The exotic other and feminine virtue: Dilemmas of African American female self-representation in the novels of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen

During the Harlem Renaissance, both Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen were recognized as important and influential writers; nevertheless, in the decades following the Harlem Renaissance, their work was marginalized and neglected by both literary and historical critics. Often, the critical attention Fauset and Larsen receive narrowly interprets their work as attempts to portray and advance a bourgeois African American identity. Many critics point to the extensive descriptions of the clothing, hair, cosmetics, and home decor of their female protagonists as evidence that their work is "middlebrow." Such evaluations dismiss Fauset's and Larsen's work as less important than the work of their male counterparts, when, in fact, their work often explores in just as great depth the enormous complexity of achieving agency and self-definition in a racist and sexist society. This scholarship examines the role of fashion, cosmetics, home decor and other forms of feminine popular culture in the novels of these two authors of the Harlem Renaissance and argues that such forms of feminine self expression reveal a semiotics of racial politics. In Fauset's and Larsen's work, clothing and fashion are foregrounded as the most visible element of black consumer culture and as inextricably implicated in black female identity. This study argues that in making the interconnections between sexuality, economics, and race visible, fashion becomes a revelatory space in which Fauset and Larsen explore the making and marketing of African American female identity.