ABSTRACT
The image of the older black woman continues in the Harlem Renaissance in characters who may be minor in the plot but who perform a major service in defining the mulatta heroine or principal female character. In each of Jessie Redmon Fauset's four novels it is possible to establish an indirect or direct link between a foremother figure and the principal female character or mulatta heroine through discourse. As with the works of Jacobs, Harper, and Hopkins, the works of Fauset, published from 1924 to 1933, bring variation yet overall similarity in the correlation between the foremother and principal female character. In There Is Confusion (1924) it is possible to establish an indirect link between the older black woman, Mammy, and the principal female character, Joanna Marshall, through the character of Joel Marshall, Mammy's son and Joanna's father. In The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life (1931), Aunt Sal, the mother as foremother, helps to define her daughter and mulatta heroine, Laurentine Strange, and in Comedy: American Style (1933) Mrs. Davies influences the life of Teresa Cary, but within the realm of the competing force, Teresa's mother, Olivia. The portrait of Hetty Daniels, in Fauset's Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral (1928), however, establishes the most definitive correlation between the foremother and the mulatta heroine. Hetty Daniels, the foremother, produces meaningful language that emerges and reemerges as guiding principles in significant episodes of Angela Murray's life.
