Vision to Visionary: The New Negro Woman as Cultural Worker in Jessie Redmon Fauset's Plum Bun

Vision to Visionary: The New Negro Woman as Cultural Worker in Jessie Redmon Fauset'sPlum BunAuthor(s): Susan TomlinsonSource: Legacy, Vol. 19, No. 1 (2002), pp. 90-97Published by: University of Nebraska PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25679417 .

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Vision to Visionary: The New Negro Woman as Cultural Worker

in Jessie Redmon Fauset's Plum Bun

Susan Tomlinson Fairfield University

Yes, she has arrived. Like her white sister, she is the product of profound and vital changes in our economic

mechanism, wrought mainly by the World War and its aftermath. Along the entire gamut of social, eco

nomic and political attitudes, the New Negro Woman, with her head erect and spirit undaunted is resolutely

marching toward the liberation of her people in particular and the human race in general.

Editorial, The Messengers "New Negro Woman" issue (1923)

In June 1924, three months after the publica tion of There Is Confusion, Jessie Redmon

Fauset confided in her friend and erstwhile pro

tege Langston Hughes that she planned to

begin working on her next novel the following month (24 June 1924). From Paris four months

later, she reported her difficult progress with

this second novel, a project radically different

from her earlier prose: "I like the stuff of my next novel?I have a good title for it too?but

I am troubled as I have never been before with

form. Somehow I've never thought much about

form before except for verse. But now I think I

am over zealous?I write and destroy and

smoke and get nervous. I hate these false starts"

(8 October 1924). The resulting novel, Plum

Bun, represents a struggle with form on several

fronts. As a feminist, anti-racist project, the

novel explores the intersections of race and

gender constructions of black and white Amer

ican women. Written at the height of both the

LEGACY, VOL. 19, NO. 1, 2002, COPYRIGHT ? 2003

THE UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS, LINCOLN, NE

New Negro and New Woman artistic and polit ical movements, it represents the aims, out

comes, and implications of both movements.

While Fauset and her text occupy the intersec

tion of the New Negro and the New Woman, both author and text represent the limitations

of each movement completely to represent its

constituency. At the same time as Fauset and

Plum Bun demonstrate a congress between two

progressive cultural movements sharing a his

torical moment, they also underscore the

mutual exclusivity and even the contradictions

inherent in both movements.

Formally Plum Bun reconciles the New

Negro and New Woman movements in a pro

tagonist who embodies both?not, however, at

the same time. Not until the very end of the

novel, when Angela Murray embraces and

trumpets her racial identity and devotes herself

to her artistic career in a Europe removed from

the cultural sites of both movements in the

United States, do both gender and racial

advancement coalesce in the unified female

subject. Fauset unites the New Negro and the



New Woman in a character denned by her

inability to recognize two aspects of her iden

tity, two cultural desires, at the same time. In

teasing out the intersection of race and class

through a character whose racial passing

bypasses that intersection of identity, Fauset's

novel implies their irreconcilability. Hazel Carby has analyzed the function of the

mulatto figure in African American literature as a "narrative device of mediation" between

the two races and "an expression of the rela

tionship between the races" (89). As a passing novel Plum Bun implies the color line's false

distinction at the same time as it redefines the

terms of its binary. In contrast to Heba Jan nath's image of the mulatto's passing "like a

shuttle . . . back and forth between the two

races, spiritually and physically weaving them

together" (61), Angela's fractured identity rep resents the racial apartheid reaffirmed by her

social complicity.

Angela's childhood forays into white wom

anhood with her mother produce a superficial notion of the life in which she later immerses

herself, a life whose ethos is limited to stereo

types of women as decorous consumers.

Angela and Mattie Murray spend their passing

Saturdays shopping and lunching in Philadel

phia's elite shops and hotel dining rooms, and Angela learns in those spaces that "the

great rewards of life?riches, glamour, plea sure,?are for white-skinned people only" (Plum Bun 17). Unlike her hardworking, pur

poseful sister Virginia (who spends her Satur

days exploring historic districts with their

father), Angela seeks an identity based on the "fashionable and idle elegance" she learns on

those excursions (18):

