infant child and even more undone when she re-
alizes that her carefully cherished eugenistic plan
has been undone by her own body and the genes
that she inherited from Lee Blanchard, her long-
deceased brown-skinned father. As a result of his
distressing relationship with his mother, Oliver
inhabits what Fauset refers to as “a double world”
(Fauset, 187) that includes “chilly spaces, those
blank moments when his mother’s indifference,
her almost obvious dislike, cast their shadows
about him” (Fauset, 199). His paternal grandpar-
ents, like his father, endeavor to teach him the
proud and inspiring history of the race. Yet, what
Oliver craves most is the love of his family. He is
devastated when his sister Teresa writes to let
him know that her marriage to a white man pre-
vents her from acknowledging her brown-
skinned brother and thus her true identity.
Eventually, he commits suicide, unable to stave
off the awful years of his mother’s unrelenting re-
jection and the accumulated slights that oppress
his spirit and deny him the opportunity to ex-
press himself fully.
The couple’s son Christopher is blessed by
his marriage to Phoebe, a steady, self-confident
woman who often is taken for white because she
has inherited her father’s features. “My color is
my father’s gift,” she tells Llewellyn Nash, her
unsuspecting suitor with whom she breaks off a
relationship once she reveals her racial back-
ground. Christopher proposes marriage to her
and admits that he hopes that she will be a wife
and a companion who will help him to “restore”
his father in the wake of his youngest son’s sui-
cide. The couple disregard Olivia’s “dissatisfac-
tion with the young folk’s plan of moving into a
street which recently had received a considerable
influx of Negroes” (Fauset, 299) and begin to
build a life for themselves. When Chris Carey ex-
periences an unexpected reversal of fortune, she
opens her own home to her in-laws. Despite his
wife’s good intentions, however, she who had
“welcomed the idea of assisting the man she
loved, found herself overwhelmed by the reality
of the idea” and becomes increasingly exhausted
both physically and emotionally (Fauset, 304).
On the verge of an extramarital affair with a for-
mer sweetheart in New York, however, she re-
members the tender vows of her earnest husband
and returns to Philadelphia. When she does, she
finds that Olivia, the main source of tension in
the home, has left for France. Ultimately, Olivia
is left destitute and friendless in France, unable
to take comfort in any of the relationships that
she has manipulated so deliberately over the
years.
Fauset’s title, which quickly proves ironic, en-
ables readers to appreciate the “frustrated, ill-ad-
justed and doomed” characters of the novel (NYT,
19 November 1933, BR19). The New York Timesre-
view of the work called attention to the fact that
Fauset was featuring Philadelphia and veering away
from the typical HARLEMand southern backdrops
chosen by many other authors. The review, which
called attention to Fauset’s own racial background,
insisted that it understood Fauset’s perspectives on
race and identity. “Miss Fauset obviously believes,”
asserted the anonymous reviewer, “that happiness is
open only to those who unreservedly accept their
racial heritage, and who do not warp and waste
themselves in an endeavor to be white.” The re-
view ultimately concluded with the observation
that the novel “could, however, have been written
with more subtlety and skill,” and it bemoaned the
fact that Fauset’s “style is somewhat unfortunate,
frequently sentimental, frequently strained and stiff,
and in her effort to prove a point she loads the dice
in a way that is too reminiscent of the outright pro-
pagandist.” Nonetheless, the article’s author did
concede that “Miss Fauset’s thesis is a provocative
one,” that she “handles it intelligently and hon-
estly,” and that she “wisely stresses [her charac-
ters’s] humanity rather than their race” and in so
doing “forces one to face their problems as they
themselves see them” (NYT,19 November 1933,
BR19). Carolyn Sylvander, Fauset’s biographer, pro-
poses that with this novel, the enterprising literary
editor and midwife of the Harlem Renaissance con-
cluded a substantive and realistic appraisal of
African-American social and domestic realities.
Comedy, American Styleis an impressive considera-
tion of racial identities and the politics of African-
American domesticity.Bibliography
Lupton, Mary Jane. “Clothes and Closure in Three Nov-
els by Black Women,” Black American Literature
Forum20, no. 4 (winter, 1986): 409–421.90 Comedy, American Style