And strangely on top of all this, because Fauset played such an important part in the Harlem Renaissance as literary-editor of The Crisis, she also tends to get separated from white women-novelists who, like her, resisted the modernist literary styles and techniques of the twenties, consciously eschewing, for example, the novel's turn inward (as in the works of Conrad, James, Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, and others) in order to pursue a less subjective type of realism that than achieved in the novel of consciousness and thereby to gain a more direct focus on social circumstance. So, given all the traditions that Fauset appears to be cut off from, her work stands in the peculiar position of being considered a few contradictory things at once: too Victorian to be modern, too bourgeois to be black, and both too black and too genteel to be feminist. Against these trends in Fauset-criticism, I want to contend that Jessie Fauset is indeed a black feminist modernist and that her novels are in fact integral to the cultural moment in which they are published. I see these novels as representative -- in their own way -- of two complex and variegated movements in literature whose relation to each other I am still unable fully to articulate: modernism and the Harlem Renaissaance.
In order to attempt to place Fauset's work in relation to these two terms, I want to return to a conversation in which I participated at last year's New Modernisms conference. Last October, at the inaugural meeting of the M.S.A., I contributed a paper to a seminar titled New Approaches to the Harlem Renaissance. My paper looked at the relation between the theme of female ambition and what I regarded as ironic doublings in the plot of a novel by Jessie Fauset. In that seminar, we discussed (among other things) whether the ending of this novel, There is Confusion (1924), is or is not ironic and exactly how and why the answer to that question matters. Both of these questions led into a larger question that became the topic-question of our seminar: Just what is the relation between the Harlem Renaissance and modernism? Here, a year later, I would like to return to that discussion to explore Fauset's position with regard to three concepts that my seminar worked last year to establish relations among. These are: (1) modernism, (2) irony and (3) prestige.
For the sake of being concrete, I will take the example of Fauset's first novel, and I will try to reproduce some of the debate about it that went on last year. In last year's paper, I had been arguing that the whole novel There is Confusion was ironic, but for brevity's sake here I'll just focus on one small aspect of the novel's ending. There is Confusion focuses partly on the maturation of one female character, Joanna Marshall, an upper middle-class black woman who, coming of age at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, shuns bourgeois marriage in order to pursue artistic "greatness" in the "man's world." At the very end of the novel, however, which occurs shortly after the end of the First World War, Joanna decides -- in marrying a doctor -- to give up her own ambition and independence and to feign dependence upon her husband in "a thousand little ways" in order to shore up his sensitive ego in racist America. I regard this ending as ironic. Hildegard Hoeller, a participant in my seminar, disagreed with my reading, insisting that my "use of the term 'irony' to describe a sentimental novel that affirms love" was incorrect. Hildegard said that "Western modernism as always valued irony over affirmation," a misjudgement that -- according to Hildegard -- led us to undervalue sentiment: "Sentimentality is a discourse," Hildegard insisted, "to appeal to doing the right thing." Irony, on the other hand, "has that canonical label which has excluded women." Hildegard compared Jessie Fauset to Edith Wharton as a writer who, instead of embracing irony, "uses the sentimental in powerfully political ways." Sharon Moore, another seminar participant, disagreed with Hildegard, insisting that Fauset's ending was indeed ironic.
At certain points in our discussion, our returns to this question of Fauset's irony led us on to explore the relation between modernism and blackness. The following discussion ensued after Hildegard re-asserted her claim that Fauset's ending gave us sentiment, not irony:
Seth Moglen: Irony [is] not how we should define modernism. [. . .]Tace Hetrick: It's a high modernist move to call the sentimental old fashioned. [Think about] Ann Douglas's argument in Terrible Honesty. Or Rita Felski's.
Fred Moten: The sentimental avant guard [in African-American music, has] a certain oral quality. [Combining] dissonance and love song [. . . ] as a quality in black music goes back very far . . . 300 or 400 years. [. . .]
Sharon Moore: Then is everything that's not black modern? Has the new modernisms really become new?
Fred Moten: This [looking around, gesturing, meaning "this whole conference"] is all white.Sharon Moore: [Laughing]: That's a conversation for us to have another time.
Fred Moten: What's at stake in this revision? [If you were actually to confront] what the relation is between blackness and modernity, you would create a tremor that would end this conference.
Jacqueline Franklin: Zeitgeist is a degraded concept.