Angela had no high purpose in life; unlike her sister Virginia, who meant some day to invent

a marvelous method for teaching the pianoforte,

Angela felt no impulse to discover, or to per

fect. True she thought she might become even

tually a distinguished painter, but that was

because she felt within herself an ability to

depict which as far as it went was correct and

promising. Her eye for line and for expression

was already good and she had a nice feeling for

color. Moreover she possessed the instinct for

self-appraisal which taught her that she had

much to learn. And she was sure that the

knowledge once gained would flower in her

case to perfection. But her gift was not for her

the end of existence; rather, it was an adjunct to

a life which was to know light, pleasure, gaiety,

and freedom. (13)

That Angelas creativity is a thing apart, a dis

traction from her central ambition, demon strates the extent to which she embraces the

codes of white femininity which her New

(white) Woman peers are at that moment

rejecting. Angela's deployment of her whiteness

passes her from one form of oppression to

another. Her unwitting choice of female

domestication as an improvement over racial

exclusion exposes the political blind spot that

renders black female subjectivity invisible.

After her parents' deaths, Angela relaunches

herself on a racialized New York landscape that

emerges as a metaphor for her splintered iden

tity. Fauset portrays 1920s Harlem, behind its

glossy offensive-defensive facades, as a site of womb-like safety and nurturance. Just as the

imposingly classical facade of Anthony Cross's

brownstone belies its shabby and uncomfort able interior, so is Harlem a "deceptive palace" of vice and thrill that masks what Plum Bun

posits as its familiar reality (277). Fauset locates her protagonist both geographically and psy

chologically on the other side of town from this Mecca of the New Negro.1 Angela discovers Harlem's attractions as a visiting white woman

and comes to appreciate its cultural familiarity as she gradually reincorporates her racial back

ground into her identity. Just as Fauset locates Virginia in a young pro

fessional Harlem setting as a natural extension of and surrogate for her family?a space which

Susan Tomlinson 91



Angela herself eventually longs for?so, too, does she place Angela in a culturally and his

torically marked geographical setting. If

Harlem represents a racial center, Union Square is Angela's artistic focal point. In her early days in New York, Angela gravitates to this bustling and rapidly changing commercial center and

spends hours watching the people whose lives

have taken a wrong turn and left them stranded at the crossroads of pre-Depression-era New

York:

It was Spring and the Square was full of rusty

specimens of mankind who sat on the benches,

as did Angela herself, for hours at a stretch, as

though they thought that the invigorating air

and the mellow sun would work some magical

burgeoning on their garments such as was

worked on the trees. But though these latter

changed, the garments changed not, nor did

their owners. They remained the same, droop

ing, discouraged down and outers. "I am seeing

life," thought Angela, "this is the way people live," and never realized that some of these peo

ple looking curiously, speculatively at her won

dered what had been her portion to bring her

thus early to this unsavoury company. (89)

While Angela's identification with these people remains constant, the meanings of that self

recognition change with her growing sophisti cation, social awareness and self-knowledge.

Angela, unaware of their circumstances, sees

herself in Union Square's indigents and gradu

ally recognizes her own lonely, directionless sta

sis mirrored in the expressions of people whose

despair she had previously objectified. Harlem in Plum Bun is synonymous with the

New Negro, embodied in Virginia who, shunned by her sister at the railway station, knows to head for the 135th Street Y. Angela lives

in bohemian Greenwich Village but spends her

private time in and draws her artistic inspira tion from the area associated most specifically with the New Woman. Without specifically

naming it, Fauset places Angela at the center of

the group of painters known as the Fourteenth

Street School. Deborah Barker, the first critic to

analyze Plum Bun's specific reference to the

Fourteenth Street School movement, argues that in Fauset's positioning of her artist protag onist within a historic artistic movement,

"[w]hat emerges from the intersection of these

social, racial, and aesthetic discourses, but what none is able fully to represent, is what might be

called the New Negro Woman Artist" (163). The

Fourteenth Street School movement, which

flourished in the 1920s and 1930s, reinscribed

classical figurative painting on an American

cultural landscape. The artists rented studio

space in and drew inspiration from the Union

Square area, which John Hart called "a polyglot of nationalities, a clash of ideologies, a roar of

violence and chaotic action; in its honest and

genuine concern for betterment it had always been American to the core_Union Square is

the past forever being overthrown; the future

forever being coaxed into existence. It is the

vortex of change, it is America in transition

(qtd. in Todd 85). The subjects of such painters as Isabel Bishop and Raphael Soyer included street vendors, resting workers, and, very fre

quently, window-shopping working women.

