 First edition | |
| Author | Jessie Redmon Fauset |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Novel |
| Publisher | Frederick A. Stokes |
Publication date | 1929 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral is a novel by Jessie Redmon Fauset first published in 1928. Written by an African-American woman who, during the 1920s, was the literary editor of The Crisis , it is often seen as an important contribution to the Harlem Renaissance. [1] [2] [3]
Overtly conventional through its employment of elements and techniques of traditional genres such as the romance or the fairy tale, Plum Bun at the same time transgresses these genres by its depiction, and critique, of racism, sexism and capitalism. The heroine, a young, light-skinned African-American woman called Angela Murray, leaves behind her past and passes for white in order to be able to attain fulfilment in life. Only after she has lived among white Americans does she find out that crossing the racial barrier is not enough for a woman like herself to realize her full potential. The detailed description of her coming of age makes Plum Bun a classic Bildungsroman .
Plum Bun, Fauset's second novel, was difficult to place; her first publisher Boni & Liveright, declined to publish it. Her agency, Brandt & Brandt eventually placed the book at the British publisher Charles Elkin Matthews in 1928, and Frederick A. Stokes published the US edition in 1929. [4] The title, Plum Bun, illustrates some of the forces which drive the novel's main character Angela Murray. The novel's epigraph quotes the nursery rhyme from which the title is taken: "To market, to market / to buy a plum bun / Home again, home again / Market is done". A plum bun itself, which may be similar to the English Chelsea Roll and the American Cinnamon Roll, is a sweet pastry made of white flour, in which deeply colored currants, raisins, or prunes (plums) are baked. The use of the term "plum bun" is also a sexual innuendo as a plum bun can also be read as "an attractive piece".
Angela must come to grips with her colored and white racial heritage, as well as with her femininity (stereotypically seen as sweetness), before she achieves psychological wholeness. Although African-American women were typed in popular song as "a little brown sugar" or a "jellyroll", [5] Angela had to cease thinking of herself as a purveyor of feminine sweetness for sale, and instead step into new roles with inherent value.
The novel's plot and characters include many autobiographical elements. In Fauset's actual family was part of the Philadelphia black middle class, and although well-respected and well-connected in the African-American community, they were prohibited from public places such as hospitals, restaurants and stores by widely accepted Jim Crow policies. [6] Other autobiographical elements include growing up in a suburb of Philadelphia, [7] being the only African-American student in a white school, [7] and discovering Philadelphia's racist policies for hiring public school teachers (a black teacher could not teach white students [7] ). Fauset, like her main characters, moved to Harlem during the peak of the Harlem Renaissance (in 1919 [7] ) and heard W. E. B. du Bois (in the novel he is named Van Meier [8] ) speak.
The novel's plot concerns two sisters, Virginia and Angela Murray, who grow up in Philadelphia in a home rich with African-American culture. Angela, like her mother Mattie, is light skinned and able to “pass” in white society, while Virginia and her father Junius's darker complexion places them on the other side of the color line. Virginia grows up refusing to bow to racist pressures; rather she accepts who she is. Angela, on the other hand, tries repeatedly to gain acceptance by assuming a white mask, but each time it seems that success and friendship are hers, her ethnicity is exposed and she is stripped of everything she cares about.
The deaths of her parents and the racism of Philadelphia society cause Angela to leave for New York City, where she decides to fully hide her African-American heritage. She gains acceptance in an elite artistic circle perhaps inspired by the 1920s Greenwich Village avant-garde. She begins a romantic relationship with Roger, a young white man who seems to move among New York's "Four Hundred", the social elite. Their relationship, however, is based in several deceptions. In one of the novel's most important scenes, Angela's sister is newly arrived at Pennsylvania Station from Philadelphia. Angela, who has come to the station to meet her sister, sees her lover. Aware that his racism will cause him to reject her, she brushes by her darker-complected sister, leaving her standing alone in the crowd. Angela's and Roger's deceptions of each other and of themselves lie also in their use of each other for personal gain: Angela seeks Roger's financial comfort; Roger seeks the convenience of sex without having to introduce his new find to his father, whose deep concern is for his future daughter-in-law's pedigree. Roger's abandonment of Angela, the unmasking, to Angela, of his solely sexual intentions, and the mistreatment of Miss Powell, a young artist of African-American heritage, lead Angela to reveal her racial heritage and lose her standing with several of her acquaintances. However, true friends and her sister urge her to travel to Paris to become an artist, and Anthony, a fellow art school classmate of mixed heritage who watched his father die under the hands of a racist mob in the South, declares his love for Angela. It seems at the end, Anthony and Angela may come to terms with America's racist past and their own brighter future.
The subtitle of the book, A Novel without a Moral, can be understood as follows: once Angela leaves Philadelphia for New York and a traditional African-American home for life on her own, her morality is no longer clearly defined for her. The “moral to the story” is slowly created for the reader and for the main characters as Angela learns and understands the life lessons that New York affords her.
The Crisis is the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). It was founded in 1910 by W. E. B. Du Bois (editor), Oswald Garrison Villard, J. Max Barber, Charles Edward Russell, Kelly Miller, William Stanley Braithwaite, and Mary Dunlop Maclean. The Crisis has been in continuous print since 1910, and it is the oldest Black-oriented magazine in the world. Today, The Crisis is "a quarterly journal of civil rights, history, politics and culture and seeks to educate and challenge its readers about issues that continue to plague African Americans and other communities of color."
Jessie Redmon Fauset was an editor, poet, essayist, novelist, and educator. Her literary work helped sculpt African-American literature in the 1920s as she focused on portraying a true image of African-American life and history. Her black fictional characters were working professionals which was an inconceivable concept to American society during this time. Her story lines related to themes of racial discrimination, "passing", and feminism.
Dorothy West was an American novelist short-story writer, and magazine editor associated with the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement in the 1920s and 1930s that celebrated black art, literature, and music. She was one of the few Black women writers to be published in major literary magazines in the 1930s and 1940s. She is best known for her 1948 novel The Living Is Easy, about the life of an upper-class black family and their attempts to climb the social ladder. She also explored the complexities of the black experience in the United States in short stories and essays that challenged stereotypes and explored themes such as race, class, and gender. Her work paved the way for future generations of African-American writers, and her legacy continues to inspire and influence writers today.
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The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural revival of African-American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics and scholarship centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, spanning the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after The New Negro, a 1925 anthology edited by Alain Locke. The movement also included the new African-American cultural expressions across the urban areas in the Northeast and Midwest United States affected by a renewed militancy in the general struggle for civil rights, combined with the Great Migration of African-American workers fleeing the racist conditions of the Jim Crow Deep South, as Harlem was the final destination of the largest number of those who migrated north.
Arthur Huff Fauset was an American civil rights activist, anthropologist, folklorist, and educator. Born in Flemington, New Jersey, he grew up in Philadelphia, where he attended Central High School.
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Kevin De Ornellas, "Plum Bun", in Elizabeth A. Beaulieu, ed, Writing African American Women: An Encyclopedia of Literature by and about Women of Color, 2 volumes (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2006), volume 2, pp. 714-5. 9780313331961