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"Is This Really What You Wanted Me To Be?": The Daughter's Disintegration in Jessie Redmon Fauset's There Is Confusion

In 1924, a coalition of literary, political and philanthropic notables old and new, black and white (in other words, those whom Zora Neale Hurston lampooned as the "Niggerati" and the "Negrotarians") gathered one evening at New York's Civic Club for the Opportunity literary awards dinner, the "dress rehearsal" to the Harlem Renaissance (Lewis 90). Officially the publication of Jessie Fauset's first novel, There is Confusion, was the gathering's raison d'Ãatre. This, however, turned out to be something less than the truth, for while personalities like W.E.B. DuBois, Horace Liveright, and James Weldon Johnson presented their agendas, Fauset waited. She managed finally a few words, but by evening's end the first corporate articulation of what was supposedly the "New Negro" was no longer "about" her novelÂ—in fact, the evening's dynamics seemed to have made the novel more "about" the gathering. Renaissance heraldry reduced her individual achievement to a party-line cog, and Fauset became "mere background to a major event" (Carby, "Quicksands" 79). Since then, of course, the Harlem Renaissance has been reconceptualized through the work of literary and cultural historians