Plum Bun by Jessie Redmon Fauset

First published: 1928

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: From 1900 to the 1920’s

Locale: Philadelphia and New York City, specifically Greenwich Village and Harlem

Principal Characters:

• Angela Murray, the central figure, a young black woman who can pass as white and who changes her name to Angele Mory
• Virginia (Jinny) Murray, her younger sister, who has brown skin
• Roger Fielding, a rich white man who, thinking that Angela is white, wants her to be his mistress
• Anthony Cross, a sensitive black man who can pass as white but chooses not to, and who is in love with Angela
• Rachel Powell, a young black woman who is a fellow art student of Angela
• Martha Burden, a young white woman who is a friend and fellow art student of Angela
• Junius, and
• Mattie Murray, the parents of Angela and Virginia; the father is dark-skinned; the mother can pass as white; both die early in the novel

The Novel

Most of the narrative focuses on the life of Angela Murray, from her early childhood in a black, working-class area of Philadelphia to her late twenties, when she achieves some success as an artist in New York City. The novel is divided into five parts, each part based on one portion of the well-known children’s verse: “To Market, to Market/ To buy a Plum Bun;/ Home again, Home again,/ Market is done.”

In the first part, “Home,” the Murray family is introduced: a father, a mother, and two daughters, living on Opal Street in Philadelphia, a residential area of small, cramped houses. The race of the family immediately becomes an issue as the focus moves to Angela, the older daughter, who feels at a very young age the constraints placed upon her life by the fact of the family’s color. Angela, like her mother, has a “creamy complexion” and can pass as white; Virginia, like her father, is dark. Angela’s youthful yearning is for freedom, and she very soon realizes that she and her mother, when in the city alone, have access to the rewards of life, the glamours and pleasures of the marketplace, that are closed to her father and to Virginia. Mattie Murray often plays at being white and finds it a pleasant pastime, but she always professes her color when principle demands it. Angela, however, is keenly aware of the disadvantages of color and deeply hurt by the rejection of her white friends when they learn that she is black. The family is a close and caring one, but the tensions brought on by color are only relieved on Sunday afternoons, when they are alone and isolated from the color-conscious world of the city.

The two sisters are left truly alone, however, when both parents die within weeks of each other. The father dies of a heart attack, seemingly brought about by a racial confrontation in which he has to deny his husbandly relationship to Mattie. Mattie dies shortly thereafter, her heart more with her husband than with the tribulations of the world. Angela’s inheritance, three thousand dollars, is, she believes, her golden opportunity for freedom; she flees Philadelphia for the glamour and promise of New York City; Virginia decides to stay with her inheritance, the parents’ home, in Philadelphia.

In part 2, “Market,” Angela becomes an art student in New York City, changes her name, establishes herself in Greenwich Village, and, after some inner debate, determines, as she did in Philadelphia, that to refrain from announcing her race will afford her the freedom to reach for the riches and pleasures of life. In New York City, she can rely on the fact that nothing will betray her race; she can even hope to marry a rich white man who can give her the entrance into the good life she so desires.

Angela is drawn to the simplicity and the values of the other art students, particularly Martha Burden and Anthony Cross; she is especially fascinated by a young black woman, Rachel Powell, who quietly and persistently develops her art. The entrance of a rich young white man, Roger Fielding, is more alluring, however, and Angela determines to make him her husband. Roger is attracted to Angela and pursues her, but only with the intention of seducing her: He is not about to marry a girl out of his own class, even though she may be white. The climax of this section occurs when Virginia decides to come to New York; Angela, caught between Roger and her sister, denies the sisterly bond, initiating an estrangement with Virginia that will last until the closing section of the narrative. Virginia is always a reminder to Angela that, unlike her mother, Angela does not acknowledge her race when principle is involved.

In part 3, “Plum Bun,” Angela appears to be well on her way to achieving her goals—she has taken Roger as her lover with the hope of future marriage; she is persuading herself that she loves Roger and he her; she is succeeding in her art. Yet the life of her friends and her sister persists in intruding—Anthony Cross, who is in love with Angela, attracts her because of his sensitivity and his sympathy with the struggles of black people; Martha Burden offers her a straightforward, sensible view of the world, an open, honest friendship; Rachel Powell reflects a pride in race and in talent that in Angela’s own self has been submerged; Virginia’s delight in the life of Harlem, the sustenance and joy she draws from living among blacks, presents Angela with the reality of the happiness possible within the black community, a reality that Angela has evaded since her childhood. Roger grows restless under Angela’s possessiveness, and the third section of the novel closes with the end of their affair and Angela’s growing awareness of the superficiality of her desire to be white and rich and free.