The artists represented in working-class people,

particularly sales-girls and office workers, the

dignity, complexity, and grace of classical god desses or European royalty.

Fauset's placement of Angela at the center of

the Fourteenth Street movement is supremely

suggestive. Angela's identification with the

artistic movement is defined by her own move

ment (development) within Plum Bun as a text, her movement (emergence) as an artist, and her

movement (mediation) between her two roles, Fourteenth Street artist and Fourteenth Street

"type." An implicit aim of the Fourteenth Street

School was to represent the humanity of an

alienated working class and the increasing social commodification which contributed to

that alienation. Throughout much of the novel,

particularly the section "Plum Bun," Angela

92 legacy: volume 19 no. 1 2002



resembles a figure in Soyer's Window Shoppers;

steeped in the very ideologies of white Ameri

can womanhood which exclude her by class

(and, for Angela, race), Angela covets the prod ucts in the commercial marketplace that will

increase her value on the sexual marketplace. As

she develops an artistic vision and concomi

tantly a self-definition, Angela changes role and moves from the front of the canvas to behind it, from subject to artist, from the gazed upon to

the gazer, the visionary.

Soyer and Bishop explored through visual

media the issue of an emergent urban white

female labor force. Ellen Wiley Todd's analysis of the New Woman in the Fourteenth Street

School examines the artists' shared and diver

gent visions of this new American subject:

Raphael Soyer addressed the problems and

Isabel Bishop the possibilities of feminized

occupations. Soyer's shopgirls, working-class

figures, represent alienated female labor, qui

etly interrogating a social order that systemat

ically ignored their plight. Bishop's images of

office workers carve out a transitional space...

in the public arena where women were most on

display. Unlike Soyer's, her pictures tend to blur

class distinctions, thus perpetuating the myth

of access to individual female success. (314)

Fauset positions squarely between those poles an artist protagonist who articulates and per forms their school as a psychological and social

movement. Angela's evolving subjectivity and her resulting, award-winning work embody an

organic feminist project. Rather than renounc

ing the commodification of women, she natu

rally outgrows it.

The "Plum Bun" section opens with Angela, spinning fantasies of a fairy-tale rescue on a

Union Square bench. Fauset depicts Angela as

no more a simple gold-digging adventuress than Soyer's Shop Girls or Bishop's Tidying Up represent cheapness and vulgarity. Paintings of the Fourteenth Street School neither idealize nor demean the New Woman; rather, as Todd

points out, their stark realism and psychologi cal suggestiveness foreground the women mar

ginalized by the "New Woman" myth and most

directly affected by the changing gender roles:

At a time of feminist conflict and heterosexual

and domestic retrenchment, the Fourteenth

Street School artists were among the few easel

painters to acknowledge woman's growing par

ticipation in public life. The spaces of con

sumption and work in which women appeared

signified to the liberal mainstream viewer both

the progress and the integrity of democratic

society. At a time of economic crisis and social

concern, the artists broadened their viewers'

social world, inscribing class and sometimes

ethnicity into their female imagery. In addition

to suggesting possibilities for women, they

occasionally staged quiet inquiries into the cir cumstances in which women shopped and

worked. (316)

Fauset inscribes Angela in the discourse of

Fourteenth Street as a non-WASP white work

ing woman, an individual member of a com

munity in transition. If the New Woman's

associative vestiges are sexual experimentation, bobbed hair, and taped breasts, its culturally obscured reality, then as now, remains under

paid women rendered by their fantasies com

plicit in their exploitation. Like her peers,

Angela aspires to a life of comfort and luxury and is defined by her embrace of and exclusion from those myths.

But over the course of the novel, Angela develops an artistic eye and complicates the reader s gaze on its subject. Having broken up with Roger, her racist white lover, distanced herself from their shared friends, and exhausted her savings, Angela finds both solace and a means to earn money in her art and turns nat

urally to her favored themes?psychological studies of the people of Fourteenth Street:

She remembered the people in Union Square on whom she had spied so blithely when she

