Census Bureau, and hobnobbed with the well-to-do and the literati until the summer of 1893, when she learned that Breckinridge, despite his promise of marriage, had married another woman. (2) Pollard sued Breckinridge and won--and then disappeared. As a historian interested in the lives of women who come to short-lived fame and then are swept away into a domestic dustbin of history, initially I imagined Pollard's narrative as one in which she survived the trial but, ruined, spent the rest of her life in obscurity. My first look at Pollard's post-trial history seemed to confirm this early impression. She did not take to the stage, as newspaper commentary suggested she would, and in fact, with her former lover absolutely broke, she never received a penny of the $15,000 awarded her by the court. Her Washington socialite friends abandoned her. Beyond 1894, newspapers that had once covered Pollard's every move failed to mention her. Twentieth-century scholarship gives brief attention to the scandal that ended Breckinridge's political career and little attention to Pollard (Fuller, Congressman Breckenridge and An Early Venture; Klotter, Sex, Scandal, and Suffrage). In these works, Pollard represents a type: the mistress who seeks revenge and whose complaints bring an otherwise good civil servant to public shame. While neither condemning nor supporting Pollard, such scholarly accounts of the scandal offer little information on or insight into her background beyond what was reported in the newspapers. …