Jessie Redmon Fauset

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Jessie Redmon Fauset (born April 27, 1882 in Camden County , New Jersey , † April 30, 1961 in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania ) was an American writer and publicist .

Life

Fauset was born the seventh child of an African American Methodist minister. She grew up in simple circumstances but in a cultured family, went to school in Philadelphia, where she graduated from a girls' school in 1900, probably the only black student. She then studied at Cornell University , where she made her first degree in 1905. Back in Philadelphia, she found no employment in the segregated schools. She spent a year teaching in Baltimore and in 1906 went to Washington, DC , where she taught French for 14 years at M Street High School, later renamed Dunbar High School . She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with an MA in 1918 and 1919, and began working with William Edward Burghardt Du Bois and the magazine he edited, The Crisis . In 1919 she moved to New York City and henceforth worked as the magazine's literary editor. In this position she promoted many young authors of the Harlem Renaissance such as Claude McKay , Jean Toomer , Nella Larsen , Georgia Douglas Johnson , Countee Cullen , George Schuyler and Arna Bontemps , Anne Spencer and Langston Hughes , but also white women authors who deal with racial or gender issues and gave them an opportunity to be published. Her four novels appeared in the following twelve years, her most productive time as a writer. She was also the editor and principal author of a magazine for black children, Brownie's Book . However, this was discontinued after 24 monthly issues (January 1920 to December 1921). In 1921 Fauset took part in the second Pan-African Congress . In 1925/26 she traveled through France and Algeria, after which she left the Crisis . In 1929 she married Herbert Harris and lived with him and her sister Helen Fauset Lanning in Harlem . In the 1940s, after their sister's death, the couple moved to Montclair , New Jersey, where Fauset lived until her husband's death in 1958. During this time she was no longer literary. She moved to Philadelphia with her stepbrother Earl Huff, where she died of heart disease in 1961 as a result of arteriosclerosis .

plant

Fauset himself wrote poems and translated poems by Haitian authors. She published it in Crisis ; some of them were later included in anthologies several times . Her short stories address characters and subjects that she later covered in more detail in her novels. In addition, she wrote many articles, reviews, reports and other non-fictional texts, which reveal a wide range of knowledge and interests of the author. However, she achieved lasting literary success primarily through her novels. In these she addresses the striving for open, honest human relationships across restrictive class, race and gender boundaries; only through this do their characters achieve happiness and fulfillment. On the one hand, her novels are thematically and materially diverse and creative, but on the other hand they show linguistic and formal weaknesses.

There is confusion

She also wrote Fauset's first novel in 1924 to show that blacks themselves could best write about black lives. It tells the stories of two black middle-class families who are linked by marriage. The stories of friends and ancestors of the two are woven into the life story of the protagonists, i.e. the bride and groom. Fauset describes the limited career prospects of black women and discusses alternatives to the existing social norms. In addition to the discrimination that blacks suffered, another major theme of the novel is the feeling of dignity and superiority that arises from surviving this suffering. The weakness of the novel, however, lies in the formal inconsistency and confusion, which also arises from the large number of characters introduced but not developed into complex characters.

Plum bun

In Fauset's second novel from 1929, she focuses on a main character, from whose point of view the plot is told. It is a kind of Bildungsroman about Angela Murray, a young mulatto woman . So the issue here is not discrimination itself, but the way black people deal with it. Philadelphia-born Angela has a sister, Virginia, who is darker-skinned than she is. After the death of her parents, she decides to go to New York and pretend to be white, which she succeeds because of her relatively light skin. She begins a relationship with Roger Fielding, a wealthy white man. Years later as a recognized artist, she travels to France, where she reveals herself as black and meets her only great love, the poor black Anthony Cross. Fauset ironizes the typical narrative pattern of fairy tales and love romance: The young Angela has romanticized, wrong ideas about the whites and seeks her luck in a "good match". Therefore she sees Fielding as a kind of "saving prince"; but this turns out to be the wrong man for Angela.

The Chinaberry Tree. A novel of American Life

In this 1931 novel, Fauset develops a complicated relationship story that includes affairs and multiracial relationships. In the figures she shows the different ways people deal with social norms: While some accept them and strive for normality and respect for their fellow human beings, others maintain the emotional relationships between people across class and racial boundaries. The novel is viewed as a qualitative step backwards from Plum Bun because of some inconsistencies in the plot .

Comedy, American style

Fauset's last novel was published in 1933. The main character is Olivia Cary, a black woman who hates her own race and wants to be white or to be considered white under all circumstances. She has a husband and two children, all three of whom suffer from their "color mania". When she is expecting a third child, she projects her longings onto this child and names the boy after herself, i.e. Oliver. Three people are destroyed by their madness: Oliver commits suicide early, the daughter Teresa is forced to marry an unloved man, and Olivia herself dies lonely and bitter. Only her husband Christopher and the older son Christopher Jr. recover from the emotional damage Olivia has done. Fauset creates a counter-model to Olivia's handling of her racial identity with the figure of the Phebe. She stands by her origins and refuses to marry a white man. She later marries Christopher Jr. of her own volition. It shows that there is no easy way of dealing with one's own racial identity, but that it can and must be accepted.

reception

Jessie Redmon Fauset was included in the Daughters of Africa anthology published by Margaret Busby in London and New York in 1992 .

German poetry transfer

• Hanna Meuter : I sing America too. American Negro seals. Bilingual. Ed. And transl. Together with Paul Therstappen . Wolfgang Jess, Dresden 1932. With short biographies. 1st row: The new negro. The voice of the awakening Afro-America . Part 1; New edition ibid. 1959. pp. 52–53 (poems "We wear the mask" & "Life") and introduction, passim

source

• Carolyn Wedin Sylvander: Jessie Redmon Fauset . In: Dictionary of Literary Biography , Vol. 51. Farminton Hills: Thomson Gale 1986 pp. 76-86.

Web links

• Literature by and about Jessie Redmon Fauset in the catalog of the German National Library