There Is Confusion

Jessie Redmon Fauset’s debut novel There is Confusion follows an ensemble of middle-class African-Americans as they come of age in 1910s New York. The novel explores a series of on-again, off-again romantic entanglements between four characters: Joanna Marshall, an ambitious but snobby dancer; Phillip Marshall, Joanna’s brother who studies at Harvard; Maggie Ellersley, a hairdresser who aspires to climb the social ladder; and Peter Bye, a race-conscious medical student. Through the course of the novel, a series of misunderstandings and intentional slights set former friends and lovers at odds with one another, all the while the forces of racial prejudice prevent each of them from accomplishing the fullness of their vocational ambitions. The book is considered a canonical novel of the Harlem Renaissance for its depiction of the upwardly mobile African-American middle class.