Encyclopedia of the Harlem Literary Renaissance

ers named after the children in the novel, Fauset
chronicles the evolution of a woman whose height-
ened color consciousness results in much distress
and pain for her family. Olivia Carey, desperate to
preserve herself from racial stereotyping, places
undue emphasis on her light-skinned, ethnically
ambiguous identity. She is a character whom one
reviewer described emphatically as “a peculiarly re-
pulsive and cold-blooded villainess... who wrecks
her own and her children’s lives because of her
half-crazed obsession on the subject of color”
(NYT,19 November 1933, BR19). Olivia chooses
Christopher Carey as her husband and does so not
because she loves him but because she believes
that they will produce children who are extremely
light-skinned and, for all her intents and purposes,
white. Unfortunately for her, this man who “might
easily have been taken for the average American”
(Fauset, 25) frustrates his wife’s claims on white-
ness by maintaining friendships with a number of
dark-skinned individuals.
The couple’s three children grapple with their
mother’s color prejudice in different ways. The
daughter Teresa accepts her mother’s efforts to cat-
apult her into white society and does not resist
when she is sent away from PHILADELPHIA to
Christies, an elite boarding school. She lives as a
white girl among her schoolmates who “of course,
unquestionably accepted her as white.” She is able
to maintain her facade without pain, it seems, be-
cause “the absence of any other colored girl took
away any sense of strain or disloyalty to her own”
(Fauset, 71). Teresa denies her love for Henry
Bates, who is a student at the Massachusetts Insti-
tute of Technology but a man whose skin color and
race consciousness make him unacceptable to
Olivia Carey. When Teresa attempts to persuade
Henry to pass as a Mexican rather than live his life
as he has done proudly and with relish, he aban-
dons the relationship. She then agrees to a loveless
marriage to Professor Aristide Pailleron, a French-
man whom she meets in Toulouse while enrolled in
classes and recovering there with her mother from
her failed relationship with Henry. As she consid-
ers her married life and the upheaval with which
she must contend when her demanding mother-in-
law comes to live with them, Teresa “dwelt in some
wonder on her mother’s ambitions.” She is taken
aback by the limits of her life but acquiesces and

“settled into an existence that was colorless, bleak

and futile” (Fauset, 183).

The Members of the Carey family, with the

exception of Olivia, cherish Oliver, the child

whose bronze-colored skin is the darkest of any

family member. Their embrace of him contrasts

sharply with his mother’s denial that he is her

child. Her reaction to the child is fueled by the

fact that she regards him as “the totality of that

black blood which she so despised” and the fact

that “[i]n her own eyes it frightened and degraded

her to think that within her veins, her arteries,

her blood-vessels, coursed enough black blood to

produce a child with skin as shadowed as Oliver’s”

(Fauset, 205). She is shocked when she sees the

Comedy, American Style 89

Dust jacket cover of Comedy, American Style(1933),

the last of four novels by Jessie Fauset (Yale Collection

of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and

Manuscript Library)