Mar Gallego. Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity, Politics and Textual Strategies

Gallego also sees Jessie Fauset's mulatta protagonist in Plum Bun (1928) as a metaphor of double consciousness, of African American women, and of the problematic definition of both their identity and their sexuality. Fauset's dramatization of the "mulatta" protagonist's desire to pass as white, however, exposes the white world as materially and morally corrupted, and idealizes Harlem as morally and culturally solid. For Gallego, Fauset's characterization in such contrasting social backgrounds aims to reveal the materialist and racist roots and motivations of the action of passing and the destructive consequences of such action. As interpreted by Gallego, the action itself also constitutes a disguising strategy that conceals Fauset's critique of racist ideology. Other means of disguising include the genres of the fairy tale, the romance, and the nursery rhymes. By strategically employing these means, Fauset parodies fairy tale motifs in African American life and devises a strategy of survival rooted in "double double consciousness." In spite of their endowments of beauty and their longing for riches and happiness, both protagonists, contrary to their idealized fairy-tale models and the conventional images of African American women, possess assertive personalities, materialistic attitudes that confound their emotions, and a desire for happiness rendered difficult by racial and gender categorizations. The discrepancy between the African American women's ruthless reality, on the one hand, and conventional childhood's pleasures and hopes, on the other hand, is also rewritten, as Gallego explains, in the Mother Goose nursery rhyme that shapes the structure of the novel. The "plum bun" obtained by the speaker in the rhyme and metaphorically achieved by Angela, one of the protagonists, appropriately supplants marriage and the fallen woman with a work of art at the conclusion of the novel.

Gallego's study is well researched and complexly structured. It draws interesting and illuminating connections between and among four authors well-chosen for an assessment of the phenomenon of passing. Mar Gallego's book is undoubtedly a persuasive addition to current studies of passing novels.

Yupei Zhou

Xiamen University, China

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