Date of Award
Summer 8-2010
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
English
First Advisor
Dr. Elizabeth Burmester
Second Advisor
Dr. Pearl McHaney
Third Advisor
Dr. Elizabeth West
Abstract
I am baffled each time someone asks me, “Who is Jessie Fauset?” As I delved into critical work written on Fauset, I found her critics dismissed her work because they read them as bad fairytales that showcase the lives of middle-class Blacks. I respectfully disagree. It is true that her novels concentrate on the Black middle-class; they also focus on the realities of Black women, at a time when they were branching out of their homes and starting careers, not out of financial necessity but arising from their desire for working. They establish the start of what Patricia Hill Collins later coined “Black feminism” through strong female characters that refuse to be defined by society. This thesis seeks to add Jessie Fauset to the canon of Black feminists by using Collins’ theories on Black feminism to analyze Fauset’s first two novels, There Is Confusion and Plum Bun.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.57709/1396352
Recommended Citation
Tillman, Danielle L., "Un-Fairytales: Realism and Black Feminist Rhetoric in the Works of Jessie Fauset." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2010.
doi: https://doi.org/10.57709/1396352