Women of the Harlem Renaissance.

Cheryl A. Wall. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995. 266 pp. $29.95 cloth/$14.95 paper.

In the last decade a growing body of scholarship devoted to women of the Harlem Renaissance has transformed our understanding of that period. Books articles, and edited volumes by critics such as Deborah McDowell, Hazel Carby, Ann duCille, Maureen Honey, Marcy Knopf, Gloria Hull, Daphne Duval Harrison, Jacquelyn McLendon, Charles Larson, and Thadious Davis have established the importance of women's lives and works to one of the most well-known periods of African American cultural production. This scholarly project ranges from the important archeological and archival work necessary for establishing the existence of these women and their works to analysis, interpretation, and theorizing that help to open up the discussion and debate necessary to insure that they are never lost to us again.

Cheryl A. Wall's Women of the Harlem Renaissance is the most recent contribution to this important effort. Wall situates her readings of texts by women such as Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jessie Fauset in historical and biographical context. Along the way, she provides glimpses into the lives and works of lesser known figures such as Marita Bonner, Ann Spencer, and Gwendolyn Bennett. Finally, in order to contextualize these writers, she juxtaposes her analyses of their works with discussions of the lives, compositions, and/or performances of Bessie Smith and Josephine Baker. The result is a richly textured, nuanced study of all of her subjects. Wall's text is one of the first intellectual histories of twentieth-century black women writers; as such, it provides a model of historically grounded readings and sheds light on the way that these women became such mysteries. Organized around the motif of literal and metaphorical travel, Wall argues that "the journey" for most black women writers of the Renaissance "reflect[s] the sense of possibility, disappointment, and perseverance."

In the first chapter Wall explores the implications of Marita Bonnet's 1925 essay "On Being Young--A Woman--and Colored" as paradigmatic of the experiences of many of her female contemporaries:

Bonnet's essay anticipates the themes and metaphors that inform much of

the fiction written by women during the Renaissance. Like several of the

texts discussed in this study ... Bonner's essay images the consequences

of racial prejudice, gender bias, and class stratification in metaphors of

confinement and self-division. Moreover, "On Being Young--a

Woman--and Colored" defines as well major contrasts between the Harlem

Renaissance memorialized by male writers and remembered by women.

Wall convincingly argues that the paradigms set forth by Alain Locke's classic essay "The New Negro" and the generations of Renaissance scholarship that echo these paradigms are significantly altered when we are attentive to the lives and writings of the women of her study. Among these is the notion that Harlem was the principal setting of the Renaissance, or that many of the major participants were Southern migrants. Wall argues that Washington, D.C., the location of Alice Dunbar-Nelson's salon, was of equal importance. Second, she notes that periodization that marks the decade of the twenties as most significant in terms of literary production does so to the detriment of the major contributions of persons such as Fauset and Hurston, who published their major works long after the stock market crash. Instead, Wall suggests that the publication of two major anthologies--James Weldon Johnson's The Book of American Negro Poetry in 1922 and The Negro Caravan published in 1941 and edited by Sterling Brown, Arthur Davis, and Ulysses Lee are more significant markers in that both presented work by women poets, but each articulates very different critical stances toward their work. For Wall, the devaluation of women's works began with the introductory essays and headnotes found in the very influential Negro Caravan. Here we find one of the first attempts to "relegate women writers to the `Rear Guard,' "where they remained until the black feminist recovery of them in the past twenty years. While Wall does not initiate the debate around locale and periodization, her insertion of gender forces us to reconsider both.

Wall's second chapter on Jessie Redmon Fauset is perhaps one of the most significant contributions of the entire book. Educated at Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania, well-read, well-traveled, and fluent in French, Jessie Redmon Fauset is one of the most misunderstood figures of the Renaissance. Wall's work shows her to have been an extremely influential literary editor, nurturer of young talent, important novelist, essayist, translator, and all-around woman of letters. Her Crisis columns from places as diverse as Algiers and Paris as well as her translations of stories written by African and Caribbean authors contributed to the journal's cosmopolitan sophistication and its Pan-Africanist cultural politics. Wall tells us that "travel was one means through which Fauset broadened her experience and her perspective." It seems to have been a means of broadening the perspective of the well-respected journal as well.

Fauset was also a committed social activist. According to Wall, Fauset's tireless efforts on behalf of a young black woman who had been denied housing at Smith College and whose case was taken up by the NAACP "may have led to her being considered for NAACP Secretary in 1916."

After situating Fauset in the context of her birth, her Philadelphia and Methodist upbringing, and her involvement in African American literary and political culture, Wall goes on to provide some of the most informed readings of Fauset's corpus that we have. She does not limit herself to the novels, but explores the essays, poems, and columns in order to note continuities and discrepancies across time and genre. Most importantly, while Wall argues for a reconsideration of Fauset's importance as a writer, she is not uncritically celebratory. She demonstrates the way that Fauset's cautiousness and class consciousness limited her ability to create rich, complex black characters who are not of her own class. This is most evident in Fauset's last novel, The Chinaberry Tree: "Never an intrepid traveler, she does not even try to visit the inner life of an illiterate, southern black woman." Similarly, according to Wall, Fauset proves unwilling to explore the motivations of her self-hating, middle-class Olivia in Comedy: American Style as well. Wall argues that "to do so ... would have meant confronting persistent contradictions in [Fauset's] ideology and her art.... Several of these concern race." Fauset could not escape the contradictions of her own position as a "race woman" and her own sensibilities inherited from centuries of intraracial class and color prejudices.

Of the three writers whose work she examines in detail, only Hurston appears to have circumvented many of the confines set in her way. In both her life and her work, Hurston was better able to navigate both the literary and geographical terrains of her time. Wall notes, "The sources of Hurston's imagination and the texture of her prose are radically different from those of her female contemporaries.... Zora Neale Hurston was the one literary woman who was free to embrace Bessie Smith's art, who was also heir to the legacy evoked in the blues." And yet, even Hurston was almost lost to us.

What is most painful about Wall's accounts of these women is the extent to which recognition of their accomplishments was so often undermined by their powerful male contemporaries and those of the generations of writers who followed them and allowed them to remain in obscurity. Speaking of Fauset, Wall notes that, as early as 1924, Fauset knew that "whatever she had done to produce [the Renaissance, she] would not have a starring role when ... [it] hit the big time."

In many ways, the book reads as a cautionary tale to those of us who have inherited their legacy. It is cautionary to us as critics in that it illustrates the continuing necessity of black feminist archival work, criticism, and theorizing. It is also cautionary to us as black women who write and whose efforts all too often remain marginal to mainstream intellectual production.

Women of the Harlem Renaissance allows us to appreciate each of these writers in her own context and to value the important interventions each attempted to make. The book helps set the terms for further analysis, discussion, and critique of their work. Finally, Wall reminds us that all of these writers "had to invent themselves at a time when the terms `black,' `woman,' and `artist' were never complementary." After Wall's book it will be difficult to claim that these three terms are contradictory. As if to ensure this, Wall leaves us with a gem of a primary bibliography that will surely be of use to scholars and students doing further research or those creating courses on the Harlem Renaissance, black women writers, American women writers, African American literature, or African American intellectual history. The bibliography is organized first by writer and, where appropriate, under each writer's name, by genre. In this way it illustrates the range of their writings as well as the range of venues in which they published. It serves as a testament to their legacy and as encouragement to those who follow.