Whose Middle Ages?: Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past

The Middle Ages in the Harlem Renaissance

Cord J. Whitaker

W. E. B. Du Bois writes that every African American lives a “double life … as a Negro and as an American, as swept on by the current of the nineteenth while yet struggling in the eddies of the fifteenth century.” This, he contends, leads to a “painful self-consciousness … fatal to self confidence.” This is one way that he describes “double consciousness,” the dynamic of seeing oneself as oneself and simultaneously seeing oneself through the eyes of another who has a very different vision. Double consciousness has become a dominant theoretical paradigm in critical race and African American studies. Medieval studies today is in a similar double bind: The field today is swept on by the current of the twenty-first while yet struggling in the eddies of the nineteenth century—a time especially concerned with its own modernity. University disciplines still reflect the view, increasingly prominent in the nineteenth century, that the present moment only improves upon a benighted past consisting of discrete periods to be treated with objective scientific study, including ever more discrete historical specialization and rigid philological methods.

Medievalism has long troubled the waters of academic culture: A field that often demonstrates the surprising similarity between modernity and premodernity, it is also a discipline born of passionate interest. The early twentieth-century African American scholar and artist Jessie Redmon Fauset, the subject of this chapter, knew this all too well. When she used the European Middle Ages to stake African Americans’ claim to the history and culture of the European Middle Ages and the entirety of the English literary canon, her amateurism—where amateur is true to its original meaning: lover—was fully in line with the history of medieval studies. The field owes its very existence to “amateur” medievalists such as Frederick James Furnivall “who wore their passions on their sleeves” and sought no detachment from their objects of study. Furnivall was anything but unproductive. He was editor and a principal contributor to what would eventually become the Oxford English Dictionary; he founded the Chaucer Society, the Wyclif Society, the Ballad Society, the New Shakspere Society, the Browning Society, and the Shelley Society. He also founded the Early English Text Society, for which he edited some 100 medieval texts himself. It now contains as many as 495 editions. It was a sense of pleasure “borne of connectedness to the people” that propelled Furnivall’s work. His intimate attachments to objects of study also informed Furnivall’s projects of social improvement: the London Working Men’s College and the Girls’ Sculling Club. Furnivall’s work evidences that subjective love of the medieval past or, as Carolyn Dinshaw stirringly puts it, “[A]synchrony, in the form of restless ghosts haunting the present, can be the means of calling for justice for past exclusions and injustice.” Racial injustice is included.

Fauset recognized that the Middle Ages—what Du Bois calls the “fifteenth century” representatively—is inextricably bound with double consciousness. When terrorism appears to threaten at every turn, when students of color report regularly feeling disenfranchised on college campuses, when respect for women’s self-determination is so low that one in six first-year college women report having been raped while incapacitated, the doubleness of medieval studies—its aptitude for disrupting divisions between the premodern and the modern, the subjective and objective, the disempowered and the empowered, and between white and black—is instructive. Fauset recognized and used the Middle Ages’ peculiar power, born of the “amateur” scholarship of the late Victorian popular “medieval revival,” in building the foundations of the African American literary and cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance.

In 1914, Fauset was rising to some prominence on the literary scene when she published a piece that deploys the medieval past as a “restless ghost” to call for present justice. In The Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, she placed a short vignette called “My House and a Glimpse of My Life Therein.” In it, the narrative speaker situates her home and her life between a manicured private garden, a bustling industrialized city, and an enchanted forest. Her story manipulates the medieval past in order to ameliorate the psychological and spiritual pain of double consciousness by asserting the black reader’s relationship to America’s medieval English literary pre-history.

Fauset went on to become the most published female novelist of the Harlem Renaissance. Often called the Renaissance’s “midwife,” she was literary editor of The Crisis, under W. E. B. Du Bois, from 1919 until 1926. As the first editor to accept the work of Langston Hughes, she shepherded his career, along with those of other black literati such as Claude McKay and Jean Toomer. Yet, because critics of African American literature in the mid-twentieth century sought forms that challenged convention over and above those that sought to deploy conventional forms, Fauset’s impact was minimized. Indeed, according to Robert Bone’s 1958 study, Fauset’s work amounted to naught but “vapidly genteel lace-curtain romances.” The misread conventionality of her work has not a little to do with prejudices against the medievalizing nature of her gardens and forests.

In “My House,” the narrator takes the reader on a tour of her whimsical, magical house. She describes it as “An irregular, rambling building … built on no particular plan, following no order save that of desire and fancy. Peculiarly jutting rooms appear, and unsuspected towers and bay-windows …” (143). The journey gives the reader access to the garden, the city, and the forest.

The narrator’s is a symmetrical pleasure garden, and Fauset writes, “Surely, no parterre of the East, perfumed with all the odors of Arab[ia], and peopled with houris [the beautiful women who inhabit paradise] was ever so fair as my garden!” (143). Fauset’s parterre owes its integral role in Western European medieval culture to the influence of Islamic Arab culture in Spain and southern Europe. As garden historian John Harvey puts it, in the case of the garden “medieval Christian sensibility was at one with Islam” (my emphasis).

