Abstract
This essay contends that the writings of Jessie Redmon Fauset, styled the ‘midwife of the Harlem Renaissance’ by her protégé Langston Hughes, reveal that one of nineteenth-century medievalism’s ghosts is the utilization of the medieval European idyll for the radically creative ends of racial justice. Focusing on one of her early short writings and taking up the critical reception of her work, including its denigration in the mid-20th century, this article examines Fauset’s uses of popular nineteenth-century medievalist literature and contextualizes it within the medievalizing discourses of her contemporaries and interlocutors. The essay argues that Fauset’s work posits a literary modernism in which medievalism is a central component that underwrites African-American writers’ claim to equal ownership of the entire American literary canon, including its supposed homogeneously white English pre-history. The article concludes that Fauset’s literary medievalism offers valuable lessons for 21st-century medievalisms’ engagements with racial ideology.
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Notes
The tradition of Fauset criticism resonates with the criticism of Phillis Wheatley’s poetry nearly two centuries prior. Unable to square Wheatley’s poetic talents with the racist philosophies about Africans’ rational capacities (such as those of Kant and Hegel) to which he subscribed, Thomas Jefferson writes: ‘Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry. [. . .] Religion, indeed, has produced a Phyllis Whately [sic]; but it could not produce a poet.’ Wheatley’s work was worthy of comment yet ‘below the dignity of criticism’ (Jefferson, 1788, 150). Treatment of her work offers an early paradigm for similarly backhanded mid- and later 20th-century treatments of Fauset’s.
I borrow the term ‘success’ from Jonathan Ullyot’s treatment of the argument that modernism is characterized by texts’ ‘failures’ to conform to previous literary models or to perform narrative coherence (Ullyot, 2015, 1–5).
Including the tradition of houris, or ‘beautiful women with large eyes whom no man has touched,’ speaks to the ancientness of conventions all too often considered European. The houri predates Judeo-Christianity and is so old that it is ‘among the oldest of all myths and traditions, suggesting that it may have originated in extremely ancient times, when the Indo-European peoples still inhabited the uplands of Tibet or some neighbouring region’ (Schulze-Belli, 2007, 214).
Ullyot argues that these and similar modernist texts are ‘failed or “stalled” versions of the Grail romance’; they conform to modernism in a ‘failure aesthetics’ comprised of the collapse of previous aesthetic models and the conservation, or continual representation, of the collapse (Ullyot, 2015, 1–9, esp. 1–2).
Groome reprints Charles Lamb’s letter noting the worth of the poem after its initial publication in Hone’s 1831 edition. He also includes the letter published alongside the poem in the Athenaeum newspaper on 9 July 1831. Though the poem was originally published anonymously, Groome reprints the 1889 argument that the poem was written by Fitzgerald.
Fauset’s position is feminist. For Fauset’s feminism, see McDowell (1990), Garcia (2010), and Tarver (2006). For a treatment of the ways Fauset’s feminism was unsuccessful, see Edwards (2003, 138). For how the intersection of her feminism with race and class has drawn the ire of critics, see Kuenz (1999, 89–90).
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Whitaker, C.J. B(l)ack home in the Middle Ages: Medievalism in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s ‘My House and a Glimpse of My Life Therein’. Postmedieval 10, 162–175 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-019-00127-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-019-00127-x