The Search for Beautiful Experience in Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun

Abstract

This chapter is devoted to Jessie Fauset’s most famous novel, Plum Bun (1929). The chapter investigates the ways the protagonist of the work, Angela Murray, embodies creative democratic oppositions to the routinization of experience. For Angela, encounters with racism, sexism, and essentialism produce cyclical patterns of experience that spawn the same emotions over and over, namely anger, bitterness, and fear. Angela determines to break out of this pattern by passing in predominantly white settings, but her materialistic goals germinate new circular modes of experience. At the same time, she gains renewed understandings of herself as an African American woman by pursuing experiences outside the parameters of this identity. Over time, she is able to disrupt repetitious cycles of experience by marshalling her evolving self-conception into attempts to forge communal interconnections with other African American women.