There is Confusion by Jessie Redmon Fauset (1924)
By Nava Atlas | On April 7, 2020 | Updated March 22, 2024 | Comments (0)
There is Confusion by Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882 – 1961) was the first novel by the American editor, poet, essayist, educator, and author closely associated with the Harlem Renaissance movement.
In addition to her own pursuits, Cornell-educated Fauset was known as one of the “literary midwives” of the movement, someone who encouraged and supported other talents.
Fauset’s poetic bent is reflected in the novel’s title, which comes from lines in “The Lotos-Eaters” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson:
There is confusion worse than death,
Trouble on trouble, pain on pain,
Long labour unto aged breath …
Ann Allen Shockley, in Afro-American Women Writers 1746 – 1933, observed that the writing of this book “at the age of forty-two was prompted by reading an unrealistic novel, Birthright (1922) by white writer T.S. Stribling. To her, the story was not indicative of actual Negro life. There is Confusion was the first novel to depict black middle-class people.”
A new edition in 2020
After being out of print for many years, Modern Library Torchbearers has reissued There is Confusion in a new edition with an introduction by bestselling author Morgan Jerkins. Here is the publisher’s synopsis of the book:
“A rediscovered classic about how racism and sexism tests the spirit, ambition, and character of three children growing up in Hell’s Kitchen and Harlem, from Jessie Redmon Fauset, the literary editor of The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP.
Set in early-twentieth-century New York City, There Is Confusion tells the story of three Black children: Joanna Marshall, a talented dancer willing to sacrifice everything for success; Maggie Ellersley, an extraordinarily beautiful girl determined to leave her working-class background behind; and Peter Bye, a clever would-be surgeon who is driven by his love for Joanna.
As children, Maggie, Joanna, and Peter support one another’s dreams, but as young adults, romance threatens to upset the balance of their friendship. One afternoon, Joanna makes two irrevocable decisions — and sets off a chain of events that wreaks havoc with all of their lives.
Written with a Jane Austen-like eye for social dynamics, There Is Confusion is an unjustly forgotten classic that celebrates Black ambition, love, and the struggle for equality.”
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More about Jessie Redmon Fauset
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Initial critical response
Reviews in white newspapers made an enormous to-do about the fact that There is Confusion featured middle-class Black people doing ordinary things, and grappling with the universal quandaries and challenges of life and love.
Though no reviewers objected to this portrayal, they nevertheless marveled at it — at the time, it was quite revolutionary to depict Black people in a way that didn’t involve demeaning stereotypes.
A review in an Illinois newspaper pointed out that that the book featured no Southern mammy saying “sho’ ‘nuff,” no happy-go-lucky plantation Negro (if ever there were such thing). Others pointed out that there was no slapstick comedy or tragic roles.
In some of the reviews, it was pointed out the achievement of this book is all the more significant due to having been written by an educated “negress.” Rather, observed this review, the book presented “a picture of a new society which is rapidly growing up among the educated Negro of the north.”
A review in the May 31, 1924 Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported that the book’s characters “do not carry on a continuous burlesque … They are encouraged and thwarted in their endeavors precisely as the blondest Nordics are encouraged or thwarted. In short, they live in a perfectly natural fashion …The result is an unprejudiced study of modern negro psychology written with profound knowledge and understanding.”
Fauset was celebrated with receptions and book launch parties by her Black colleagues when There is Confusion was published, but they held her to a high standard and not all were enamored of this and her subsequent work. Her novels occasionally received mixed reviews from African-American critics. Some praised her for portraying an aspect of Black life that often didn’t see the light of print; others criticized her for an overly bourgeoise point of view.
Yet the majority of Black critics were delighted with Fauset’s images of African-American life. Critic and anthropologist William Stanley Braithwaite praised her as “the potential Jane Austen of Negro literature.”
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See also: Plum Bun by Jessie Redmon Fauset (1928)
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A 1924 review of There is Confusion
This original review in The Chicago Tribune, July 26, 1924 is typical of the mixture of admiration and amazement the novel received upon first publication. Please note that some of the language here reflects the parlance, and indeed the ignorance, of the time:
There is Confusion, a novel by Jessie Redmon Fauset, is of more than the usual interest a first novel inspires in a reader. Miss Fauset is a Negro and the story is a serious record of the lives of a group of the educated, ambitious members of her race.
As a first novel it is as good as the average. The construction is not as good as it could be, the motivations seem a little strained, and the heroine’s rise to fame, like that of most fictional heroines, is more flighty than convincing.
But the faults of There is Confusion are no greater than the faults of most first novels, and Miss Fauset tells an interesting story.
That her characters are always shadowed by the fact of their color is the most memorable impression one gains from the book — that, and the fact that they have a rounded, full life of their own. That life, aside from the mechanical devices of restaurants where they may not eat, parallels the life of white family that occupy similar social positions of their own.
There is none of the poignant terror and power that one finds in W.E.B. Du Bois’s Dark Water, for instance, or in The Souls of Black Folk.
There is bitterness in the story, but not despair. Its hero discovers that, instead of being the direct descendant of a pure stock of slaves (and therefore the cream of Negro society), as he believed himself to be, he is the grandson of a white man. That provides an explanation, to him, of why he as suffered shiftlessness of mind and inability to amount to something due to that taint of white blood.
“My ingratitude, my inability to adopt responsibility, my very irresoluteness came from that strain of white Bye blood. But I understand it now. I can fight against it …”
If you expect to find any of the rich color and flavor of Negro humor in There is Confusion, you will be entirely disappointed, for there isn’t a moment of it. The story might as well have been of middle class Lithuanians or Bosnians, or French, or English, or Americans, so far as any actual local flavor is concerned.
The characters talk like their white neighbors; act, in most cases, like them; love and live like them. There is Confusion comes nowhere near to being the Great Negro Novel. It’s merely a presentable novel written by an educated and obviously earnest person of that race. It’s as good as the general run of first novels, and, one account of its story, illuminating and interesting.
More about There is Confusion by Jesse Redmon Fauset
- The Forgotten Work of Jessie Redmon Fauset (The New Yorker)
- Reader discussion on Goodreads
- Britannica
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