Plum Bun
Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral is a novel by Jessie Redmon Fauset first published in 1929. Written by an African American woman who, during the 1920s, was for many years the literary editor of The Crisis, it is often seen as an important contribution to the movement that has come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance.
Overtly conventional through its employment of elements and techniques of traditional genres such as the romance or the fairy tale, Plum Bun at the same time transgresses these genres by its depiction, and critique, of racism, sexism, and capitalism. The heroine, a young, light-skinned African American woman called Angela Murray, leaves behind her past and passes for white in order to be able to attain fulfilment in life. Only after she has lived among white Americans does she find out that crossing the racial barrier is not enough for a woman like herself to realize her full potential. The detailed description of her coming of age makes Plum Bun a classic bildungsroman.
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- Nella Larsen's novel Passing, published in the same year, has a very similar plot: A light-skinned African American woman pretends to be white and becomes involved with a white supremacist.
- In her novel Joy, set two generations later, Marsha Hunt's eponymous heroine, herself too dark-skinned to pass for white, only associates with white people because she believes that they are superior and that she will find fulfilment in life that way.
- Another passing narrative is Philip Roth's novel The Human Stain, where a light-skinned man passes in order to be able to join the army during World War II.
- In Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, Caroline Meeber is another young girl who, although white, is unwilling to accept her station in society and who tries to improve her situation also by unconventional and immoral means.
- Erskine Caldwell's short story "Saturday Afternoon" depicts a lynching in very much the same way as the story Anthony Cross tells about his father's violent death in Georgia.
Further reading about Fauset and Plum Bun
- Deborah McDowell: "Introduction: Regulating Midwives" (1990), Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral (Beacon Press: Boston, Mass., 1990) ix-xxxiii (ISBN 0807009199).