In part 4, “Home Again,” Angela attempts a reconciliation with her sister and tries to recapture the closeness and the caring of their earlier life together. Angela is awakened, by a series of incidents involving her friends and Virginia, to the fact that she in her self-absorption has been blind to the developing selves of the others. Hoping to regain Anthony’s love, she learns, by his confession, that he is “colored,” and that he and her sister are engaged. This relationship has evolved over a period of time and has, as Anthony tells Angela, been partially a result of his own struggle to overcome the temptations of “passing” as white. Anthony, still thinking that Angela is white, is unaware of her relation to Virginia. Anthony’s confessions prompt an empathetic confession from Angela—she, too, is “colored.”

Angela’s awareness of the ironies of her life, her decision never to see Anthony again, her recognition of the strength of her race, as evidenced not only in Anthony, Virginia, and Rachel but also in her new perceptions of blacks who have moved briefly through her life, lead into the last section, “Market Is Done.” Here, Angela confronts her own racial consciousness and announces her heritage publicly, primarily to defend Rachel, who has been refused an art scholarship because of her color. Angela realizes how much her own scholarship was a matter of color and not simply of talent and so identifies herself with those who have been rejected, ostracized, and humiliated because of race. After a series of acknowledgments by all the major figures, Anthony and Angela are reunited, and Virginia returns to her first love, Martin, and to Philadelphia. There is common agreement that happiness cannot be achieved by a denial of one’s race and cultural heritage.

The Characters

The continuing focus on Angela allows the development of the duality in her character—her inner sympathy with her race, her external rejection of it. The characterization allows, on one hand, for the reader’s questioning of Angela’s materialistic external values and, on the other, for the reader’s understanding of the inner evolution of Angela’s self-esteem and race identification. Most of the other figures are, in some way, parallel with Angela, and they serve symbolically as reflections of various, often contradictory, aspects of Angela’s self. Mattie Murray, for example, is the Angela who can pass as white; Mattie has achieved a balance between this external “white” self and the black self she really is—Angela’s progress throughout the novel is to achieve that same kind of balance, only in a more complex world than that of her mother. Virginia is the external reminder to Angela of that black self that should be publicly acknowledged; Angela’s warring with Virginia is symbolic of the war between her own white and black selves. Anthony’s struggle with his racial consciousness parallels Angela’s, and his emotional confrontations with his own actions bring to life authentic passions in Angela. Thus, the black Anthony and the white Roger represent the conflict within Angela between a true expression of love for others and a false passion based on selfish ends. Rachel is symbolic of the unity possible between self and art, a unity that Angela must struggle to achieve. Angela’s art cannot be true until she is true to herself and to her race.

The characters are all established in realistic settings, in the context of descriptions of their homes, their clothing, and their physical interaction with the varied events and things of the marketplace. This depiction of the external world reinforces those aspects of character that are formed by physical and social realities. For example, Junius and Mattie’s withdrawal to their home and their eventual deaths reflect their decision to isolate themselves as much as possible from the pain that the larger society provides. The descriptions of Harlem and of the people actively and intensely involved in that bustling community help to reinforce the characterization of Virginia, who accepts her race and finds within it joy and affirmation. Throughout the novel, Angela’s developing character is reflected in the homes and apartments in which she lives—her sense of being cramped is reflected in the smallness of her room at home; the apartment rented by Roger is filled with material objects that have no human connection. The realistic description in the novel reflects how much the characters, and Angela particularly, are tied to the external world. Angela, Anthony, Virginia, and Rachel all achieve a sense of freedom and of freedom of choice once they have confronted truthfully the realities of a larger society that has defined their limitations and constricted their movement.

Critical Context

Plum Bun is generally considered to be one of Fauset’s best novels. Fauset, however, has been valued more for her social and journalistic contributions to the Harlem Renaissance than for the considerable literary and cultural value of her fiction. Her fiction has also been misjudged by those who claim that, as an upper-middle-class black woman, she had more sympathy for white American values than for the values of black Americans. A careful reading of Plum Bun reveals that Fauset is, indeed, in sympathy with black American values. Her point is that blacks in cities such as New York can find their identity only when they can work through the myths and social constructs of the dominant white culture. Fauset chose Angela rather than Virginia as her protagonist, not because she wanted to promote the values of the marketplace but because she wanted to depict both the internal and the external struggle that is often necessary in order to achieve black pride.

With the recent emphasis on feminist criticism, Fauset’s work is receiving the comprehensive attention it deserves. She is no longer dismissed as a writer who wanted, through the novel of manners, to promote the values of a white, class society. By focusing more on the techniques that Fauset used to present the struggle of her major women figures, contemporary critics can separate Fauset’s views from those of her characters—for example, no longer is there the simplistic assumption that Fauset validates such beliefs as Angela articulates through most of the narrative. What Angela does admire and value at the end—authentic emotional expression, the bonds of sisterhood and talent, the enhancement of a culture through the vitality of its members—is humanistic values that are not class-dependent, nor are they very evident in the white society that dominates Angela’s life. These values are, however, as in the community of Harlem, able to have their impact on cultural growth, both within the black community and perhaps, with even more struggle, within the entire American culture.