Susan Tomlinson 93



had first come to New York. Then she had

thought of them as being "down and out," mere

idlers, good for nothing. It had not occurred to

her that their chief disaster might be loneli ness? And between them and herself she was

able to detect a terrifying relationship. She still

carried her notebook, made sketches, sitting

watching them and jotting down a line now

and then when their vacant, staring eyes were

not fixed upon her. Once . . . she would have

said with a shrug: "Oh they wouldn't mind,

they're too far gone for that." But since then her

sympathy and knowledge had waxed. How

fiercely she would have rebelled had anyone from a superior social plane taken her for copy! (239-40)

Angela's work is both the measure and the per formance of her evolving identity. By identify

ing Angela by her very specific cultural work, Fauset emphasizes that work's relevance and

gives as particular a cultural reference as 1920s Harlem. Fauset does not depict Angela's life as

shuttling from Harlem to "the rest of New York" or even just downtown; rather, she locates

Angela in a specifically white but ethnically and

socially heterogeneous cultural space which is

enriched by her presence and aestheticized

through her work. Quite on her own Angela finds a cultural niche which she ultimately broadens to include herself, a black woman. As an ingenue who deliberately launches herself on the marriage market at its most commercial

level, later as an experienced woman who

knows firsthand the dehumanizing price of that

game, and finally as an artist who seeks to artic

ulate the individual in relation to fate and to re

humanize individual members of the urban

mob, Angela herself comes to embody a crucial

theme of the Fourteenth Street School: the

changing role of women in society and the

material and psychological effects of that

change. Fauset's inscription of her protagonist as a member of the Fourteenth Street School

produces a construction of New Womanhood

that not only includes black women artists but

which is to some extent determined, defined, and articulated by a black woman artist. Fauset

demonstrates through her character's cultural

work that the black woman offers unique and

essential perspectives on the changing roles of women.

Angelas professionally successful and per

sonally satisfying career alters the downtown

artistic scene portrayed in Plum Bun; Fauset

makes an art for Angela that allows that pro

tagonist to make a lasting difference in her cul

tural moment by changing the very terms by which that fictionalized moment is represented and remembered. In her own artistic project, however, Fauset's representation of the New

Negro Woman remains ambivalent, particu

larly in the area of sexual autonomy.2 In the fig ure of Paulette Lister, Fauset takes the

opportunity to explore female sexual auton

omy more radically and with fewer political ramifications than in Angela's depiction. Plum

Bun merges the New Negro and New Woman

phenomena while representing the inherent

and external limitations of each movement.

Upon arriving in New York, Angela cloaks her

self in a New (white) Woman persona?com

plete with bachelorette apartment, art classes,

free-thinking friends, and eventually extramar

ital sex?without believing the hype. In the dis

illusioned aftermath of her affair with Roger,

Angela embraces the old-fashioned values she

learned on Opal Street; this knowledge offers

her the perspective from which to examine the

subjectivity of her friend Paulette, the text's

prototypical New Woman.

Like Vera Manning in There Is Confusion, Paulette's subjectivity haunts both the text and

its protagonist. As a secondary character, one of

Angela's artistic set, Paulette dominates, even

steals her scenes, as much because of her char

acteristic audacity as her thematic roguishness. Just as her insistent sexuality tests gender boundaries, so do the ideological questions her

representation poses raze her formal function.




Like There Is Confusion and the novels to follow, Plum Bun represents a struggle between formal

and material integrity. Paulette cannot just rep resent the New Woman; her character must

provide an analysis of New Womanhood, a sub

ject in herself.

Angelas sense of sexual propriety, derived as

much from the moral conventions of her

upbringing as from her investment in the mar

riage economy, is challenged by her friendship with Paulette, a struggling artist who becomes

Angelas role model of the New Woman. "She was so alive, so intense, so interested, if she were

interested, that all her nerves, her emotions

even were enlisted to accomplish the end which

she might have in view" (100). Fauset represents Paulette through Angelas gaze in androgynous terms; her fragility is more childlike than femi

nine, and her appetite startles Angela in its

"working man" heartiness (104). But perhaps most suggestive to questions of egoism are

Paulette's gendering of her own traits, which are revealed when Angela compliments her new

friend on her "conspicuous" femininity:

To her surprise Paulette resented this last state

ment. "There is a great deal of the man about

me. I've learned that a woman is a fool who lets

her femininity stand in the way of what she

wants. I've made a philosophy of it. I see what

I want; I use my wiles as a woman to get it, and

I employ the qualities of men, tenacity and

ruthlessness, to keep it. And when I'm through

with it, I throw it away just as they do. Conse

quently I have no regrets and no encum

brances." (105)

Ambition and its means are gendered male,

coquettishness and submission female, but Paulette's proclaimed ability to step outside

social constructions and use the devices of both

categories to fulfill her individualist desires de

essentializes the gender roles through which

Angela seeks to reconstruct herself. Paulette

eats, drinks, and smokes lustily; to Angelas "amazement" (104), she also lets her overnight

guests leave their razors and brushes in her

bathroom. This friendship reveals to Angela the

possibilities for women's liberation at the same

time as it represents the line Angelas individual

morality draws.

