Sharon L. Jones. Rereading the Harlem Renaissance: Race, Class, and Gender in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West

African American Review, Winter, 2003 by Martha J. Cutter

Westport: Greenwood P, 2002. 176 pp. $62.95.

According to Sharon L. Jones, African American women writers of the Harlem Renaissance such as Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West must be read in terms of a "triangular configuration of aesthetics" that deconstructs the "tripartite division of folk, bourgeois, and proletarian aesthetics." In chapters that discuss the major novels and short fictions of each of these writers (Fauset, Hurston, and West), Jones argues that it is necessary to look at how folk, bourgeois, and proletarian themes work in conjunction with each other. An attendant argument is that these writers appropriate theme, plot, symbolism, and characterization from the literary genres of the Bildungsroman and the Kunstlerroman to illuminate the role race, class, and gender play in the source and development of their art.

But who exactly reads these writers according to a strict division of aesthetic categories--the folk, the bourgeois, and the protest/proletarian? It is certainly true that Hurston tended to be read in an earlier epoch in terms of her presentation of the folk, and that past critical discussions of Fauset and West have centered on their depiction of middle-class, bourgeois life. Yet many contemporary critics--such as Hazel Carby, Carla Kaplan, and Deborah McDowell, to name just a few--have been attentive to overlapping aesthetic practices from various traditions in these writers' texts. Jones creates an incomplete argument about how recent critical discourse has constructed these authors and then reacts against it. Another problem is that these three aesthetics (the folk, the bourgeois, and the proletarian) are loosely defined in Jones's book so that, for example, any treatment of racial injustice in any of the texts becomes a "protest" or "proletariat" aesthetics. Finally, there is little discussion of how these writers appropriate or reconstruct the Bildungsroman and the Kunstlerroman. The book might therefore be appropriate for undergraduates interested in obtaining a very general understanding of Fauset's, Hurston's, and West's major works, but the student or scholar interested in a nuanced or original reading of these authors or the Harlem Renaissance is likely to be disappointed.

After an introduction that provides a brief historical overview of the Harlem Renaissance, Jones argues that Fauset deconstructs the black bourgeois through her appropriation of the Kunstlerroman. Fauset often portrays black bourgeois life, but she is not a writer removed from the folk or the masses and lacking a political agenda. Yet "the masses" and the folk are defined in this chapter as anyone who has an "ancestry of slavery." Earlier Jones had defined the folk in terms of specific aesthetic practices and focuses, but here, in order to solidify her argument, she drops this definition in favor of something less subtle. Similarly, when she discusses "protest" or "proletariat" elements of Fauset's works (it is never clear why these two terms are conflated), she states that Plum Bun "exemplifies the proletarian strain through the valorization of the folk as the center of black art as well as Angela's admission of her black heritage to protest discrimination against Miss Powell." But Jones never explains how the folk are "proletarian" by their very nature, and a protest against discrimination does not in and of itself indicate a proletarian strain. Angela certainly does lambast racial discrimination, but there is little critique of capitalism as a system in the novel as a whole.

The next chapter provides a wealth of biographical detail and a long summaries of the plots of Hurston's four novels and several of her short stories. Jones argues that "Hurston connects the narrative techniques of the Bildungsroman and the Kunstlerroman with formal elements such as theme, character, plot, and symbolism to mediate on folk, bourgeois, and proletarian aesthetics." Yet there is little discussion of how Hurston appropriates and redefines these genres, and the chapter ignores many sustained critical controversies over issues in Their Eyes Were Watching God, such as Janie's voice, her sexuality, and her growth in the three marriages. It also disregards the circular structure of this novel, which tends to militate against a straightforward adoption of the Kunstlerroman form. Again, what makes a book proletarian is any protest against racial injustice, connected to capitalism and economics or not: "While not overtly a protest or proletarian novel, [Their Eyes Were Watching God] contains incidents that reveal that Hurston does not avoid criticism of racism in the United States." This chapter does provide interesting connections between Hurston's short stories and her longer fictions, and a good general discussion of some of her lesser criticized novels, such as Seraph on the Suwanee and Moses, Man of the Mountain.

The final chapter--on Dorothy West--argues that her work is "a proletarian outcry against injustice, proving the presence of a revolutionary mind." However, the chapter as a whole is not convincing because the meaning of the term proletarian becomes conflated with a search for social justice or a protest against intraracial or interracial discrimination. Furthermore, West seems an odd selection for the final chapter because all of her writing was published after the "official" end of the Harlem Renaissance. In general, it is unclear why Jones focuses on this particular "triumvirate in the canon of African American literature." Nella Larsen gets barely a mention, despite the fact that she too could be said to exemplify Jones's argument about the blending of these three aesthetics.