“My House” continues to reference the Middle Ages once the narrator is inside. Chased inside by a surprise rainstorm, she peers through her windows in reverie. Out of one, she sees a busy town. She muses:

I perch myself on a window-seat and look toward the town. Tall spires and godly church steeples rise before me; high above all climbs the town clock; farther over in the west, smoke is curling from the foundries. (144)

Out of another window she sees “the friendly nodding of tall trees and the tender intercourse of all this beautiful green life.” The conceit registers the tension between modern industrial reality and the quaint medieval ideal. Indeed, still looking out the window, the narrator exclaims:

Suddenly the place becomes transformed—this is an enchanted forest, the Forest Morgraunt—in and out among the trees pass valiant knights and distressed ladies. Prosper le Gai rides to the rescue of Isoult la Desirous. (144)

The Forest Morgraunt, Prosper le Gai, and Isoult la Desirous are from Maurice Hewlett’s 1898 Forest Lovers, one of the most popular medievalist romances of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was so well praised that, in 1899, a reviewer for the New York Times wrote that “Not since Spenser’s Faerie Queene first delighted the world have we had such recountings of heroic deeds and manifest chivalry as are contained in these few hundred pages.” In other words, it was a huge success surely headed for canonization. Scholar, editor, and writer Fauset could not help but know the novel. Nor would she, or other writers of her time, have been able to avoid the nineteenth-century popular medievalism now known as the Medieval Revival.

After her reverie, the narrator heads up to her library near the top of the house. The Arabian Nights and modern stories bookend the medievalizing texts that interest—and comfort—the narrator most. Fauset writes:

But when a storm rises at night, say, and the rain beats and dashes, and all without is raging, I draw a huge, red armchair before the fire and curl into its hospitable depths,

“And there I sit

Reading old things,

Of knights and lorn damsels,

While the wind sings—

Oh, drearily sings!” (144)

The poetic excerpt is taken from “The Meadows in Spring,” first published in 1831 and republished, sometimes under other titles such as “Song of the Fire,” in various anthologies throughout the nineteenth century. The poem, by the writer and orientalist Edward Fitzgerald, explicitly proclaims its medievalism a few lines after those that Fauset quotes. Fitzgerald writes: “sit I; / Reading of summer / And chivalry— / Gallant chivalry!” Medieval chivalry is what protects the narrator-reader. The storm—those things that make her uneasy, that put her out of sorts, including the industrialized city—is turned out of doors by the medieval past that helps her feel safe and at home. As Alice Chandler puts it, the Medieval Revival sought to substitute “the vision of a more stable and harmonious social order [and] the clear air and open fields of the medieval past in place of the blackening skies of England.” Fauset’s Forest Morgraunt represents idyllic pleasure in place of “blackening skies.”

The Middle Ages are not the only ghost in Fauset’s story. Industrialization not only undergirds the Medieval Revival but also drives the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North with the promise of economic improvement. This urbanizing trend provides the conditions for the Harlem Renaissance. The garden and forest point not only backward but also southward—toward the plantation South. The black philosopher Alain Locke, in his famed 1925 essay “The New Negro,” identifies the Great Migration as “in the Negro’s case a deliberate flight not only from country side to city, but from medieval America to modern.” The plantation South, which was often idealized as a medieval pastoral space by nineteenth-century defenders of slavery, is, because it was supposedly idyllic and because it was agricultural, linked with the medieval. Locke, however, turns the idyll on its head: The garden space invokes, for black readers, the history of enslavement and oppression.

Fauset takes a different approach to double consciousness when she depicts herself as a medieval lady in this photo that she publishes with “My House” (see Figure 1). Even though she is of light complexion, Fauset is still discernably African American, and the image makes visible the claim that the black woman has just as much right as the white woman to imagine herself a lady deserving of knights, jewels, fancy gowns, and all the other trappings of romance. What’s more, by invoking her parterre’s Eastern origins, Fauset has already disturbed the supposed whiteness of the Romantic Middle Ages. The modern late nineteenth and early twentieth-century African American woman claims her place, along with that of the “darker peoples of the world”—to use one of Du Bois’s terms—in the idyllic Middle Ages so prized in the popular culture of her day. When Fauset lays claim to and changes the idyllic Middle Ages, she experiments with reunifying a double, or split, consciousness. No longer does the American black person have to see him or herself through the eyes of another who looks on in “amused contempt and pity.” Instead, by combining the white American or European’s popular view of herself as a medieval romance heroine with Fauset’s own view of herself as a black woman, “My House” strives to depict a consciousness that sees itself clearly and as a fully unified being.

Fauset’s subjective love of the Middle Ages, also borne out in other of her works, such as her most popular novel Plum Bun, evidences the strategic viability of medievalism as a tool for the advancement of racial justice. Fauset’s “My House” is closer to playing in the Middle Ages rather than struggling “in the eddies of the fifteenth century.” Her subjective love of the Middle Ages is not unlike Furnivall’s, and her medievalism is a model for those who would ask “Whose Middle Ages is this?” in order to criticize and influence the politics and ethics of the present. It is a model for the student of medieval studies who would advance racial justice by ameliorating the dissonance of racial double consciousness while assuaging the discord of her own temporal double consciousness as a modern person who aims to analyze, criticize, and, at least occasionally, intellectually inhabit the Middle Ages.

Figure 1. Jessie Redmon Fauset, “My House and a Glimpse of My Life Therein,” The Crisis 8 (July 1914): 144.