The Politics of Color in the fiction of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen.

Reviewed by

Jennifer DeVere Brody University of California, Riverside 

Jacquelyn McClendon's book The Politics of Color in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen examines the categories of race and color and begins to lay the groundwork for the arduous and necessary task of theorizing the figure of the mulatto/a in African American literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book-jacket features Richard Bruce Nugent's "Drawing for Mulattoes," from the short-lived Harlem Renaissance journal Ebony and Topaz (1927). The chiasmic figure that graces the cover is a fine illustration of the complex musings on complexion, class, and classification contained in McClendon's readings of Plum Bun (1929), Comedy American Style (1933), Quicksand (1928), and Passing (1929). McLendon's study would have been more valuable had she chosen to interrogate this and other non-literary representations of the mulatto (which are and are not color-coded, as McLendon tries to point out in her narrative when she speaks problematically, if inventively of the phenotypical mulatto with straight hair and light skin and a genotypical mulatto who has one black and one white parent). As it stands, however, The Politics of Color makes a real contribution to scholarly discussions of the mulatto/a.

McClendon resolves the contradiction between the "phenotypical" and "genotypical" mulatto/a when she writes, "Unlike Fauset's Angela Murray, who has two 'black' parents but reads 'white,' Larsen's Helga Crane even more ironically, actually has a 'white' parent but reads 'black.'" By drawing attention to physical appearance versus biological reality, both writers call into question socially constructed notions of race. As Helga Crane says, "It wasn't merely a matter of color. It was something broader, deeper that made folk kin." The title of McLendon's text is indebted to this quotation from Quicksand, since the book tries to determine what is the matter of/with color.

McClendon's book gives the novels of Fauset and Larsen, two fascinating and important modernist writers, their due by demonstrating the need for more serious critical engagement with their work. Indeed, I think that McClendon's study does much to redress hasty dismissals of these writers by providing "textual evidence" that supports her claim that Fauset's and Larsen's "emphasis on the physical body results not from the belief in 'half-caste superiority,' but from a desire to examine and reinterpret the social signifier of the black/female/ body." Drawing such parallels between and among "black" women and "mulattoes" is the strongest aspect of McLendon's work on the significance and significations of "mulattoness."

The book's second chapter, "The Myth of the Mulatto Psyche: Tradition and the Tale of the Tragic Mulatto," provides a rather cursory look at nineteenth and early-twentieth-century representations of the mulatto by George W. Cable, William Dean Howells, and T. S. Stribling - all of whom are "white." This chapter could have been expanded as work on this topic is already considerable and seems to be increasing. McClendon's impulse to discuss changes in the representation of the mulatto through history is a good one; indeed, she asserts that ". . . the stereotype of the mulatto as constructed by white writers becomes both a political tool and an artistic device in Fauset's and Larsen's hands." It seems to me that both "black" and "white" authors "show, within a political frame of reference, the ways in which their novels are influenced by their various readings of America as cultural text and the ways in which they call into question socially constructed concepts of blackness and race." For example, Fauset and Larsen were not writing solely against a "racist" representation of the mulatto but also within and against a racialist tradition perpetuated by "black" authors such as Frances Harper and William Wells Brown, to name only two.

Moving beyond the strictly literary analysis of her topic, McClendon might have compared the superb fiction of Larsen and Fauset with dramatic and sociological texts produced by other Harlem Renaissance writers - Zora Neale Hurston's play Colorstruck comes to mind. The book does not defend the decision to do close readings of only two novels from Fauset's oeuvre. Perhaps this choice was determined by the fact that Larsen published only two novels; nevertheless, as it stands, Fauset's position as a leading authority on this topic is diminished because only two of her novels are discussed.

Finally, one wishes that McClendon had included a chapter on anthropology - on racial and cultural classification as well as color as perception. The two-page "Afterword," which critiques Alice Walker's and other critics' "reading" of Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), does give us a new category by which to "read"/contextualize this now classic text. McClendon gestures toward the utility of reading "biracial" characters as both part and not part of "black" literature broadly writ; however, I left the book feeling frustrated that a full reading of Hurston's text from this perspective was not done. Also, I was left wondering how McClendon might have discussed the difficult aspect of Janie's light skin, which "provokes" and is the raison d'etre of her lover Teacake's violence toward her. I offer such relatively minor criticisms because the topic of the text is so important and because McLendon's readings whet one's desire for more work on this quintessentially American topic.