Bibliography

Allen, Carol. Black Women Intellectuals: Strategies of Nation, Family, and Neighborhood in the Works of Pauline Hopkins, Jessie Fauset, and Maria Bonner. New York: Garland, 1998. Allen devotes a chapter to Fauset and details the theme of family, home and creativity in Fauset’s works.

Ammons, Elizabeth. “New Literary History: Edith Wharton and Jessie Redmon Fauset.” College Literature 14 (Fall, 1987): 207-218. Despite comparisons between Edith Wharton and Jessie Fauset, Ammons contends that Fauset’s writing makes sharp distinctions between white female issues and black female issues.

Berzon, Judith R. Neither White nor Black: The Mulatto Character in American Fiction. New York: New York University Press, 1978. A study of the historical, sociological, and scientific backgrounds of American novels about the problems of mulattos, with frequent references to the works of Fauset. Berzon analyzes the “crisis experience” common to many of these novels and the modes of adjustment to the experience.

Christian, Barbara. Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980. This historical study emphasizes the common themes in novels by black women writers, beginning with Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Iola LeRoy: Or, Shadows Uplifted (1892). Fauset’s works are evaluated in relation to those of other black women novelists.

Draper, James P., ed. Black Literature Criticism. 3 vols. Detroit: Gale Research, 1992. Includes an extensive biographical profile of Fauset and excerpts from criticism on her works.

Ducille, Ann. “Blues Notes on Black Sexuality: Sex and the Texts of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen.” Journal of the History of Black Sexuality 3, no. 3 (1993): 418-444. Complex novels about urban, northern, and bourgeois black women subtly did two things. They critiqued black middle-class and lower-class extremes of bourgeois pretense and primitive exoticism, and they focused on themes of the classic blues: love, lust, and longing.

Feeney, Joseph J. “Black Childhood as Ironic: A Nursery Rhyme Transformed in Jessie Fauset’s Novel Plum Bun.” Minority Voices 4, no. 2 (1980): 65-69. There is a marked disparity between the joy and hope of the nursery rhyme that gives the novel its title and the despair and disillusionment of the reality of the lives of black children who grew up reciting its lines.

Foreman, P. Gabrielle. “Looking Back from Zora, or Talking Out Both Sides My Mouth for Those Who Have Two Ears.” African Literature 24 (Winter, 1990): 649-666. Foreman analyzes the black women’s literary tradition with a focus on Fauset’s Plum Bun.

Johnson, Abby Arthur. “Literary Midwife: Jessie Redmon Fauset and the Harlem Renaissance.” Phylon 39 (June, 1978): 143-153. Summarizes Fauset’s career as a writer and editor and attempts to evaluate her significance in African American literature. As the title of the article suggests, the author considers Fauset important mainly for her influence on her contemporaries and successors.

McClendon, Jacquelyn Y. The Politics of Color in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995. McClendon examines Fauset’s Plum Bun and compares it to Quicksand by Nella Larsen. Both authors exhibit a subversive element in their novels. McClendon also explores how Fauset and Larsen reinvent and transform the stereotype of the “tragic mulatto” into the concept of doubleness of the African American experience.

McDowell, Deborah E. “The Neglected Demension of Jessie Redmon Fauset.” In Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, edited by Marjorie Pryse and Hortense Spillers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Imitating the novel of manners gave Fauset the opportunity to write about controversial subjects such as black female sexuality without offending readers during the 1920’s.

McDowell, Deborah E. “Regulating Midwives.” Introduction to Plum Bun. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990. McDowell emphasizes the novel’s focus on power relationships in American society that impinge on the development of a black female who is ensnared in fantasies about passing and marriage.

Sato, Hiroko. “Under the Harlem Shadow: A Study of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen.” In The Harlem Renaissance Remembered, edited by Arna Bontemps. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972. A discussion of Fauset’s life and work, with special reference to her role in the Harlem Renaissance. Contains photographs of prominent members of the Harlem Renaissance and many other interesting articles about Fauset’s contemporaries.

Sylvander, Carolyn Wedin. Jessie Redmon Fauset, Black American Writer. Troy, N.Y.: Whitson Publishing, 1981. A full-length study of Fauset’s life and works. Argues that Fauset was a more important author than generally acknowledged and that she has been unfairly accused of denying her own racial values in favor of those of middle-class whites. Sylvander’s study was originally undertaken as a doctoral dissertation and contains an exhaustively researched bibliography.

Wall, Cheryl A. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Wall profiles Fauset in a chapter-length discussion and places her in the context of the Harlem Renaissance. Wall evaluates Fauset’s contributions and impact on black women’s literature.