Paulette's sexual curiosity about the promi nent black lecturer Van Meier also provides the

text's explicit representation of an implicit cul

tural desire. While Van Meier's Harlem oration

inspires in Angela racial pride, sustenance, and

"thickness of life" (216), Paulette can experience Van Meier's vitality only in terms of his imag ined construction of and desire for her white

female privilege. "T gave him my prettiest smile,

grand white lady making up to an "exceptional

Negro" and he simply didn't see me; took my hand,?I did my best to make my grip a cling

ing one?and he passed me right along disen

gaging himself as cool as a cucumber and

making room for a lady of color.'" She finished

reflectively, "'I wonder what he would be like

alone'" (220). Just as Van Meier disengages him

self from Paulette's cringe-making flirtation, so

does the text disengage itself from the ideolog ical constructions of racialized desire and envy. Paulette mistakenly assumes that as a "grand white lady" she might gain intellectual and even

sexual access to this most prominent of black

men; through her sexualizing gaze she objecti fies him and erases his political and intellectual

self-projection. Fauset inscribes a possibility erased by the dominant construction: black indifference to white interest. Paulette's come

on reduces Van Meier to a sexual challenge; vis

iting him later in his office, she is hustled out of the building. Fauset portrays Paulette's anec

dote as embarrassing to all her friends; the woman's own lack of embarrassment embodies the depths of what Fauset represents over and over as white self-absorption.3

Fauset opens her female characters' dressing tables and medicine chests and usually reveals bath salts and cold creams; Paulette's vanity table?her vanity?is her unapologetic display of her lovers' masculine accoutrements. Angela's

Susan Tomlinson 95



astonishment at Paulette's lifestyle demon strates the degree to which the protagonist's definitions of liberation transcend race but stop at gender:

Certainly, Angela thought, she was in a new

world and with new people. Beyond question some of the coloured people of her acquain

tance must have lived in a manner which would

not bear inspections, but she could not think of one who would thus have discussed it as calmly with either friend or stranger. Wondering what

it would be like to conduct oneself absolutely

according to one's own laws, she turned into

the dark little vestibule on Jayne Street. (107)

Angela's need to read Paulette's irreverence

toward her reputation through a racialized lens

represents Fauset's commentary on female sex

uality as still a red zone in African American lit

erature and middle-class culture.

Her disastrous relationship with Roger and

her emerging love for Anthony awaken Angela not only to her own sexual subjectivity but also

to the societal and individual barriers to com

plete sexual autonomy. Through the gaze of a

mature protagonist who has crossed the line of

female sexual propriety and discovered

through that transgression and its price her own subjectivity, Fauset teases out the individ

ual and political potentials of New Woman

hood, as Angela measures her own capacity for

independence against her erstwhile New

Woman role model. The text resanctifies mar

riage from the other side, as an institution

which the whole woman makes, as opposed to

that which makes the woman whole. The text

reinvests marriage with an intrinsic value

rather than its market value through a charac

ter who learns through experience, not mythol

ogy, its "real" meaning:

Until she had met Roger she had not thought much about the institution [of marriage] except as an adventure in romance or as a means to an

end; in her case the method of achieving the kind

of existence which once had been her ideal. But

now she saw it as an end in itself; for women cer

tainly; the only, the most desirable and natural

end. From this state a gifted, an ambitious

woman might reach forth and acquit herself well

in any activity. But marriage must be there first,

the foundation, the substratum. Of course there

were undoubtedly women who, like men, took

love and marriage as the sauce of existence and

their intellectual interests as the main dish. Wit

ness, for instance, Paulette. . . . Paulette might

vary her lovers but she never varied in the man

ifestation of her restless, clever energy.... But this

was Paulette, a remarkable personage, a woman

apart. But for most women there must be the

safety, the assurance, of relationship that mar

riage affords. Indeed, most women must be able

to say as did men, "You are mine," not merely, "I

am yours." (274-75)

This possessive shift marks also the shift in sub

ject and object as the woman becomes in mar

riage a possessor of, parallel to, her husband.