Well, I thought -- and think even more so now, looking back -- I don't want that. I don't want my work on Fauset to be curatorial. To me, this was a persuasive argument for refusing to give up on a definition of modernism (singular). Earlier in the seminar, all of us had been only too ready to throw out both the terms "modernism" and "Harlem Renaissance" as descriptions of movements entirely too variegated to define. It was as though no one wanted any longer to be on the inside of things that had excluded any text or writer; no one wanted to claim membership for "his" or "her" writer or artist in a movement that had been revealed to be elitist. And yet, to a certain extent, what each critic has to claim for the texts on which he or she works on is prestige. And if "isms" convey prestige, if inclusion in an "ism" constitutes prestige, then we are back to establishing that a writer like Fauset belongs a significant movement or tradition (to some sort of "flowering" at her cultural moment, whether it be modernist, African-American, female, or some combination of these) or else relegating her works to a position without prestige.
Irony is one of those "gold cards" that a text can flash to gain inclusion in the modernist movement. But I do not argue that Fauset's texts are ironic only in order to get Fauset in the modernist-door of literary history. I want to argue that these novels are ironic because to do otherwise would be, I think, to miss Fauset's tone of voice and point of view -- would be to overlook what I find to be one type of modernist vision. I learned from Robert von Hallberg much more subtle ways to approach her irony than the methods that I had been using, but I think still I have to contend after much reflection that Fauset's texts deserve prestige because they are ironic and therefore modern.
I cannot let go of irony as one criterion for bestowing modernist prestige. I understand others' arguments against giving irony this power, and I find some of these arguments to be good ones. I appreciate Hildegard Hoeller's desire to value women's work in valuing the sentimental and the domestic; I just do not think that Fauset values these things as much as nineteenth-century women writers do. I also understand Hildegard's valuing of the sentimental over the ironic because of the associations between realism -- a mode defined by its irony -- and capitalism. But I do not see an alternative to capitalism in the sentimental, which seems to me to be a mode at least as infused with bourgeois ideology as realism is. After some reflection, I have to assert that Fauset's works, by virtue of their irony, deserve the prestige that we reserve for those works we include in the literary movement that we call modernism (singular).
Somehow, however, I feel as though I am supporting some structure that I should be subverting here. In the modern period, prestige is so caught up with elitism (and even rightist politics) that one wants to react against the very word prestige. As Judith Stephens put it simply in my seminar: "White racism is embodied in modernism." Certainly it is, but the timing of rejecting modernism as a construct is wrong here for Jessie Fauset. By the time a certain, apparently isolated, African-American woman writer begins to be recognized (finally) as ironic and modernist, and therefore worthy of prestige, now irony and modernism become "if not terms of opprobrium" at least more questionable criteria of prestige than they were during the decades in which Fauset was writing and during those which immediately followed (i.e., the twenties through the fifties), when Fauset's irony -- decades ahead of its own time and of the second wave of feminism -- went largely unrecognized.
For all the problems with the term modernism (singular), therefore, I do think we need to continue to use it for just the reason that Von Hallberg gives. Not only does an "ism" confer prestige, but also the term "modernism" is, as Von Hallberg says, "like romanticism or Victorianism, a term of explanation. There is something serious at stake when you have an explanation that crosses national borders and crosses disciplinary boundaries." This is true. And so, in spite of the damage that this monolithic construct of modernism does to our definition of the Harlem Renaissance -- at one point in our discussion, Judith Stephens begged, "Could we just find a way to talk about the Harlem Renaissance and put the Harlem Renaissance at the Center?" -- I will make the claim that Jessie Fauset is a modernist. Fauset is not writing Victorian novels, but rather she is parodying their structures ironically to assert her own reactions to modernity. In the end, I still cannot answer my initial question about the relation between modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Perhaps Seth Moglen is right, that our revaluation of modernism could not survive a serious revaluation of the Harlem Renaissance. Until better answers to this question emerge, I will assert that Jessie Fauset is a modernist by virtue of her ironic vision. As for her alleged elitism, which supposedly makes her less than African-American, I must quote Sharon Moore, who minces no words on this: "People have said of Jessie Fauset . . . that she was being consciously elitist. She wasn't; she was writing out of her own experience." Fauset did not come from a background of material privilege, but she was well educated and did spend her time with mainly other educated African-Americans. Her writing reflects her education. Her writing is erudite, but it is not inaccessible to students in the ways that Pound's or Eliot's or much of Joyce's writing is. Somehow, it seems odd for the erudition of a Joyce or an Eliot to gain him entrance to literary history through the door of modernism, while the erudition of a Fauset should bar her entrance at another door (the door the African-American vernacular). Unlike other modern who are modern on account of their formal elitism, Fauset is modernist in spite of her formal accessibility. Elitism of form or structure, then, should not be our only criterion for conferring modernist prestige. Irony, too, should count.