Angela recognizes and embraces her own

desire, here for marriage, and thereby her own

subjectivity. But Paulette remains the excess of

this epiphany, the riddle, the unanswered, tex

tually unanswerable question. In leaving unre

solved not only Paulette's fate but also her

meaning, her place in the sexual economy, Fauset leaves open the potential for female sex

ual autonomy. Paulette stands as a representa

tion of a woman living, even thriving, outside

sexual convention but very much within the

text's code of acceptability.

Angela's anxiety toward her white friend's sex

uality suggests that despite her own individual

ism and desire to break with her racial past, her

sexuality is bound to and by the morality of racial

uplift. Concurrent with the white female egoist's

rejection of chastity codes is the New (Negro) woman's desire for inclusion in its definition of

female; the ideology which upheld white women

as virtuous, black women as licentious, was being

challenged with both sides demanding the right




to define their sexuality, the one as sexually autonomous, the other as potentially chaste, nei

ther as sexually objectified. As a middle-class

black woman brought up to be conscious of her

sexual stereotyping and now passing into a com

munity as a bohemian white woman struggling to overcome the opposite side of this objectifica tion, Angela embodies the convergence of two

conflicting feminist projects whose shared aim is a woman's control over her body and her destiny.

NOTES

1.1 borrow this phrase, of course, from the special

Survey Graphic issue (March 1925) entitled "Harlem, Mecca of the New Negro."

2. For an invaluable analysis of this theme in

Fauset's work, see McDowell.

3. Fauset's suspicion of white interest in Harlem

and in all things black is well documented. In his auto

biography, Langston Hughes contrasts Fauset's gen

teel parties with the louche Harlem gatherings he

clearly preferred. "White people were seldom present

there unless they were very distinguished white peo

ple, because Jessie Fauset did not feel like opening her

home to mere sightseers, or faddists momentarily in

love with Negro life" (247). And in an earlier letter to

Hughes, Fauset voices her suspicions about Carl Van

Vechten and other Negrophiles: "I don't know what

his motives maybe for attending and making possible these mixed parties. But I do know that the motives of

some of the other pale-faces will not bear inspection"

("Tuesday"). In Plum Buns Harlem lecture scene

Fauset depicts as suspect not only Angela's friends but

also Angela herself, whose specular consumption of

the black faces and voices around her differs from the

others' only in her remembered childhood familiarity

with their colors and cadences.

WORKS CITED

Barker, Deborah. Aesthetics and Gender in American

Literature: Portraits of the Woman Artist. Lewis

burg: Bucknell UP, 2000.

Carby, Hazel. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emer

gence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New

York: Oxford UP, 1987.

Editorial. Messenger 5 (1923): 757.

Fauset, Jessie Redmon. Letter to Langston Hughes. 24

June 1924. Langston Hughes Papers. James Wel

don Johnson Memorial Collection, Beinecke Rare

Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. -. Letter to Langston Hughes. 8 Oct. 1924.

Langston Hughes Papers. James Weldon Johnson

Memorial Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and

Manuscript Library, Yale University. -. Letter to Langston Hughes. "Tuesday."

Langston Hughes papers. James Weldon Johnson

Memorial Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and

Manuscript Library, Yale University.

-. Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral. 1928.

Introd. Deborah E. McDowell. Boston: Beacon,

1990.

Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea. New York: Knopf,

1940.

Jannath, Heba. "America's Changing Color Line."

Negro: An Anthology. Ed. Nancy Cunard. 1934. Abr.

Ed. Hugh Ford. 1970. New York: Continuum, 1996.

60-66.

McDowell, Deborah E. "The Neglected Dimension

of Jessie Redmon Fauset." Conjuring: Black

Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition. Ed. Mar

jorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers. Bloomington:

Indiana UP, 1985. 86-104.

Todd, Ellen Wiley. The "New Woman" Revised: Paint

ing and Gender Politics on Fourteenth Street.

Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.

Susan Tomlinson 97



Documents

Vision to Visionary: The New Negro Woman as Cultural Worker in Jessie Redmon Fauset's Plum Bun